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CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS 
 
Christian Economics 
 
 BY 
 
 WILFRID RICHMOND, M.A. 
 
 WARDEN OF TRINITY COLLEGE, GLENALMOND 
 
 ;n2ri7BRsiTrl 
 
 Ncto ¥orfe 
 E. P. BUTTON AND CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS. AND IMPORTERS 
 31, WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 The purpose of this book is to enforce the principle 
 that economic conduct is matter of duty, and there- 
 fore part of the province of conscience and of morals. 
 It might seem, accordingly, as if the book would have 
 been more appropriately called "Economic Morals." 
 I have preferred the title, " Christian Economics," 
 because the purpose of the book is practical, and 
 because the Christian motive and the Christian spirit 
 are not only the true but the most commonly recog- 
 nized expression of moral principles. 
 
 A great part of the book consists of sermons 
 actually preached. That part of it which consists of 
 essays or sermons unpreached has still something of 
 the character of the sermon. I have no wish to 
 assume the dogmatic tone to which the preacher is 
 supposed to be always entitled. In dealing with 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 argumentative subjects, it has always seemed to me 
 that the preacher's prerogative of not being answered 
 is a disadvantage. The sermon does not allow of an 
 exhaustive treatment of all objections. Difficulties 
 of which the preacher may be conscious, and the 
 answers to which would enforce his point, have to be 
 omitted. As it is, since he cannot challenge and deal 
 with objections, it remains for him to aim at suggest- 
 ing principles for the acceptance of conscience. In 
 the present case, therefore, while the sermon form 
 has enabled me to claim the subject of which I 
 treated for the authority of conscience, to which all 
 the associations of a sermon appeal, it has left my 
 own particular opinions or method of treatment to 
 stand for what they are worth as suggestions. 
 
 I have not aimed at a systematic or exhaustive 
 treatment of a subject, on which I wish rather to 
 provoke discussion or reflection. I have made no 
 attempt to define a doctrinal or ecclesiastical position, 
 though it may appear, from casual allusions, what are 
 the doctrines and the system of life which I conceive 
 to underlie and condition the true view of social and 
 economic ethics. Still less have I attempted to define 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 any exact philosophical basis for the views I have 
 expressed. There are two branches even of the 
 subject of Economic Morals which I have left almost 
 untouched. A separate book might be written on 
 the service done to morals by modern economic life, 
 as e.g. in the development of credit. Separate treat- 
 ment is, perhaps, needed to prove in detail the reality 
 of the moral factor in economics, as e.g. in modifying 
 the standard of comfort. 
 
 Nor, again, have I here attempted to show how the 
 Christian treatment of Economic Morals is a part of 
 the larger subject of the social character of Chris- 
 tianity and of the social substance of the Gospel 
 teaching. It is not that in the economic or other 
 branches of Christian morals there is any new truth to 
 be taught in this direction ; but there are those new 
 applications of old truth to be made which make truth 
 ever new, and which are a part of the intellectual 
 duty of faith in every age. It is in the showing forth 
 of social truths, and in the working out of their prac- 
 tice, that the work of the Church in this age seems 
 to lie, the work in doing which she may recover the 
 reality represented by her national name and posi- 
 
VIU PREFACE. 
 
 tion. And in this direction Churchmen may apply 
 afresh the principle which the Church represents, that 
 Christianity is a social creed, by identifying her with 
 its social character. 
 
 Economic Morals touch religion on one side; they 
 touch politics on another side. Economics were a 
 political subject once, because there was a cry for the 
 removal of political restraint. They seem likely to 
 become a political subject once more, through the 
 demand for legislative action to secure economic 
 results. 
 
 The point on which I wish here to dwell is, that 
 the moral consideration of economics is prior to any 
 conclusion on the political question. As a matter of 
 fact, the principle maintained in this book, that econo- 
 mics are within the sphere of conscience, might be 
 made a ground of argument either for forwarding or 
 for resisting the modern tendency towards State 
 interference in economic life. The object I should 
 wish to secure would be that it should become the 
 ground of argument on both sides. If economic life is 
 to be vindicated from the interference of law, it must 
 be because it is claimed as the sphere of conscience. 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 as a matter with which conscience is competent to 
 deal, and does deal. If, on the other hand, economics 
 are once more to become political, it is all-important 
 that legislative action should be guided by moral 
 principles, not merely excited by palpably unsatis- 
 factory results. The moral basis is in either case 
 essential. 
 
 It seems presumptuous to make, and yet ungrateful' 
 to omit, an acknowledgment of a debt to Mr. Ruskin 
 which is in no way peculiar to myself, or limited to 
 this particular subject. No one could approach the 
 subject of Economic Morals without being indebted 
 to his teaching. I have not conformed to his con- 
 clusions; I feel bound to say, nevertheless, not how 
 much I owe to him, for that would be impossible, 
 but, at least, that I am conscious of a debt which I 
 can repay only with the acknowledgment that it is 
 due. 
 
 On economics, in the ordinary sense, I have found 
 Mr. Marshall's " Economics of Industry " most useful to 
 myself personally, as well as for purposes of teaching. 
 I wish also to acknowledge my debt to Mr. Walker 
 on "The Wages Question," to Mr. Cunningham on 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 "Politics and Economics," and, as will again be 
 obvious, to the late Mr. Toynbee in his " Lectures on 
 the Industrial Revolution." 
 
 Of the contents of this work, the lecture on " Con- 
 science and Political Economy," which stands first, 
 was delivered in the south transept of St. Mary's 
 Cathedral, Edinburgh, on a week-day afternoon. The 
 three following sermons were delivered as a course 
 on Christian Economics, at St. Mary's, Glasgow. The 
 sermons numbered VIIL, IX., XL, XIV., and XV. 
 were delivered at St. Paul's Cathedral, and in various 
 churches in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee. The 
 rest of the book is made up of essays approximating 
 more or less to the form of sermons. The order of 
 treatment is roughly as follows — 
 
 I. The relation of Economic Morals to Political 
 Economy, as ordinarily understood. 
 
 IL, III., IV. The principles of the three great eco- 
 nomic processes of Production, Exchange, and Distri- 
 bution. 
 
 v., VI., VII. Principles concerning the three main 
 factors in economic life — Labour, Management, and 
 Resources. 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 VIII., IX., X. The end, the organ, and the method 
 of economic life. 
 
 XI., XII., XIII. The three aspects in which commo- 
 dities present themselves to the individual — as pos- 
 sessed, as exchanged, as enjoyed. 
 
 XIV., XV., XVI. Three points immediately con- 
 cerning practice — the dominant principle, the im- 
 mediate practicability, and the ideal of economic 
 duty. 
 
 Where there are allusions to the particular place 
 and time of the delivery of the words, I have 
 left them as they stand; partty in order to mark 
 that occasional character of the treatment of a 
 great part of the subject, on which I have already 
 insisted. 
 
 There is one other point on which I wish to lay 
 stress in conclusion. I am prepared to be told that 
 the view of Economic Morals which I put forward 
 is an impracticable ideal. If I answer that this is 
 because Christian Economics are a part of Christian 
 Morals, I do not wish to be understood to claim 
 any authoritatively Christian character for my own 
 apprehension of moral principles in application to 
 
XU PREFACE. 
 
 Economic conduct. I only wisli iny readers to bear 
 in mind that Christian Morals must always speak 
 what will seem to be the language of paradox, and 
 command the accomplishment of that which " with 
 men is impossible." 
 
 Trinity College, Glenalmond, 
 November, 1887. 
 
CONTENTS 
 I. 
 
 Conscience and Political Economy. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Contrast of mediaeval and modern economic life : absence of legal 
 restraint in the latter, which is subject to the authority of 
 
 Political Economy and conscience i 
 
 What has conscience, the moral authority, to say of Political 
 
 Economy,, the scientific authority ? 6 
 
 Conscience is the authority ** of right " 7 
 
 And it has to say of Political Economy, that it is not satisfied with 
 its results or with its principles, e.g. ( i ) beggars ; (2) buying 
 
 cheap J (3) investments 9 
 
 These results are referred to the " laws " of Political Economy . 12 
 Distinction between laws of obligation and laws of fact .... 13 
 The laws of Political Economy belong to the theoretical class . . 14 
 
 Practical or moral laws of economics there are none 16 
 
 The theoretical science supplants the moral theory 17 
 
 Does not the science, then, afford materials for moral theory? . 18 
 No ; (i) because science is abstract, and assumes a universality of 
 motive that does not exist ; (2) because the motive assumed 
 is at best non-moral ; (3) because the principles of economic 
 science are generalized from a commercial life in which high 
 moral principle is not dominant J 9 
 
XIV CONTENTS. 
 
 PACE 
 
 Historical Political Economy is no better suited than scientific 
 economics to be the source of moral principles, since it gives 
 the history of the development, not of the principles by which 
 economic life ought to be guided, but of the principles by 
 which it is guided 23 
 
 We want, then, a Political Economy which shall be a branch of 
 
 morals and define duties, and we have not got it ... . 26 
 
 Conscience has overthrown the authoritative morality of law, and 
 has not supplied its place by the systematic assertion of its 
 own authority 29 
 
 And yet commercial life is a field congenial to conscience — a field 
 
 in which vast moral forces are at work, e.g. , credit .... 30 
 
 And, accordingly, it must be allowed that Political Economy, as 
 it stands — the science which works in this field — serves a real, 
 though a subordinate moral purpose — (i) as the science of 
 the means to moral ends ; (2) as affording a spectacle of the 
 moral government of the world — a spectacle of mingled 
 strength and weakness, suffering and success, which is itself 
 • the strongest appeal to conscience * . . - 35 
 
 11. 
 
 Competition, the Law of Life. 
 
 The command to live — how is it obeyed ? 41 
 
 The main force in economic life is competition 42 
 
 In what sense is this commanded ? 44 
 
 The desire to live is a virtual command to live ; an individual 
 
 desire, but bearing from first to last a social character ... 45 
 
 It takes shape as (i) the command to labour 47 
 
 (2) The command to combine and organize special forms of 
 organized life 49 
 
 (3) The command to help ; and in this help to excel ; — this is the 
 
 positive aim of competition 53 
 
CONTENTS, XV 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Hence, your work must be true ; it must be good ; it must be 
 
 your best 56 
 
 This is the fulfilment of the command to live — to do your best 
 
 for the help of men 60 
 
 III. 
 
 Justice, the Law of Exchange. 
 
 The society created to serve the needs of life lives by exchange, 
 
 and so brings us under the command to be just 62 
 
 Wider and narrower idea of justice 63 
 
 Exchange calls conscience into play, in the field which Political 
 
 Economy describes, and leaves open to conscience ... 66 
 
 And conscience commands justice, which is (i) an interchange of 
 
 good 7^ 
 
 (2) According to mutual agreement • . . 74 
 
 (3) Of conscience, which knows the mind of God 79 
 
 IV. 
 
 Love, the Law of Distribution. 
 
 The facts of distribution are, rich and poor side by side .... 82 
 
 In face of these facts, we are under the command to love ... 86 
 
 The love commanded is a constructive principle 87 
 
 Its law is the law of help; i.e. (i) identify your neighbour's in- 
 terest with your own 89 
 
 (2) Pursue it, if need be, at the sacrifice of your own .... 92 
 
 ( 3) In so doing you will find the energy of love to be the energy 
 
 of life 95 
 
 V. 
 
 The Blessing of Labour. 
 
 The blessing of labour (i) in the full employment of energy . . 99 
 
 (2) In the wages of life 102 
 
 (3) In the living energy of love 104 
 
XVI CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Contrast with this ideal the unlaborious life io6 
 
 The life that need not labour cannot be blest, except by sharing 
 
 the blessing of labour 107 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Privilege of Monopoly. 
 
 The typical case of monopoly is that of the direction of labour . 112 
 
 The privilege is the privilege of self-dependence 118 
 
 (i) This self-dependence is a gift 120 
 
 (2) It is a reponsibility 124 
 
 (3) Above all it is a privilege 127 
 
 VII. 
 The Produce of the Past. 
 
 In investments we look for (i) security, (2) high interest. We 
 
 ought to look for (i) a good object, (2) just interest . . . 132 
 (i) The reasons why you are entitled to interest at all .... 134 
 
 (2) Show that you are bound to see that the source from which 
 
 you draw it is good 139 
 
 (3) And that the return you get for it is such as is justly your due 144 
 
 VIII. 
 Wealth. 
 
 What is the true, the incorruptible wealth ? 148 
 
 1. Money? This is the type of wealth liable to decay, as "the 
 
 transience of a condition of utility " 151 
 
 2. Abundance of the means of life ? Life is liable to decay, as 
 
 " the gradual substitution of a lower for a higher form of 
 life" 154 
 
 3. Love. This alone is not subject to corruption, except in "the 
 
 disappearance of the opportunities of love " unused . . . . 157 
 
CONTENTS. XVll 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Economic Body. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 That Christian life is corporate life, is the teaching of S. Paul . . 164 
 The Christian laws of corporate life apply, not only to t)ie social 
 
 life of the Church, but to all social relations 167 
 
 Among others, to economic duties, viz., (i) The law of mutual 
 
 dependence between man and man 169 
 
 (2) The law of dependence on God 174 
 
 (3) The law of mutual help 176 
 
 X. 
 
 The Ethics of Division of Labour. 
 
 A supposed omission in the theory of division of labour . . . 180 
 The division of labour implies the combination of labourers and 
 
 the division of functions 182 
 
 1. Need is the source of combination 183 
 
 2. Division of function is the principle on which it works, discern- 
 
 ing and defining for the individual (a) power to help ; {b) 
 the life in which it finds vent ; {c) the sacrifice and the sub- 
 bordination which it demands 186 
 
 3. Spiritual union is the issue towards which it leads .... 193 
 
 XI. 
 
 Property. 
 
 The property of God in the persons and souls of men is the type 
 
 of property in things 197 
 
 1. Property as the result of the creative power of labour . . . 200 
 
 2. Property as the result of gift from the living or the dead, 
 
 whether directly or through the process of exchange . . . 203 
 
 3. Property as the result of use, which is the duty of possession 
 
 and its privilege 208 
 
xvill CONTENTS. 
 
 XII. 
 
 " Give me my Price." 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Value, the central economic conception, is determined by cost of 
 production, effectual demand, and final utility. What is the 
 
 moral content of these ideas ? 213 
 
 1. Cost of production 215 
 
 2. Effectual demand 220 
 
 3. Final utility 226 
 
 XIII. 
 Consumption of Wealth. 
 
 The distinction between productive and unproductive labour is 
 
 better stated as a distinction concerning consumption . . . 228 
 
 Consumption is the beginning and the end of economic life . . 228 
 What is the moral rank, with respect to their results, of different 
 
 kinds of consumption ? 229 
 
 1. Consumption of wealth in help 231 
 
 2. Consumption of wealth in production 235 
 
 3. Consumption of wealth in the satisfaction of personal desires . 238 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Competition and Co-operation, 
 
 The economic aspect of the saintly chai-acter 242 
 
 1. Economic life is a system of co-operation 245 
 
 2. And yet, at the same time, a system of competition .... 249 
 
 3. The ideal of saintliness says, at least. Subordinate competition 
 
 to co-operation 251 
 
CONTENTS. XIX 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Practicability of the Principles of Right. 
 
 Contrast of Christian principles and Christian practice . . . . 255 
 And yet in practice, the organization of life, as it is, necessitates 
 service, and offers the alternative of willing or reluctant 
 
 service 258 
 
 It offers, at least, the occasion of unselfish life 261 
 
 The occasion implies the obligation, which is personal and 
 
 absolute 264 
 
 XVI. 
 Economic Freedom. 
 
 Freedom the keynote of the economic ideal 267 
 
 A positive freedom, the freedom to enjoy 268 
 
 (1) The freedom of energy 269 
 
 (2) Freedom of sympathy 272 
 
 (3) Freedom of enjoyment 275 
 
TTiriTBESITTl 
 
 I. 
 
 CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL 
 ECONOMY. 
 
 If a man who lived in mediseval times were to be 
 brought back into our world of to-day, few Contrast of 
 
 mediaeval 
 
 things would surprise him more than the and modem 
 
 *^ •»• economic 
 
 freedom of commerce and industry from the oflega^ re"^' 
 regulation of law. And yet, probably, it iatter, 
 would surprise him more to be told that commerce 
 and industry were the subject of a science. 
 
 It is not easy to picture the vast and radical change 
 whose evidence would confront him at every turn. 
 Into our world, where prices and the quality of 
 goods sold and bought, wages and the migration of 
 workmen from place to place and from trade to trade, 
 interest in money lent for purposes of trade, the 
 nations from which we import, the markets to which 
 we export, are all matters left to be settled between 
 
2 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 buyer and seller, employer and labourer, merchant 
 and merchant, man and man, he would emerge with 
 the memory of a world in which no one dreamt of 
 regarding any of these as other than a proper subject 
 for the restraints of local regulation or national law. 
 Local guilds aimed at securing good work and skilled 
 labour, and enforced laws of apprenticeship. Wages 
 were fixed by authoritative custom. When great 
 social or economic causes, such as the spread of a 
 money system of exchange, the decay of villeinage, 
 depopulation by plague or war, the substitution of 
 pasture for agriculture, produced a change of con- 
 ditions, and weakened the efficiency of local restraint, 
 Statutes of Labourers and of Apprentices were passed 
 to check migration, and to enforce by law the rules 
 which had always obtained under a national sanction. 
 Prices, again, were matter of definite regulation, and 
 an assize of bread would fix the price of the loaf, 
 and the proportion in which its size might vary with 
 a good or a bad harvest. Law distinguished between 
 the loan of money such as made a man a partner in 
 the business which he aided by his funds, and the 
 loan to mere necessity, interest on which fell under 
 the definition of usury. Law allowed or encouraged 
 trade with foreign nations, or towns, or commercial 
 leagues, and fixed " staples " — places to which export 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 3 
 
 was restricted — in order to concentrate and strengthen 
 foreign commerce.^ 
 
 Before he asked what were the principles which 
 governed our commercial and industrial life, our 
 mediaeval visitor would stand amazed, on the first 
 view, at the disappearance bodily of this system of 
 restraint — the only means with which he was 
 familiar by which any principles, political, moral, 
 or commercial, could have force; and a question 
 would occur to his mind, as to what were the 
 causes that had produced such a vast and universal 
 change. We should tell him that the change had 
 been a long and gradual process, and that many 
 agencies had been at work ; but if, through all these 
 agencies, we were to name a single force whose opera- 
 tion gave unity to the history of the growth of free 
 commerce and free industry, we should say that the 
 main and constant agent was self-interest. The 
 separate nations, whose antagonism fills the history 
 of the period after the Reformation, had used the 
 traditional power of law over commerce and industry 
 to promote their own political interest; and, mean- 
 while, commercial and industrial life had been grow- 
 ing too strong for the bonds of the old system, and, 
 at the end of the last century and the beginning of 
 ^ Cf. the earlier chapters of Cunningham's " Politics and Economics." 
 
4 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 this, the gathered force of the individual interest of 
 traders and labourers had burst them and cast them 
 aside once for all. 
 
 We should naturally pass on to justify the change 
 as a great gain to commerce and the community. 
 We should point out that, broadly speaking, experience 
 had justified the view, not only that the general com- 
 fort and convenience of life was increased by the 
 freedom of commerce and industry from restraints 
 imposed by political considerations, but that, in so 
 far as legal restraint had aimed at commercial pros- 
 perity, governments were not as good judges of 
 what tended to this end as the individual traders 
 and labourers, left to work out their own aims by 
 any means and in any combinations which their 
 own choice and their own interest defined. We 
 should point with some pride to the vast and world- 
 wide system which the forces of individual interest 
 have built up — the fabric of a commercial life, in 
 which every individual, in every part of the world, 
 plays his part in contributing to the comfort and 
 prosperity of all the rest. 
 
 But while we were drawing a more than com- 
 placent picture of our present commercial life, there 
 would appear, I think, in the face of our mediaeval 
 friend an expression of puzzled interrogation; and 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 5 
 
 as soon as we allowed him a pause in the flow 
 of our eloquent laudation, he would be almost sure 
 to ask, " What in your modern system has become 
 of the purpose and spirit that underlay all our 
 legal restraints ? Where does right come in ? Our 
 laws and regulations, from which you are so glad 
 to have escaped, were intended to secure commercial 
 prosperity, but they were also intended to secure 
 justice and right. Very likely " — we will give him 
 credit for humility — '' they failed to attain their pur- 
 pose. But our way of looking at the matter was, 
 that man had to live by the Divine law which spoke 
 in the enlightened conscience and through the lips 
 of human law. And king, and Church, and all our 
 authorities, and all their restraints gained respect, 
 and were allowed, for commercial purposes, to regulate 
 the rights of men, on the ground that they were the 
 agents of the law of God in the governance of human 
 life. They were supposed and intended to fix fair 
 prices and just wages — in fact, to enforce what was 
 right. You say it was a mistake to enforce it. 
 Granted. But you do, no doubt, believe in the 
 governance of human life by the Divine law, only 
 I don't exactly see where it comes in in your 
 system." 
 
 At this point it becomes a little difficult to say 
 
6 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 how we should continue the discussion. There are 
 which is sub- two authorities, either of which might be 
 
 ject to the ° 
 
 PoiiticaiEco- P^^ forward as the substitute for human 
 coSence. law, as the mouthpiece of the Divine Will 
 and the exponent of the Divine Mind. We might say, 
 " Well, the fact is, we have learnt to look at the whole 
 mass of commercial and industrial life as the subject 
 of a science, and we consider that the laws of Political 
 Economy are the expression of God's Will in this 
 region, just as the laws of astronomy, in so far as 
 we know them, or the laws of meteorology, if we 
 could discover them, are the expression of the Divine 
 Will within the range of those sciences." Meanwhile, 
 we should probably add, " Conscience is, to our mind, 
 a far more effective agent of the Divine Will and 
 Mind than any legislative enactment, and conscience, 
 of course, is operative in the region of which we are 
 now speaking." In the perplexity of an endeavour to 
 reconcile these two apparently discordant answers, we 
 must, I think, leave our inquiring ancestor. There 
 is no doubt which of these two authorities would 
 What has be most to his mind, and we shall turn 
 
 conscience, 
 
 lilhTity, to ^^ ^®^^ account any light which his cri- 
 SrEcononiyi ticism may throw on our modern commer- 
 
 the scientific 
 
 authority? cial life, if we ask. What has conscience, 
 the authority de jure — the authority which he would 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 7 
 
 prefer — to say to the rule exercised by the authority 
 de facto, the authority usually accepted — Political 
 Economy ? 
 
 I have called conscience the authority de jure. Let 
 me first — not iustify, for it is above iustifi- 
 
 •^ "^ '^ Conscience 
 
 cation — but emphasize and define this au- j.^'^ f. ^f"^"" 
 thority. It is above justification ; it is not "^^^' 
 beyond analysis. We may trace the history of the 
 conscience of to-day ; we may tabulate its dicta ; we 
 may examine the nature and sanction of its command ; 
 we may hear through its lips the ring of a Diviner 
 voice. But its authority is absolute and complete. Ifc 
 cannot be described in any terms which are not tinged 
 with some theory of its nature or of its purpose ; but 
 the authority itself is a fact, one of those facts which 
 theories and philosophies only exist to describe and 
 to explain. In the nature of man there is, in the 
 history and development of man there has grown up, 
 this authoritative principle — call it by what name 
 you will — which says to every man, and in every 
 man, as to all that he does or leaves undone, You 
 ought, or, You ought not. For these commands con- 
 science neither offers nor needs any authority but its 
 own. That is its claim : a claim which carries it 
 in its own sheer right to the defiance of any con- 
 sequence, of any actual power, to death itself, and 
 
8 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 dignifies resistance, even where, in the individual, 
 conscience is unenlightened and misled, with the 
 inalienable character of martyrdom itself. It needs 
 enlightenment ; but enlightenment is the guidance, 
 not the source, of its authority. Its authority is in 
 itself It does not calculate consequences with a 
 view to any end but its own, and that end is "good," 
 of which it claims to be, in every single human life, 
 the authoritative judge. It is the power to see and 
 say what is good with authority. 
 
 And to this authority there are no limits but 
 such as conscience itself imposes on itself. Through- 
 out the whole range of the life of man, wherever 
 there is anything for a man to do or to leave 
 undone, conscience is supreme. Conscience in one 
 man holds intercourse witli conscience in another. 
 It is a social faculty. Conscience and conscience 
 blend in collective utterance. In this social and col- 
 lective life, it acknowledges a spiritual dependence 
 and claims spiritual kinship. In this' it is open 
 to enlightenment in its own kind and on its own 
 ground. But its authority remains ultimate and 
 unimpaired. It may say in any man. You ought 
 to do what others tell you, and what others think 
 you ought ; but even here the " ought " is its own. In 
 this spiritual and social life it grows and develops ; it 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 9 
 
 unlearns moral mistakes and rises to higher moral 
 levels. But its own vision and authority sanction its 
 condemnation and warrant its advance. It depends 
 on reason and experience for enlightenment on 
 matters of fact or speculative truth; but neither 
 fact nor theory can usurp its unique prerogative of 
 command. Science and philosophy enlarge and lay 
 open a wider field for the exercise of an authority 
 which they can never reinforce, and can certainly 
 never circumscribe. To one authority only in its 
 own kind does it bow. Rather, by its own act and 
 effort, it passes up into, and fuses itself with the 
 imperious dictate of love. 
 
 It is before the bar of this authority that we have 
 to summon whatever claims to direct a man ^^^ j^ ^^^ 
 what he is to do in any part of his life. And poimcaf 
 
 ■ -Tki.. iT-i Economy, 
 
 SO, m view of the fact that Political Economy that it is iiot 
 
 satisfied with 
 
 does, in some sense or other, claim to govern "^ Sits 
 men's actions in one particular region — namely, ^"""^ ^^' 
 in the efforts by which we produce wealth, in the 
 actions by which we exchange it, and in the joint 
 operation of these two in bringing about its distribu- 
 tion — I ask, what has conscience to say of Political 
 Economy ? We have to appeal — for reasons on which 
 I shall have something to say — in the conscience of 
 the ordinary man, to a conscience not very highly 
 
lo CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 enlightened in its own kind, and very often not 
 enlightened at all as to matters of fact. But to the 
 conscience of the ordinary man Political Economy has 
 to commend itself, if it is to govern his actions. Does 
 it commend itself to the conscience of the ordinary 
 man ? If not, even the inarticulate murmurs and un- 
 instructed protests of conscience must be either con- 
 strued into explicit fallacies, or else obeyed, unless we 
 would tamper with the effectual power of conscience 
 itself. And the conscience of the ordinary man, I 
 think, broadly has to say, if it could speak, that if, 
 and in so far as, Political Economy governs the life 
 of men in this region, conscience is not satisfied with 
 the results; and further, that it does not acquiesce 
 in the principles to which these results are ascribed. 
 They do not speak the language of conscience ; they 
 have nothing to do with " you ought ; " they are not 
 really intelligible to conscience at all. 
 
 A few instances will bring out the antagonism of 
 which I speak. 
 
 Take, first, the most obvious instance — the beggar. 
 e.g. (0 beg- May I in this case give an example from my 
 buying own experience ? Glenalmond lies, it miojht 
 
 cheap ; (3) in- ^ 
 
 vestments. \^^ thought, far away from the difiiculties and 
 problems of modern social life. And yet I remember, 
 when I first went to Glenalmond, being surprised to 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. ii 
 
 find that, for beggars, Glenalmond lay on the road from 
 almost anywhere to almost anywhere else. The reason 
 I soon found to be that the College had a tolerably 
 wide-open back door, which made it quite well worth 
 the while of a tramp to come a good many miles out of 
 his way. Well, of late years the back door has been — 
 not altogether closed — but it is a good deal less 
 wide-open than it used to be, and, consequently, if 
 the beggar came now, he generally found his way to the 
 Warden's house. I need not describe how I myself 
 dealt with the practical difficulty in individual cases. 
 But the result, I may say, was, that though the 
 beggar did not receive any undue encouragement, he 
 still came. About a year ago I found out that five 
 miles further on, on the roundabout road from Perth 
 to Crieff* which is the beggar's route, lay a farmhouse 
 where the farmer had long made it a settled practice 
 to give to any beggar who came a shake-down in a 
 barn for one night, and a simple supper and breakfast. 
 Comparing the Glenalmond back door, now closed all 
 but a narrow chink, with the farmer's barn, I must 
 confess that my own conscience did not feel altogether 
 at ease. And the contrast is, I think, an example of 
 what many people feel on this question, whatever they 
 may do. They feel drawn different ways. 
 
 Take another instance. Supposing that I leave the 
 
12 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 wilds of Glenalmond, and come up for a day's shopping 
 in Edinburgh, or pay a visit to London. With a 
 pardonable desire to make the most of my resources, 
 I make for the cheapest shops. But if I do so, what 
 has conscience to say ? Suppose I am buying furniture. 
 I do not know what happens in Edinburgh, but I 
 know of a part of London where men live who are 
 employed by one of the great dealers in furniture, 
 where, under pressure, men are employed to work 
 twenty-four hours on end; and I suppose every one 
 knows that overwork and underpay are regular inci- 
 dents in the production of cheap wares. 
 
 Take another instance. In a city like this there are 
 a very large number of people who live on the interes-t 
 of money invested. Invested in what ? In what pays 
 the best interest and gives the best security. But what 
 are we paid for ? For helping to do what ? Do we 
 ever ask ? Do we think it to be our duty to care ? 
 Political Economy does not say that it is. Does con- 
 science acquiesce ? I think not. 
 
 In these and other instances, which might, I think. 
 These re- be multiplied, conscience surely has to say 
 
 suits are re- ■*■ ,j %i 
 
 "Ews'-Vf''^ that it is not satisfied with the results of 
 Economy, wliat profcsscs to bc the ruling system. It 
 is driven, then, to challenge the existing system on 
 principle, and to ask, " What are its laws ? " And the 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 13 
 
 answer is, "All these things are subject to the laws of 
 Political Economy." 
 
 Here, at the first mention of the word " law," 
 we must make a distinction. "Law" is an Distinction 
 ambiguous word. We must distinguish be- lawsofobii- 
 
 gation and 
 
 tween laws of obligation and laws of fact, 'awsoffact. 
 between laws of conscience and laws of reason and 
 observation. The former state what, under certain 
 conditions, always ought to be done ; the latter, what, 
 under certain conditions, will always occur. The former, 
 the laws of obligation, issue from conscience, and can 
 claim its authority. The word "law" is applied in this 
 sense to legislative enactments. These are the expres- 
 sion of the conscience of the community. They are 
 in the main limited to the authoritative expression of 
 principles which can, and, in the judgment of the 
 community, had better be enforced by punishment. 
 In a weaker sense the name is applied to those decla- 
 rations of principle as to the duties of nations and 
 communities one to another, in whose support the 
 general sense of the world and the agreement of 
 nations sanction the use of force. It is applied, again, 
 to those very numerous laws which are enforced by 
 the sanctions of public opinion, by the loss of public 
 praise, and the visitation of public blame. And, more 
 widely still, it is applied to recognized moral principles 
 
14 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 which have no other sanction than the condemnation 
 of conscience itself. But all of these agree in two 
 points. They have their source in conscience, and 
 they speak the language of obligation. They say, 
 This 3^ou ought, or ought not to do. 
 
 Laws of fact are quite different from these. They 
 issue from the theoretical faculties, from reason and 
 observation; they state what is, not what ought to 
 be. The law that two straight lines cannot enclose a 
 space is a theoretical law. It may become indirectly 
 concerned in a moral problem. If, being at one end 
 of Princes Street, you ought to get to the other as 
 quickly as possible, then you ought not to walk round 
 the Castle. But the obligation arises not from the 
 rational law that two straight lines cannot enclose a 
 space, or from the observation that Princes Street is 
 a straight line, but from the duty which calls you to 
 the other end of it, whatever it may be. And the 
 obligation to this duty has its origin in conscience. 
 
 To which of these classes do the laws of Political 
 The laws of Economy belong ? The question is not quite 
 beiong"!othe bcyond dispute. The authorities are very 
 ciaS!^ ^'^^ much in favour of the view that the laws of 
 Political Economy are laws of fact, not laws of obliga- 
 tion. Let us in any case be clear at once that this is 
 the only claim which, on the part of conscience, we 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 15 
 
 can allow. Political Economy is, on the face of it, a 
 theoretical science dealing with human actions. It 
 assumes certain principles as to how men will act 
 under given conditions. Observation, or anticipated 
 observation, supplies the conditions, and the science 
 reasons out the actual or expected results. The 
 conclusions take the shape, Given such and such 
 conditions, this is what men will, as a matter of fact, 
 do. Take, for instance, the theory as to the increase 
 of population with the means of subsistence asso- 
 ciated with the name of Malthus. The theory was 
 that, given the then present moral nature of men, 
 population would keep pace with the means of sub- 
 sistence at a low standard of comfort. The theory 
 was not scientific at all, except on the assumption 
 that men will multiply as fast as the means of sub- 
 sistence will allow them. The conclusions drawn 
 from this were, that rise of wages will not better 
 the condition of the working classes, and that com- 
 mercial prosperity tends only to the indefinite 
 multiplication of a more or less miserable and de- 
 graded population. This is a theoretical conclusion ; 
 it states a more or less probable rule of fact. And 
 this is the character that properly and strictly 
 belongs to all the conclusions of Economical Science. 
 Wherever, then, we are reproached with desiring to 
 
i6 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 break economic laws, the words used are themselves 
 absurd. If they are laws, we cannot break them ; we 
 can counteract them or defy them, and be justified in 
 doing so or not, according to the probability of success 
 or failure, and the moral value of the motive which 
 induces us to make the attempt. 
 
 But if the laws of Political Economy are not laws of 
 Practical or obligation in the field of economic action 
 of economics whcrc arc these laws of obligation to be 
 
 there are 
 
 none. found ? Surcly they ought to exist. Surely, 
 
 there ought to be a substantive body of moral principles 
 dealing with economic duty. As a matter of fact, 
 I believe it is broadly true to say they do not exist. 
 In the history of morals, practice generally comes 
 first, and theory follows in its train. There are moral 
 problems enough in the region of economic practice, 
 in the matter of daily duties, and the common econo- 
 mic relations of man to man. But they are unsolved 
 in theory and practice alike. The theoretical science 
 holds the field, and principles of duty as to our 
 economic relations exist, neither embodied in a sub- 
 stantial and systematic shape, nor yet afloat in the 
 common consciousness and practice of men. 
 
 And this is not a very unnatural result. The 
 theoretical science holds the field. And since it is 
 a science which, though theoretical, deals with matters 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 17 
 
 of practice, it is inevitably converted into a practical 
 
 science. If I were suddenly to introduce, The theore- 
 tical science 
 
 as an illustration in this lecture, reasoning supplants 
 
 ^ the moral 
 
 which would prove — merely theoretically '^^°''y- 
 — that, supposing those principles to have been 
 observed in the construction of the roof over our 
 heads, which, as a matter of fact, are known to have 
 been observed, the roof would inevitably fall in in 
 a quarter of an hour, the obligation under which 
 I stand to deliver a lecture might keep me where I 
 am ; but I should be very much surprised if any 
 assurances I were to give, that my reasoniDg was 
 purely theoretical, availed to preserve for me an 
 audience to listen to the rest of the argument I wished 
 to illustrate. You cannot make statements as to the 
 probable results of a given course of action without 
 practically affecting the question whether men shall 
 take that course of action or not. If some law of 
 obligation were present to your consciousness or mine, 
 conscience might prevail, and we might stop where 
 we are. In a crowded theatre, for instance, a brave 
 man would face the real danger of fire to himself, 
 rather than increase the greater danger to the 
 audience of a hurried rush to the doors. But if 
 the moral obligation is not there to counteract the 
 statement of probable fact, the indicative is very soon 
 
 
 
i8 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 changed into the imperative mood, and "I shall 
 probably be killed " is transformed into " I had better 
 run away." 
 
 And in economic matters the moral obligation is 
 not present. In the last hundred years there has 
 been a vast increase of commercial and industrial life. 
 The field of action has enlarged beyond all imagina- 
 tion. The conditions with which we have to deal are 
 intricate and complicated to the last degree. Science, 
 which tells you what will probably happen, has kept 
 pace with the change. Moral theory, which tells you 
 what you ought to do, has not. 
 
 But if science is so readily translated into practice, 
 Does not is not the distinction iraa^ijinary ? Con- 
 
 the science, " 
 
 maTeriah"for scicncc is always at hand to translate science 
 iheo%? into morals. Is not the end attained ? This 
 argument we must, I am afraid, consider at some 
 leno-th. There is no formulated claim of Political 
 Economy, as it stands, to be the indirect source of 
 moral principles; but what actually takes place is 
 that the generalizations of the science are made to do 
 duty for moral principles, and the general impression 
 is that the moral end is attained. Is the end 
 attained ? It is attained if the science is such as to 
 answer the purposes of conscience ; but this is not so, 
 for three reasons. 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, 19 
 
 In the first place, Political Economy proper is a 
 strictly abstract science. Action is never ^^ , , . ^^ 
 abstract. Political Economy reasons out the iJaSSar 
 
 , . -, . a'^d assumes 
 
 probable or certain conclusions or certain a univer- 
 sality of 
 
 hypotheses, or supposed laws of human action. 5'o°es''not'^^' 
 It supposes the uniform action of a certain ^'"^ ' 
 dominant motive. This motive, or any motive, may be 
 dominant, but no motive is universal. It is modified 
 in action, and it may be modified still more, by other 
 motives, which, for instance, it may be the business of 
 conscience to bring into play. In any case, a science 
 which professedly assumes the universality and 
 uniformity of a motive, which is neither universal nor 
 uniform, is not a science whose conclusions are fit to 
 be translated straight into practice. It may or may 
 not be broadly true that population increases in pro- 
 portion to the means of subsistence ; but it does not 
 necessarily follow in any particular instance, that if 
 you give a certain man, or body of men, increased 
 means of subsistence, the only result will be a multi- 
 plication of paupers. This is a theoretical weakness 
 arising from the nature of the science itself, from that 
 very abstract character which gives force and cogency 
 to its theoretical conclusions. 
 
 But we must look, in the second place, at the nature 
 of the principles assumed. What is the general 
 
20 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 character of the principles assumed ? What are the 
 (2) because Hiotives Under which, for the purposes of the 
 
 the motive . . , 
 
 assumed is scicncc, it IS assumcd that men will generally 
 
 at best non- 
 
 "'°''^' ' act ? Political Economy creates an imaginary 
 world. The economic man rarely exists in full perfec- 
 tion, in fact. But, apart from this, what is the character 
 of the economic man ? He is a man who is invariably 
 guided by what he sees to be his interest. Such a 
 man may be a very useful member of society. He 
 may be guided by the light of self-interest, of the 
 most or of the least enlightened kind, to live the life 
 which will make him contribute most to the good of 
 his fellows. But the conclusions of a science which 
 assumes as universal, action governed by such a 
 motive, cannot, by any alchemy of conscience, be 
 transmuted into moral principles which ought to be 
 obeyed. Conscience knows, in any set of circum- 
 stances, two motives — the right and the wrong; it 
 knows no indifferent or intermediate class. Political 
 Economy does not assume immoral action as the rule ; 
 it is indifferent. In the eye of the science, all action 
 is non-moral ; right and wrong has nothing to do with 
 it ; it assumes action whose motive is an enlightened 
 view of expediency. From a science whose language 
 is, *' Men who pursue their own interest will act in such 
 and such a way," we can draw no conclusions of the 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 21 
 
 form, "Therefore I ought to act in this way, or in 
 that." In the second place, then, the theoretical con- 
 clusions of Political Economy are not fit to be trans- 
 lated at once into moral principles, because the motive 
 under which Political Economy assumes that men 
 habitually act is at best a non-moral motive. Con- 
 science, in fact, would unhesitatingly condemn the 
 life of a man who was uniformly guided by however 
 enlightened a view of his own interest. 
 
 But there is a third consideration affecting the fit- 
 ness of the conclusions of Political Economy (3) because 
 
 the prin- 
 
 to be translated into moral principles. eJ-P^omfc 
 Political Economy rests on assumptions as to generalized 
 
 . T . from a com- 
 
 the motives uniformly governing the actions merciai ufe 
 of men, not in all the world and all ages, pifn^cipre'tl 
 
 , , . 1 • ^ /» • 1 1 • not domi- 
 
 but m a certain lorm or commercial and m- nant. 
 industrial society, existing at the present time among 
 nations of a given degree of advancement in civiliza- 
 tion. It assumes, for instance, the readiness of men 
 to transfer their capital or their labour from one 
 employment to another at the bidding of their 
 interest; it assumes a general power of seeing what 
 their interest is. How far these assumptions are 
 universally true of the region within which they 
 are supposed to hold, if Political Economy is to have 
 any immediate practical bearing at all, we need not 
 
22 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 ask. It is enough to see that the whole science, as 
 it stands, is an analysis, not of the commercial and 
 industrial life of man, but of the commercial and in- 
 dustrial of our own time and civilization. Its assump- 
 tions, therefore, as to the motives on which men 
 habitually act, will reflect the actual character of the 
 motives under which men have acted and do act, in the 
 course of the growth and expansion of our modern 
 commercial system. And it is, unfortunately, the 
 historical fact that the birth of this system was in 
 days when religious and moral principles were barely 
 strong enough in the world to animate the existing 
 fabric of society, far less to keep pace with and 
 inform this new and rapid growth. And while there 
 has been a very notable development of religious and 
 moral vitality since the days when enthusiasm was a 
 term of reproach, it will, I think, scarcely be denied 
 that the religious and moral growth, and the com- 
 mercial and industrial growth, while they have coin- 
 cided in time and place, have not interpenetrated one 
 another or flowed into a single stream. Broadly, I 
 suppose it will be allowed that a weakness of our 
 religious movements has been that they are not in 
 touch with the conditions and difiiculties of modern 
 society, and that while, as I shall have occasion to 
 observe, the commercial and industrial fabric is, in 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 23 
 
 its main structure, a moral organization, it is not per- 
 vaded in the mass by any high spirit of religious 
 devotion or stern morality. So that, in the actual 
 character of the source from which the assumptions 
 of economic science as to the dominant motives of 
 men are drawn and derived, there is fresh reason why 
 Ave should not consider its conclusions available for 
 moral guidance. They are generalizations as to the 
 motives current in a society not pervaded, we have 
 good reason to believe, by a tone which will har- 
 monize with the voice of that moral faculty which 
 is required to adopt them as its own. 
 
 But, in making this last criticism, we have already 
 taken some steps along the road which leads j^jgjQj.;^^^ 
 to a Political Economy professedly proceed- Iconomy is 
 ing on a different method. It has been suited than 
 
 *■ scientific 
 
 allowed, and indeed maintained of late tJ^bTthe^ 
 years, by a school of Political Economists, morafprin- 
 
 ciples, 
 
 that a science whose principles are drawn 
 from the limited field of our present economic life 
 can never justly claim any universal or cogent force 
 for its laws. Its place should be taken, it is said, 
 by an Economic Science which is historical in method, 
 which traces the growth of economic life, and com- 
 pares the economic practices and principles of one 
 age with those of another. And such a historical 
 
24 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 Political Economy, it is further said, will not aim at 
 any such isolation of the purely economic motive, 
 of the motive of self-interest, as can never lead to 
 results corresponding with the facts, but will view 
 the economic life of this or any other age in its true 
 and actual relation to the rest of the political and 
 social life of man, of which it always forms a part, 
 and with which it is inextricably intertwined. With 
 the merits of the controversy between the tw^o schools 
 of abstract and historical Political Economy, we are 
 not in our present argument concerned. The only 
 question we have to ask is whether historical Political 
 Economy is any better fitted than the more abstract 
 science to furnish conscience with conclusions which 
 may be readily translated from a theoretical into a 
 practical form, and may take their place as moral 
 principles or commands. And the answer to this 
 question is, that historical Political Economy will 
 answer this purpose under exactly the same con- 
 ditions as any other branch of historical science, 
 under the same conditions as history itself History 
 teems with moral lessons of the widest and the deepest 
 kind; history may serve the highest moral purpose, 
 if it is written and read as the history of the estab- 
 lishment of moral principles, and of the achievement 
 of moral ends. Historical inquiry, though it appears to 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 25 
 
 begin at the beginning, always, in fact, begins at the 
 end. It is the history of this or that institution, or 
 of its fall. It asks and answers the question — What 
 has produced the given result ? What forces have 
 built up the institution ? What causes have brought 
 about its decay ? It begins with ilds end of the 
 clue, and traces its way back to what, in the writing 
 and the reading of the story, appears as the beginning. 
 Historical Political Economy is a systematic view 
 of the history — of what ? We come back to since it 
 
 gives the 
 
 our old distinction. Is it a history of the JjJ°J^y°[o ] 
 
 development of the principles of right in Se"prind-°^ 
 
 commercial and industrial life, or is it a which econo- 
 mic life 
 
 history only of the progressively successful °"fdeV°but 
 means by which men and nations have dpie^by" 
 
 which it is 
 
 sought wealth, and have achieved the wealth guided. 
 which they sought ? If it is only the latter, it will 
 not serve the purpose of conscience ; it will not tell 
 us what we ought to do ; it will only tell us how to 
 do what we want, provided that what we want is to 
 pursue our own interest, as men have generally, and 
 with progressive wisdom, more wisely and cunningly 
 pursued it. If, I say, it is the latter — if it is a his- 
 tory of the development of enlightened self-interest, it 
 will not answer our purpose. Can it be the former ? 
 Can it be a history of the progressive or of the flue- 
 
26 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 tuating growth of moral principles in economic life, 
 
 unless it starts with a firm hold on this end of the 
 
 clue, with a clear view of what our duties are, of 
 
 what we ought to do in commercial and industrial 
 
 concerns ? Surely not. 
 
 We are left, then, with the conclusion that there 
 
 We want, is a waut wliicli no Economic Science satis- 
 then, a Poli- ^ , , , . . 
 
 ticai Econo- fies, althouo'h it is a want which, as we have 
 
 my which " 
 
 branch^of sceu, the verj existence and richness of 
 define duties. Ecouomic Sclcncc tends to conceal. We want 
 
 and we have 
 
 not got it. a Political Economy as a branch of morals — 
 a systematic view of economic duties, of how men 
 ought to behave to one another in the complex 
 relations of modern commercial and industrial life. 
 In the society to which I ventured to direct attention 
 at the beginning of this lecture, the Church exercised 
 an authority not only so powerful, but so pervading 
 that religious and moral influences were always in con- 
 tact with every part of life, and were able, as a matter 
 of right — however successfully or unsuccessfully in 
 fact — to guide and control a commercial and industrial 
 life immeasurably less complex than ours. The loss 
 of this official influence of morality and religion has 
 been felt, and has been supplied in very difierent 
 decrees in dififerent fields of social life. The indivi- 
 dual conscience which overthrew authoritative religion, 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 27 
 
 also overthrew authoritative morality, except in so 
 far as law still controlled, as it had always been its 
 function to control, obvious and flagrant breaches of 
 moral law, as being fatal to the national life. But the 
 individual conscience has not in all cases alike filled 
 the place of that which it overthrew. To take merely 
 a single instance of moral duties that lie in the main 
 outside the range of law : I do not suppose any one 
 would say that the current code as to the life of the 
 family, as to the relations between husband and wife, 
 and between parent and child, is all that we could 
 wish. But none could well deny that in this region 
 conscience acts as a constant moral force, supporting 
 recognized moral principles, advancing acknowledged 
 moral ends, to an incomparably greater degree than 
 in the relations between buyer and seller, or between 
 employer and employed. 
 
 This is the want, then, on which I insist. Econo- 
 mics, as a branch of morals, does not exist. We 
 cannot do what we ought, unless we know what we 
 ought to do. And we don't know what we ought 
 to do. It is not Political Economy, but conscience, 
 that is to blame — conscience, and those whose duty it 
 is to serve its guidance and enlightenment. Many 
 excellent people have an easy and conclusive theory 
 that a man's conscience will always tell him what 
 
28 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 his duty is if he will listen to it. No doubt this is 
 perfectly true, if it is allowed, among other qualifica- 
 tions, that conscience sometimes tells him that he 
 does not know what he ought to do, and that his 
 duty is not to rest till he finds out. A double appeal, 
 to say the least of it, is wanted, to those who, by 
 profession or capacity, are qualified and commissioned 
 to deal with the theory of duty, and to the mass 
 of us, who, after all, have got to do our duty, and for 
 whom moral teachers and moral theorists can do very 
 little, unless we are at work on our own account and 
 in our own sphere to find out what our duty is, and 
 to do it. As it is, I maintain that our ignorance 
 'stares us in the face. To go back to one of the 
 instances to which I have already alluded — buying 
 cheap. We know the evils of cheap production. 
 How are we to avoid contributing to them ? Buying 
 dear is an easy, but in many ways an unsatisfactory 
 way out of the difficulty, and it is not much, if at all, 
 a more moral proceeding than buying cheap. How 
 are we to know what is the right price at which to 
 buy, so as not to support oppression and feed on 
 misery ? We don't know ; and we don't know because 
 to do so is not a generally recognized end. The 
 moral view of so ordinary a transaction does not 
 exist. If I want to buy a particular article or com- 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 29 
 
 modity, it is not difficult for me to ascertain where to 
 buy it cheapest, or best, or dearest; but it is more 
 than difficult for me to find out where I can buy it 
 and pay the right price for it. Our mediaeval friend, 
 whom these wearisome arguments have lulled to 
 sleep, may well wake up here to say, " Ah, we had 
 an authority to fix that. He may not have always 
 fixed it rightly ; but there he was." Well, we have 
 an authority — conscience; as we believe, a conscience 
 better authority in these things than external thrown the 
 
 authoritative 
 
 authority; but our authority does not speak. |J^^^^ndhas 
 This is merely one instance. In a dozen hsViaJe by'^ 
 
 the systema- 
 
 other instances, it is easy to see that on sub- tic assertion 
 
 of its own 
 
 jects on which conscience ought to have a authority. 
 voice it has nothing to say. I plead for the exten- 
 sion of the efforts and of the actual authority of 
 conscience over the field of economics. That this 
 field belongs to conscience by a right which no 
 science can dispute, I have endeavoured to show. 
 That this claim of conscience is not realized, in fact, 
 seems to me to need no further proof than an attempt 
 to arrive at a clear idea of almost any given economic 
 duty. It remains only to show that the field is con- 
 genial to the authority to which it of right belongs ; 
 and this may be shown on the evidence of the science 
 whose right to furnish moral or practical principles 
 
30 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 I have denied, but whose practical value and interest 
 I should wish distinctly to maintain. 
 
 As to the field offered to moral theory by com- 
 ^^j ^j. mercial and industrial life, there is indeed 
 \\i^Z^ni\A much to be said. I have heard it seriously 
 
 congenial to . . 
 
 conscience— maintained that a merchant's life is one 
 
 a field in 
 
 mS forces which no high-miuded man could choose as 
 a field for moral energy, with the hope of 
 carrying out a lofty moral purpose. Such a view may 
 be extreme, but in a milder form it is very widely 
 spread. Many, if not most people, regard mercantile 
 business as a life whose end is to make money. And 
 this business is supposed to be pursued, under moral 
 restraints, indeed, which forbid clear and obvious dis- 
 honesty, but in obedience to no high or inspiring 
 moral principle. The presence of any higher inspiration 
 we commonly expect to be shown, not so much in the 
 way money is made, as in the way it is spent. There 
 is a story of a man with one wooden leg, who stole 
 a pair of boots and gave away the odd boot in charity. 
 The devotion to charity of the superfluity of wealth 
 unscrupulously gained is not commonly supposed to 
 condone any dishonesty in the means by which it 
 is acquired, but there is a good deal of one-legged 
 morality in the common practice, and still more in the 
 common theory of commercial life. If I have seemed 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 31 
 
 to cry down the moral dignity of economic science, 
 I am by no means disposed to acquiesce in this low 
 view of the moral character of commercial life in itself 
 I cannot understand how any one can devote any 
 study to this subject, or even survey the obvious facts 
 of the system in which we live, without being im- 
 pressed beyond all words with the magnificence and 
 scope of the moral forces that are at work in our 
 commercial and industrial life. I have spoken of the 
 defects of our moral theory in economics. Defective 
 moral theory must arise from and tend to produce 
 defective moral practice. But as the taint of sin in 
 human nature does not avail to hide the glory of the 
 image in which we are made, so no defects of moral 
 theory, however great they may be, can avail to con- 
 ceal or to destroy the moral strength that remains in 
 this gigantic system. The giant is a blind giant if you 
 will, but he has the majestic frame and mighty thews 
 of a moral giant none the less. The vast fabric and 
 frame of the economic life of the world is alive with 
 moral forces, is strong with a moral strength, so far 
 as it is strong at all, and when all is said it is strong 
 indeed. I have spoken of the motive of self-interest as, 
 to say the least of it, morally insufiicient. But, after 
 all, self-preservation is a duty, though a comparatively 
 low one, of the individual. And when mutual self- 
 
32 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 preservation is the result of the common life of the 
 members of a society, and the attainment of this result 
 is any part of their motive, we are in the presence of 
 a great moral power doing a great moral work, in 
 the removal, by however slow degrees, of those condi- 
 tions of want and misery which are bred by sin, and 
 breed it. It still remains to be said that this view of 
 the dignity of economic life, and of any place in the 
 system which makes for these results, is not the 
 prevailing view ; it remains to be said that it should 
 be brought into clear consciousness, and become no 
 mere undercurrent of feeling, but a dominant faith. 
 But the first step towards this is to see the real moral 
 value of the work done, and of the motive which, so 
 far as it operates, is a real agent in the doing of it. 
 But we may go far beyond this. Commercial and 
 industrial life, as they stand, do, as a matter of fact, 
 however it may come, proceed upon moral principles 
 of the highest value, exemplify them on a vast and 
 colossal scale, and bring about by their means the 
 most amazing results. 
 
 For instance, credit is a term of business and of 
 
 economics which stands, we know, for a whole 
 
 world of facts — facts which, if we look at 
 
 them, surpass almost every other wonder of the world. 
 
 It is familiar to us that for food and clothes and 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 33 
 
 furniture, and all the ordinary equipment of life, we 
 are each one of us dependent on a world-wide and 
 intricate system of combined and divided labour. We 
 know that this vast machinery of production makes 
 its various produce available in all parts of the 
 world through a no less vast and intricate system 
 of exchange. But what is the means by which this 
 exchange is effected, and by which what we need 
 and enjoy is brought to our doors ? Money ? Money, 
 coined money, stands to the real means of commercial 
 exchange in somewhat the proportion in which copper 
 coins stand to the rest of the currency. The real 
 means of exchange of the larger commerce, on which 
 all the smaller commerce of everyday life depends, are 
 various instruments of credit. Without the operation 
 of credit the whole system would go to pieces like a 
 world without gravitation. And credit, if we translate 
 the word from the language of commerce and econo- 
 mics into the language of morals — credit means trust, 
 and trust implies trustworthiness. In our dependence 
 on this vast system of production and exchange, we 
 are members of a great moral world of human trust 
 and human trustworthiness. Every now and then 
 trust fails or is abused. There have been two 
 instances in Scotland, in the last twenty years, of 
 disasters produced by the abuse of trust, in commercial 
 
34 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 and industrial concerns respectively; and the indig- 
 nation they excited is a sign of the moral power 
 which lies, not dormant, but not in the full con- 
 sciousness or exercise of its strength, in the body of 
 our life. 
 
 Commercial and industrial life, then, is a moral fabric. 
 Conscience will enter into it and find itself at home, 
 with plenty to do, no doubt, to set its house in order, 
 but in no strange, repulsive scene ; among people who 
 speak its own language, though it may be with an 
 unfamiliar accent : it will be organizing the govern- 
 ment of a province, whose natives have instincts and 
 habits that correspond to the definite laws and institu- 
 tions it will seek to establish. This is the work of 
 conscience and of moral theory and enlightenment 
 in every part of human life. Deep down in the human 
 heart itself lie the instincts that grow to be the 
 principles of life. They are part of the lines of the 
 original foundation. They are hidden in the structure 
 of the seed that is to grow into a mighty tree. They 
 cannot be imposed from without unless they can be 
 evoked from within. Economic life is a human thing, 
 made by men who had in them the instincts of fellow- 
 ship and help, and who, even where they disregarded, 
 could not w^holly contradict the laws which are 
 essential to the cohesion of any society, and under 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 35 
 
 which alone a truly human soul can live its life and 
 be content. 
 
 The field of economic life, then, is intensely and 
 truly congenial to the authority that should ^^^ accord- 
 rule it. And, if this is so, plainly the be\iiiow?d^' 
 
 • !• If.. 1. r.11 that Political 
 
 science which has busied itself m this field Economy, as 
 
 It stands — 
 
 must itself be fitted to serve, in some way, whicS' works 
 the purpose of this authority; it must take serves a real, 
 its place, thouojh it may be a subordinate subordinate 
 
 ■•- ' ~ •' moral pur- 
 
 place, in the moral government of the eco- ^°^^~ 
 nomic world. 
 
 Political Economy, as presenting the actual spectacle 
 of this great field of human life, cannot fail to be 
 a study of fascinating and surpassing interest. But, 
 beyond this, it serves a twofold moral purpose. I 
 have tried to show that it cannot claim to be a 
 science of the moral ends that should rule , ^ , 
 
 (i) as the 
 
 and guide commercial and industrial life, themeanlto 
 
 1 . /» /. moral ends ; 
 
 Observation and the analysis of fact are not 
 the source of moral principles. But though it must 
 not be allowed to usurp the place of a science of 
 economic ends or principles, it must fill an important 
 place as the science of economic means. Let a man 
 bo equipped as well as he may with true economic 
 principles, with true conceptions of the main end of 
 economic life as a whole, and of the great factors and 
 
36 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 agents in its work, he must still know, and know 
 intimately, the actual world in which these principles 
 are to be applied, before he can apply them. He has 
 to act upon men, and among men and with men ; he 
 must know the average economic man with whom 
 he has to deal. His principles have to find their 
 way along roads that are alread}?- trodden by 
 thousands and thousands of busy and laborious men. 
 He must know the map of the country. He must go 
 down among the crowd who do the work, whether 
 they do it well or ill ; he must watch them at their 
 work ; he must know their minds, their methods, their 
 habits, their pursuits. And for all this he must go 
 to the science which deals with economic life as it 
 is. Conscience, as the teacher of moral principles in 
 this as in any other department of life, cannot live 
 apart and declaim upon the heights. We must see 
 the unguided instincts at their work ; we must dis- 
 cern in their actual working their true motive and 
 principle ; we must be familiar with life. Ends and 
 means are two different things, but they are different 
 in idea rather than distinct in fact. If men are to 
 be led to seek real wealth, we must see what is the 
 wealth they do seek. If they are to produce it by 
 methods that are in accord with the true end to be 
 pursued, we must know what the methods are by 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 37 
 
 which it is produced. In that process of moral reason- 
 ing which produces action, the minor premise is often 
 more than half the battle ; and we cannot get the 
 minor premise which will bring principle into play 
 in the world of fact, without using all the resources 
 of that economic science, which sets out before us 
 economic life as it is, and as it has been, in the 
 w^orld of present reality and fact. In the first place, 
 then, Political Economy — the Political Economy we 
 know of old — serves the purpose of economic morals 
 as giving the means to its end. 
 
 But it serves another and a more impressive, 
 thouixh not a more essential, purpose. The C2)asafford- 
 
 o •'•■'• ing a spec- 
 
 laws of Political Economy have sometimes molaUov-^ 
 
 had assigned to them the rank which we thevTorid— 
 momentarily gave to them in our comparison of 
 modern and mediseval economic life. They are some- 
 times spoken of as laws of the Divine Governance of 
 the world. With the falsehood of this contention we 
 have already dealt. Plainly, the laws by which God 
 governs economic life are the laws by which He governs 
 the whole life of man — the laws of right and wrong. 
 And in this government, conscience is His vicar, and 
 the human will His ao;ent. If we disreo^ard the 
 oblio^ation to brinoj our economic conduct under the 
 sway of these laws, to learn t]ji>j3a5|mh^te^hem, it 
 
 VxJ^ OF THJ?^^$^ 
 
 'UHIVEE3IT 
 
38 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 is at best an unconsciously hypocritical delusion to 
 plead that, in pursuing his own interest and leaving 
 the consequences to take care of themselves, man is 
 leaving the results to God. We are leaving them to 
 God in the same sense in which a mother, who stifles 
 the instincts of love and abandons her child, is leaving 
 her child to God. We are neglecting our duty, and 
 leaving God to deal with and remedy the evil con- 
 sequences of our neglect. True, God has given us 
 the instinct of self-preservation which leads a man 
 to pursue his own interest; but He has also given 
 us the instinct to identify this self which we preserve 
 with the selves of others, and with the universal Self 
 of God. And in the development of our nature, this 
 latter instinct has assumed, in what we call con- 
 science, the authority over the other. The first 
 truth about God's moral government of human life 
 is, that His laws are meant to come into operation 
 through the agency of human wills. But when we 
 have said this, it still remains to be said, that while 
 God governs men first of all by themselves. He 
 governs them also in spite of themselves. And 
 it would be most ungrateful not to acknowledge 
 the moral service rendered to the world by Political 
 Economy, in exhibiting this side of the moral 
 government of God. It sets before us what, as a 
 
CONSCIENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 39 
 
 matter of fact, occurs, and what actually occurs has 
 a moral bearino:. There is no field of observation 
 and knowledo^e which is not a source of Divine reve- 
 lation. Political Economy is a doctrine of judgment 
 on sloth, on luxury, on waste, on shortsighted selfish- 
 ness, on crass stupidity, on rash and inconsiderate 
 pride. And, more than this, it exhibits the steady 
 pressure of reward and punishment, by which men 
 are won from lower to higher ways of life ; of the 
 guidance — it seems scarcely reverent to say the over- 
 ruling guidance — under which the blind instincts of 
 the tribes of men grope their way out of the darkness 
 of mistrust and mutual war into the clear light of 
 mutual faith and loyal fellowship. It shows us a 
 spectacle of human life which is also a spectacle of 
 Divine design — design not forced upon an unwilling, 
 but evoked from an unconscious world, where mutual 
 need grows into mutual help ; and the fellowship of 
 men is knit by no external bonds, but by the ties 
 of that knowledge and good will which emerge in 
 the community of help, into one world-wide ministry 
 to life and love. 
 
 And yet the picture has dark patches, not only here 
 and there. The more we see that the soul and guid- 
 ing spirit of the whole is good, the more resonant is 
 the cry that rises from the great discordant scene 
 
40 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 for the harmonizing rule of some triumphant power. 
 It appeals to something deeper than con- 
 
 a spectacle 
 
 Tu-rngSl^and scieuce, this world of opportunities for love. 
 
 weakness, a i d ^ i -\ ' 
 
 suffering A strauge power oi change seems to be in- 
 
 and success, 
 
 which is herent in the landscape of life. It is dark 
 
 Itself the ^ 
 
 appefuo ^^^ light by turns. At one moment it is the 
 appointed sphere of helpful energy, of human 
 kindness, and Divine enlightenment. At another it 
 is a field of ghastly struggle, a battle-ground full 
 of cries of wounded men rising through the gather- 
 ing darkness of death. And both pictures are true. 
 We are summoned to go down into the light and into 
 the shade, to help the wounded, and to rejoice the 
 hearts of the strong, when we have learnt what 
 tyranny of evil it is that strikes men down in needy, 
 joyless lives, and can teach the strong, who know only 
 half their strength, how to unlock the doors of happi- 
 ness and hope. 
 
11. 
 
 COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 
 
 " So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created 
 He him ; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, 
 and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the 
 earth."-GEN. i. 27, 28. 
 
 This is the first command addressed to man — the 
 
 command to live. It is implied in the ^,^ 
 
 ^ 1 he coin- 
 
 creative word that called him into being, ^llhot^ilr^ 
 
 Here in the story of Genesis, which gives 
 us the picture of Creation, it is embodied in the first 
 words which are put into the mouth of God as 
 addressed to man. How is the command fulfilled to- 
 day ? The spoken word reveals the duty which lies 
 in the nature and position of man, in his desires and 
 his surroundings. How is the duty done ? How do 
 we to-day — we, made in the image of God, after His 
 likeness — how do we fulfil the Divine command to " be 
 fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth" — in the 
 image of God ? How do we fulfil the command to 
 live ? 
 
42 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 The subject of the means by which we live, the 
 The main systeDi undcr which the means of life are 
 economic Droduccd, is familiar to us in one way. It 
 
 life is com- 
 petition. ]-jr,^g i^een made the matter of scientific treat- 
 ment and inquiry. And though the science which 
 treats of the economic life of men cannot supplant 
 conscience and the law of God as the source of 
 principles of duty, it does show us — Avhat indeed lies 
 before our eyes — a vast and wonderful world of forces 
 which are at work in producing the means of life. 
 
 It has been said of nature that "in the very act 
 of labouring as a machine, she also sleeps as a picture." 
 As the imagination travels over the field of the 
 economic life of men described by the economists, 
 there is a picture indeed before the eye of the mind, 
 not less wonderful in features of majestic power, in 
 beauty that ranges from tragic terror to tender loveli- 
 ness, than the landscape of the visible world. Famine 
 and war, and starvation and despair are included in 
 the story, and in these scenes move love and courage, 
 the incredible patience and the invincible hope 
 which can make beautiful the terrors of death. Every 
 lovely scene of simple country life, the shepherd on 
 the hills, the ploughman in the fields, every home 
 which, however stinted for space, can glorify with the 
 joys of human love the dark places of a crowded 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 43 
 
 manufacturing town, — all these, too, are gathered into 
 the picture which lies before us, as the answer to the 
 question, How do we live ? And here, too, beneath 
 the surface of the picture there are vast forces at 
 work. Lie on a Highland hillside, and the very 
 rocks that are under you tell of a tremendous, age-long 
 work, whose history is traced because we still can see 
 the same forces at the same work to-day. That 
 sleeping w^orld of beauty is alive with powers before 
 which imagination quails. Watch the larches as the 
 life of spring begins to show^ upon them. That shade 
 of green upon the gray means that there are a 
 thousand thousand buds, in every one of which the 
 gentle force of life is pushing its way; the sleeping 
 world is alive. It is pleasant to lie upon the heather 
 and be still ; but you are not alone. In the rustling of 
 every bough you can hear the whispered echo of the 
 command addressed to them, as w^ell as to you, "Be 
 fruitful, and multiply." It is pleasant to lie amid the 
 ease and the comforts of life, and to look on this 
 larger landscape of a human world which supports 
 you, and sustains your life and your enjoyment; but 
 it, too, is a world of living forces ; and as the world 
 of nature has been presented by science as the scene 
 of a great struggle for existence, so the first fact we 
 have to meet about this economic world, by and in 
 
44 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 which we live, is this — it is a world of competi- 
 tion. 
 
 And this economic world is a moral world. It is 
 In what as moral beings that we are concerned with 
 
 sense is this . 
 
 commanded? cconomic life. We have not only to con- 
 template and to understand the forces that are at 
 work about us; we are responsible for our share 
 in them. That competition is a " law " of the 
 economic world, in the sense that, as a matter of fact, 
 it is a pervading feature of economic life, is plain 
 enough. Competition, as the struggle for the larger 
 share of the means and comforts of life, like the 
 struggle between two men who have hold of opposite 
 ends of the same stick, is certainly a feature of 
 economic life. Competition, in the more precise 
 meaning of the struggle for the power of supplying 
 the means of life and enjoyment to others, is no less 
 so. In this sense, certainly competition is a " law " 
 of the production of the means of life. It is a law, a 
 universally observed and well-established fact, that the 
 means of life are produced by competition. This is 
 how we do live. But we have a further question to 
 ask. We are under a command to live. How, and 
 in what sense, does the command to live carry with 
 it the command to compete ? How far, and in what 
 sense, is competition a law, not of fact, but of obliga- 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 45 
 
 tion and of duty ? That is the question with which 
 I propose here to deal. 
 
 I have spoken of the command to live. Apart from 
 any history or picture of Creation in the Bible 
 or elsewhere, is it not with the desire to live t°rtuaicom- 
 that we have to do ? And is it not the func- 
 tion of moral command and obligation, of conscience 
 and of law, human and Divine, to restrain desire ? 
 Certainly the desire to live is the force at work in com- 
 petition; certainly it is the prerogative of conscience to 
 restrain desire. But the right of conscience to restrain 
 desire arises from this, that it is no alien visitor to 
 human nature, but the enlightened utterance of man's 
 original aim. It is the one supreme, and should be the 
 one dominant, desire — the desire to live well. And 
 the root of its authority is in the very desire which it 
 claims to control. Every desire of the heart of man 
 is in its measure authoritative ; and the desire to live, 
 though, as it exists in us, it may run riot and lead us 
 to live ill, is in itself the voice of the Divine command 
 which gave us birth. 
 
 The desire to live — that is the force whose work- 
 ing we have to trace, realizing that it is in 
 itself a virtual command, a rudimentary 
 utterance of conscience, a voice of duty and of right. 
 Primarily, and on the face of it, it is an individual 
 
 an individual 
 desire. 
 
46 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 desire — the desire to maintain and enrich an indivi- 
 dual life. It refers to a single self, whose cravings are 
 to be satisfied, whose existence is to be prolonged, 
 whose sphere is to be enlarged. And we all know 
 that it can take forms in ourselves in which it is not 
 only self-regarding, but selfish. But, in any case, it 
 appeals to, it draws from these single sources of 
 spiritual energy, in the single, individual will of the 
 single, individual soul, that wills, by an instinct deeper 
 than desire, its own single, individual self-preserva- 
 tion in bodily life. That is the command that it has 
 not only to carry out, but to justify ; that is the 
 object whose attainment has to assume in the course 
 of its working the moral dignity and character 
 which will justify the desire to live. It is here deep 
 down in every one of us, the desire to preserve our 
 own souls in bodily life. It is in its original nature 
 a command. We have to see to it that the self, the 
 soul, which it is our duty to preserve, is such that 
 it can be a duty to preserve it. 
 
 And the history at large of the working of this 
 desire to live is such as to justify its moral 
 
 but bearing *^ "^ 
 
 ISra^Jockl character. Individual as it is in its essen- 
 c arac er. ^.^^ naturc, appealing direct to the very root 
 and spring of individual life, it is no less essentially 
 social. It is social in the historical surroundings of 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 47 
 
 its origin. We need go to no far-away age of pre- 
 historic man, we need trace no half-imagined history 
 of early economic life, to know that the desire to live 
 is born where the man is born, in a society, in a 
 family. It grows into consciousness in a life of 
 dependence on others; it breathes in love as the 
 answer to its infant craving; it begins to learn at 
 once, by the response from without which makes 
 explicit the desire from within, what is the stamp and 
 character, the very nature of the being at which it 
 aims. A social life, a life of interdependence, in form 
 however rudimentary, with duties however imper- 
 fectly fulfilled, is the only answer which meets the 
 individual desire to live. It is social, then, in its 
 origin and history; it is certainly not less social in 
 its results. By its own necessary working it leads, 
 and has led to the organization of a society, implying 
 in its very existence a certain amount of moral 
 motive and moral action, oflTering occasion for far 
 more. 
 
 Let us look at its work. First of all, as faced with 
 the forces of the world, the command to live n takes 
 becomes the command to labour. Even in (inhe^com- 
 
 mand to 
 
 this world of toil we can so far put aside the labour; 
 pain and misery of labour as to picture the desire to 
 live, working in a world of labour that should be no 
 
48 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 toil, in which the doom should not yet have been 
 heard, " In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat 
 bread." As it stands, it is in no ideal, sinless world 
 that we see the duty of living lead to the duty of 
 work. Among the moral principles commonly recog- 
 nized in our life, perhaps the soundest and the 
 simplest is found in our apprehension — at least, as 
 regards the poor — of S. Paul's principle, that " if a 
 man will not work, neither shall he eat." Certainly, 
 as it stands, man, with this instinct of self-support 
 strong within him, finds himself faced with a world, 
 from which he has to wring his life. The duty of 
 work takes higher forms; but its first and simplest 
 source is in the duty, which is implied in the desire, 
 to live. So, then, the units of our social life, the 
 springs of the force that works in the economic world, 
 have grown from units of desire to units of labour. 
 Each man has to work out his life, to work out his 
 own bodily salvation. You come into the world with 
 this strong instinct and command latent in your soul. 
 Your life lies before you ; but you must be at the 
 pains to take it. The world challenges your force, 
 your intelligence, your strength. We see nations and 
 men too so challenged by difficulty and depression, by 
 danger and need ; and we rejoice to see the force 
 evoked which enables them to rise, and to work out 
 
COMPETITION, THE LA W OF LIFE. 49 
 
 their life. They show themselves equal to the duty of 
 
 living, because they meet the duty of work. 
 
 But though, in one aspect, the world of labour is 
 
 a world of toiling units, each bearing the (2) the com- 
 mand to 
 burden of its own life, there is another side combine 
 
 to the picture. Never in any past that we can 
 reach has the individual man laboured to support 
 his own life himself by himself alone. And as soon 
 as industry and econo^mic life begin to have any his- 
 tory at all, we are following forms of combination 
 between man and man, which daily become more 
 intricate and more complex. Face to face with the 
 forces of the world, man, with this desire to live in 
 his heart, is bound not only to labour, but to combine. 
 In a moral consideration of economic life, it is most 
 important to insist that what is commonly called the 
 Division of Labour is first a Combination of Labour. 
 Men combine, they unite their forces to wring their 
 living from the world. And then, because they com- 
 bine, they organize, telling off this or that man to this 
 or that part of the work. But first they combine ; and 
 every step in combination is rightly a step in fellow- 
 ship, is necessarily a step in opportunities for fellow- 
 ship. The duty to live has become the duty to 
 labour, and the duty to labour has become the duty 
 to live in fellowship with men with whom you maVe 
 
 E 
 
50 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 a common aim — that all promote the life of each. 
 The wall of isolation, if it was ever there, is broken 
 down. Long and long ago, men were led by the 
 natural working of the moral force within them to see 
 that my desire to live means, and is one with that 
 same desire to live in others who live and work by 
 my side. 
 
 And next in idea, though, perhaps, by no separate 
 step in history, men combined become men 
 
 and organize. 
 
 organized ; and for the mere instinct and 
 recognition of sympathetic fellowship, we have all the 
 duties and virtues that belong to the mutual subordi- 
 nation of the members of a social body one to another, 
 in which the eye cannot say to the hand, " I have no 
 need of thee," nor yet the head to the feet, " I have no 
 need of you." Who can estimate the moral value of 
 this advance, or of any step in it? You, the individual 
 soul, we looked at you first as a single unit of desire, 
 feeling instinctively bound to preserve your own ex- 
 istence. You are so still ; but what are you more ? 
 The multitudes who jostle you in the crowd are no 
 mere struggling units ; they are a vast organized 
 body which knows its common needs, and evokes 
 from you, as your fulfilment of your duty to live, the 
 exercise of whatever special faculty there lies in you 
 to fulfil some special need. Your capacity to live is 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 51 
 
 your privilege to help, and to help in some special 
 way peculiar to yourself, the life, not of yourself, 
 but of mankind. And in the fulfilment of this work, 
 by which you obey the primal command to live, in 
 carrying out into tangible and helpful results the 
 powers that lie dormant in your soul, what do you 
 learn to do ? To obey and to rule ; to submit to, to 
 sympathize with, to understand, to enter into, the 
 faculties and souls of other men. It is a spiritual 
 body, indeed, to which you belong, traversed from 
 head to foot by spiritual forces, demanding from every 
 member of it obedience to moral laws, giving occasion 
 at every step of its life for obedience to those spiritual 
 principles which are the salvation of the world. 
 
 Already the duty to live leads man, we see, to the 
 dignity of labour, to the truth of fellowship, g ^ ; , 
 to the virtues of subordination and organized orgTni^fd 
 
 life. 
 
 life. Follow the development in one or two 
 directions a step further on. Labour combined and 
 organized, lightened by fellowship, quickened by the 
 distribution of difierent offices, gives to men, to some 
 men at least, leisure to think and to enjoy. Life 
 begins to mean more than mere subsistence. There 
 is time for the sight of beauty and the pleasure of 
 living to give birth to all the arts, which minister to 
 those desires, refined or depraved, that grow up in a 
 
52 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 luxurious and civilized society. With whatever evils 
 dogging the steps of its progress, life begins to mean 
 something higher, more refined, more intelligent, more 
 cultivated, with deeper, stronger joys. 
 
 And all this reacts on the life of labour itse-lf. 
 Leisure lends itself to thought, and the man who 
 has ceased to need to labour for life still likes to 
 labour for more pleasurable life ; still finds the world 
 of labour appeals to his intelligence to seek new 
 methods, new directions of work, which may lighten 
 the labour and quicken the enjoyment of the lives 
 of men; still likes to set the redoubled resources 
 won by well-directed labour to work, to enrich men's 
 lives by fresh labour in fresh fields. 
 
 And, again, in the allotment of resources by birth 
 and by the reward of work, men find the desire to 
 live taking a new shape in the desire to improve and 
 exercise to the full these resources themselves. The 
 land or the brains that you inherit are before you 
 as a field of life, your own ; a field to work in and 
 live in, to give scope and fulness to your life. 
 
 It is no part of my purpose here to trace the diffi- 
 cult lines of duty which are laid down for those to 
 whom, through the working of this great economic 
 system, God has given the capital which employs the 
 labour of others, or the talent and power to direct 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 53 
 
 their labour ; or to define the responsibilities of the 
 command of special resources, whether in the owner- 
 ship of land, or in the unique command of eminent 
 intellectual capacity. All these are matters of duty, 
 and, if so, of Christian duty. But what I wish to 
 point out is that, in all these directions, the original 
 command to man to live out his life is being fulfilled 
 in a more and more intricate system of moral fellow- 
 ship and interdependence, affording opportunities for 
 public service, for self-sacrifice, for devotion, which 
 might well turn dizzy the consciences of men, who 
 were not used to the spectacle of the use and abuse 
 of these occasions of life, offered to, and taken by men 
 made in the image of God. 
 
 But in all this process, what has the command to 
 live become ? There it stands still, a com- (3) The com 
 
 mand to 
 
 mand to you to take your part in the original help; 
 duty of man, to " be fruitful, and multiply, and 
 replenish the earth," a command latent in the strong 
 instinct which you feel in your own soul — to you the 
 first command from God — to live out this being that 
 He has given you, to be a living man, to live. 
 There it stands : it has not passed away. Only, in 
 the course of following out your instinctive obedience 
 to this command, you have learnt something of what 
 was meant by being made "in the image of God." 
 
54 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 The command to live remains ; it rests upon you, with 
 the full weight of obligation absolutely inseparable 
 from your own personal existence. You, as you are ; 
 you, filled by the ministry of men with all the fulness 
 of God; you, fed in body, soul, and spirit, by the 
 labour and thought, by the effort and desire of millions 
 of living human things all over the wide world ; you, 
 whose sole, single, individual desire to preserve your 
 own sole, single, individual existence is gratified by all 
 these myriad lives ; you, into the very composition of 
 whose soul, into your afi*ections and desires, into your 
 purpose and will, into your very mind and thoughts 
 the affections and wills and minds of millions of man- 
 kind have entered in; you, so made and fed; you, 
 living in all this world-wide life — you are bidden to 
 live, to live after your kind, ''to be fruitful, and 
 multiply," true to the laws that give you birth, true 
 to the nature and conditions in and by which you 
 live. If, at the day of judgment, you had only this 
 to answer for ! — Have you preserved the type ? Have 
 you lived your life out ? Match in the efforts, in the 
 aims, in the achievements of the life that you have 
 lived, the sources from which that life is drawn, the 
 character that is stamped in your very soul and in 
 the very lineaments of your face. 
 
 For what has it made you, in the course of the 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 55 
 
 ages, in the workings of the Providence of God? 
 What has it made you, this first command, this primal 
 instinct to live ? It has made you an instrument to 
 meet the needs of others. This is what the desire to 
 live has, as a matter of fact, grown into and become 
 — a desire to satisfy, in this way or in that, the needs 
 of other men. Are you proud ? What is your pride ? 
 That you can meet some need of men better than 
 others ? Are you cursed by the grip of self-indulgent 
 sin ? What is the curse ? That whatever of use and 
 help there is in you is paralyzed and dumb. Are 
 you sad and dissatisfied with yourself and with your 
 life ? Is it not because, somehow, you know not how 
 — or, you know — you have missed the only life that 
 is a man's life at all, the life in which a man is known 
 to be of use ? This is, this has become what life 
 means — to help, to serve the needs of other men. No 
 man pretends to any shadow of self-respect who can- 
 not, at least by some hollow pretence, persuade him- 
 self to believe that he is of use. The command to 
 live, the instinct to preserve your own life, has 
 become, has grown into this instinct to seek out the 
 means by which you can serve the lives of other 
 men. 
 
 But in the stress and pressure of our human 
 struggle for existence, this is not all. The command 
 
55 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 to live is not only the command to serve ; it is the 
 and in this command to be pre-eminent, the command 
 
 help to excel; ^ 
 
 ^sUi^vL''Ii'ra ^o excel. Incidentally it is the command to 
 tion?""^^^'" surpass others ; and competition, in that view, 
 is subordinate always to the main purpose, which 
 is served by competition in any view, the purpose of 
 help, the purpose of service, the purpose of co-opera- 
 tion, the purpose of love. But, positively and essen- 
 tially, the command and the desire to live have become 
 in the working of the wisdom of God the command 
 and the desire to do the best. Not better, but best ; 
 not better than others, but so well that none can do 
 better. It is the command to do what is above praise, 
 what contains and embodies your whole and highest 
 self, your best wisdom, your most earnest energy, your 
 most sincere and perfect good will. 
 
 And it is on this last outcome of the working of 
 that first command, of that primal instinct, to live, 
 that, in conclusion, I would dwell. The command to 
 live is, has become, in the course of the development 
 of our economic life, the command to excel in the 
 service of others. 
 
 This is^the outcome of all our consideration. Your 
 Hence, your Hfc is bouud up with thc livcs of othcr men. 
 
 work must 
 
 be true; Thls cagcr, keen striving towards life, to- 
 wards success, enjoyment, happiness, repose, has to 
 
CCMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 57 
 
 satisfy itself by satisfying, in some way, the same 
 striving in other men. It is on this striving in other 
 men that you depend. ^^You will not play them 
 false ? You will not for bread give them a stone ? 
 You will let your work be true? Mind to mind 
 we meet in this intercourse of interdependent life. 
 Your intelligence, your wit, your skill, and theirs, 
 are interchanged. Will you use these powers to trick 
 and to deceive ? If so, do not blink the fact, you 
 are a traitor to the laws of life. In the stress and 
 confusion of life, in the intricate complexity of the 
 division of labour, you may give men false work for 
 true, without being found out, without suffering for 
 it in the way in which, if the machinery of our 
 economic life were perfect, you would suflfer for it 
 at once. But you are false to the law of Hfe, false to 
 the true principle of this social system which the 
 command to live has produced, false to the law by 
 which you live. This is false competition, not true 
 competition. True competition may sometimes, or 
 often lead to your neighbour's loss, and call for 
 the intervention of a higher principle. But even 
 then the loss will be open and above board. First, 
 then, in obeying the command to excel in the service 
 of others, your work must be what it professes to 
 be — it must be true. 
 
58 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 And next, it must be good ; it must minister to life 
 it must be according to the best of your powers and 
 ^°° ' of your knowledge. Think, again, by what 
 
 you are living— by the working of men's striving 
 after life. You can never say, ''Am I my brother's 
 keeper? Let him have what he asks for, and is 
 content to take. It is not for me to decide whether 
 it is good or no." In the Providence of God, in the 
 working of the command and the desire to live, you 
 are your brother's keeper. And as surely as you 
 would be to blame if you were a physician, and gave 
 in to the disordered appetites of a body and a soul 
 diseased ; as surely as you would be to blame if you 
 let your ignorant child climb the cliff, or plunge into 
 the river, where he would meet his death ; so surely, 
 if you knowingly and deliberately live by giving to 
 your brother-man what ministers to death, and not 
 to life, his blood lies at your door. We see it so, do 
 we not ? But do we see it of all the poor, weak, 
 second-rate stuff with which we impoverish the lives 
 of men, with which we mock our brother's need, 
 while we take care to satisfy our own ? " It is good : " 
 — that is what God said of His provision for the needs 
 of men. " It is good : " — that is what you have to be 
 able to say of your work by which you live. It is 
 good in kind ; it helps towards life, and not towards 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 59 
 
 death. And, further, it is good in quality; it is not 
 like a broken reed to lean on, or a roof that will not 
 keep out wind and weather ; it is sound, and strong, 
 and good of its kind ; it is such as you would have 
 yourself for your own need. 
 
 At least, and last of all, it is your best ; the best 
 that you can do to help, in your own ap- jj^j^stbe 
 pointed way, the lives of other men. On ^"""^ ^^'' - 
 the one side here, in you, is this strong striving after 
 life. Who shall say what it can absorb ; who shall say 
 what more it can desire, if it be fed and tended truly 
 and well, if it be not choked and stupefied with pro- 
 vision of evil ? And beyond, over against you, there 
 are these same desires in other men. Towards them 
 let your whole soul go out. In serving them let your 
 whole self be spent, for this is life, the fruitfulness of 
 love. If you lived by your own effort, if your own 
 sole will must meet the needs of your own sole desire, 
 what would it not be worth to live indeed — to 
 quicken and satisfy to the full all your capacities 
 and desires ? What would it be worth ? Not half 
 as much as it is now, to live indeed, by launching 
 out into the lives of men — your brothers, who live 
 and work for you — your whole effort, your best mind, 
 and knowledge, and purpose, and skill, and heart's 
 desire. 
 
6o CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 Do your best. You may, or may not succeed, as 
 This is the yc>u now count success. But, at least, you 
 the command "feed the high tradition of the world, and 
 
 to live — to 
 
 forSe hd^* leave your spirit in your children's breasts." 
 of men. ^^^ -^ -^ ^^^ failuTC ; it is life. Love and 
 good will, honest and true work, are never wasted, 
 never lost. Let there be no reserve; cast them out 
 upon your world, your thought and power, and will 
 and heart ; live them out, let them go ; they will find 
 a home, and make storage of resources in the hearts 
 and lives of men, you know not when, you know not 
 how. Weak, heartless, mindless, thoughtless work 
 is waste. Put your soul into what you do, and see 
 that it be such that you can put your soul into it. 
 However humble be your place in the economic body, 
 you serve the life of men; and not least in serving 
 do you show yourself to be made in the image of 
 God, Who was among men as he that serveth. You 
 deal with men in what you do, and at every turn 
 there is room for vigorous effort, for sincerity and 
 truth, for the kindly flash of soul to soul, by word 
 and glance. Live your life out as it is. Do your 
 best with it, as God has made it, as men have made 
 it, as you yourself have made it. Never fear. " Be 
 fruitful and multiply," even if God shall give you to 
 learn that the law of fruitfulness is life through death. 
 
COMPETITION, THE LAW OF LIFE. 6i 
 
 and that " that which thou sowest is not quickened, 
 except it die." It may be that the body and soul in 
 which you live, the heart and mind and will are 
 stained and scarred, bound and paralyzed by wrongs 
 to men, false service, cruel sins. There was One 
 once Who said, "I am the Life," Who came that 
 we might have life, the saving law of Whose Divine 
 descent into our world of death was this: ''I come 
 to do Thy Will, God." He carried through life to 
 the Cross the sins of all mankind. He made there 
 upon the Cross the great repentance of mankind, 
 ending so the life of which they said, " He went about 
 doing good." Ending ? Not ending. That death to 
 sin was but the door of new life from which that 
 same power to do good should issue triumphant, to 
 work at large throughout the world in every soul 
 that gives itself to Him. To some men, more plainly 
 than to others, the command to live which Christ 
 obeyed when He lived out His life to death upon 
 the Cross, has to be obeyed by repentance that is 
 like a death, and, like His death, leads to a new life. 
 But for all men alike the command to live leads in 
 the last resort to the command to love, to die to self, 
 to live for other men the life of sacrifice, the life of self- 
 devotion, rising to new powers, to the light and glory of 
 the life of those " whose life is hid with Christ in God." 
 
III. 
 
 JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 
 
 " Thou knowest the commandments, ... Do not steal, . . . Defraud 
 not."— S. Mark x. 19. 
 
 The first command under which we live is the com- 
 The society mand to live itself — that creative command 
 serve the which Called man into bein^, and bade him 
 
 needs of life ^' 
 
 ihan^Tand " ^^ fniltful and multiply." That command 
 
 so brings us i • xi. v • j? • i 
 
 under tTie spcaks iH the Deuig 01 every single man, m 
 
 command to 
 
 be just. the necessity, which is both a desire and a 
 duty, to provide for his own existence. In the work- 
 ings of God's Providence, this need, this desire, which 
 is a virtual command, to live, has led to the growth 
 of the vast system of combined and divided labour 
 in and by which we do live. It has built up a great 
 society to satisfy the needs of life. We may well be 
 asked in our dealings one with another, to be true to 
 the purpose which has brought us together — the pur- 
 pose to provide for life ; to see to it that we follow out 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 63 
 
 the spirit of this social system, by which alone our 
 own desire for life is satisfied and filled. But when 
 once we recognize that the command to live, which 
 we know as a strong and irresistible desire in our 
 own souls, has brought us into these close relations 
 with our fellows, we hear the voice of a fresh com- 
 mand claiming to govern, at the cost of any sacrifice 
 of desire and of life, all that we do one to another — the 
 command to be just. We are members of a vast society 
 for the production of the necessities and comforts and 
 pleasures of life, but this membership means a con- 
 stant give and take between one man and another ; 
 this society lives upon exchange of one man's work 
 against another, and the law of exchange is, Be just. 
 
 It is on this aspect, then, of the system by which 
 we live, that I wish now to dwell, that it „,., 
 
 Wider and 
 
 is a system of exchange. This is pre- X^J^^i' 
 eminently and obviously true of this one ^"^^'^^* 
 part of our life, of the system by which we all, as 
 a matter of fact, support the existence of the body. 
 Here, plainly, the system by which we do live is a 
 system of exchange, calling for the exercise of justice. 
 But it may be well to note that there is a wider 
 sense, in which it is true to say that life is an ex- 
 change, indicated by the double meaning of the word 
 *' justice" itself We call a man just, who, in the 
 
64 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 ordinary matters of business and commerce, gives a 
 fair return for what he gets. But we say also that 
 *' the just shall live by faith ; " we seek to be justified, 
 or made just by God ; we speak of Christ, *' Who died 
 the Just for the unjust ; " and here we are dealing 
 with awider justice, which is co-extensive with virtue, 
 and reaches up to holiness itself The duty of justice, 
 in the narrower sense of giving a fair return for what 
 we get, is important enough ; but it gains dignity 
 when we see that it is this duty which gives the 
 name to the complete fulfilment of all duty ; that it 
 is a quality of no narrow range, confined to the 
 sordid means of earthly life, but that it grows and 
 expands with every spiritual advance of man, and is 
 never left behind — not when we deal with the 
 relations of man to God, not even when we strive 
 to apprehend the nature of God Himself The 
 narrower virtue of justice, the justice of fair dealing 
 in the give and take of trade, is connected, not merely 
 by a common name, with the attribute of God. It 
 is as though men began by living within themselves, 
 each in their own small plot, from which they gained 
 their life ; and then learnt by need to depend one on 
 another, to work together, to live by exchange of the 
 means of life ; and then found that this exchange was 
 the body of a higher and nobler soul, the exchange 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 65 
 
 of mind and will, of affection and love ; and then 
 saw how, in all this, man was dealing with another 
 member in the irreat exchanoje of life — with Him from 
 Whom he receives all things, and to Whom he must 
 render back himself. Is it not true ? Is not marriage 
 an exchange — life for life ? Are not the relations of 
 father and mother and son an exchange, each with 
 endless possibilities of wrong, each the sphere of a 
 justice which even love can never leave behind ? 
 I do not believe we can find any region of our life 
 at all, in which this does not come as a supreme and 
 vital question — Have I given the fair return for what 
 I have received ? Certainly we do not leave it behind 
 in our relations to God. When it pleased Him to take 
 the first step in the history of the revelation of Himself 
 in Christ, He revealed Himself — ^how ? In a covenant, 
 in a contract ; as though He would say, " This is the 
 fundamental law of My Being ; this is the truth about 
 Me which you must learn once for all, and must never 
 forget. I am He Who makes a fair bargain, and keeps 
 it; I am Just." When we shall reach the last con- 
 summation of our hope in Christ, we shall have 
 realized for ever the Eternal Exchange — God in us, 
 and we in Him. 
 
 It is this same quality which rules our conduct 
 in the common exchange of material and earthly 
 
 F 
 
65 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 things in daily life. "Thou knowest the command- 
 ^ ^ ments, . , . Defraud not." This vast system 
 
 Exchange "^ 
 
 science'into ^^ iudustry and commerce by which we live, 
 has grown up in obedience to the dictates of 
 the desire of life. The combined action and pressure 
 of this strong craving for life — life more intense, more 
 joyous, more complete — has called the system into 
 being, in accordance with which we provide, not each 
 for our own lives, but each for the lives of others, and 
 exchange the produce of our work. But when this 
 result has come about, and when I stand face to face 
 with my brother-man, he and I to live by giving and 
 taking each the produce of the labour of the other, 
 there is a new force called into play. The interchange 
 of life has forced us to find common ground ; the 
 desire to live, the original motive, the original com- 
 mand of God implanted in the nature of man, is still 
 there ; and by the side of it, and above it, there rises 
 a new command, a new desire — the desire to live 
 rightly. Conscience has come into play. This blind, 
 strong passion for life, which is the first great motive 
 force at work in all the economic system, centred in 
 every individual soul, finds that there arises out of the 
 very heart of it, when man is face to face with man 
 in the exchange by which each feeds his need, a new 
 and authoritative desire, which says, "You must do 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 67 
 
 right." This is what conscience is — the instinctive 
 recognition, when the spirit of man finds itself face 
 to face with the spirit of another man, or with the 
 Spirit of God, that there is a bond, an " ought," which 
 binds his action, and to which desire must yield. It is 
 a revelation from within ; it rises up at the first touch 
 of common life. That blind desire for life did not 
 know where it was leading us, when it forced us, by 
 sheer need, to live each by the labour of others ; it was 
 leading us before a judgment seat. From the sight of 
 that judge we shall never escape, when we have once 
 learnt that man, to live at all, must live a social life, 
 nor from the hearing of the voice that says, '* You 
 ought," or " You ought not." I state this here simply 
 as a general fact. I appeal to your own experience. 
 Man is, in fact, no isolated thing, no unit of merely 
 selfish desire. But, assuming this desire for the service 
 of one's own life as the first force — as the command 
 from God to live is the first command — I ask you to 
 see that, as a matter of fact and of inner experience, 
 each of us, living as we do by constant exchange 
 with our fellow-men, finds that this life cannot be 
 lived in mere obedience to the desire to live, and to 
 live as best we can; but there is heard within us 
 another voice, a voice that says, " You must do right." 
 To live, you must profit by the labour of others : to 
 
68 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 profit by the labour of others, you raust exchange, you 
 must give in return for what you take. Give what ? 
 I claim that there is a voice within every one of us 
 which says, " Give what is just." 
 
 Why does conscience come in here, where the social 
 character of life begins? What does it mean by 
 "just"? Who is to determine what it means? and 
 by appeal to what authority ? All these are further 
 questions. First, let us take the fact, conscience is 
 here, and in all the exchange of life does say, " In 
 return for what you take, give what is just." I say, 
 insist on the fact, because the fact is virtually chal- 
 lensred, and we must meet the challencre. All 
 
 in the field . . ^ 
 
 S'Ecc^'Jlm ^^^^ P^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ — ^^ system of combined 
 and divided labour, the sj^stem of exchange 
 by which we support our bodily existence — has been 
 for many years matter of discussion in books, under 
 the name of Political Economy. This science describes, 
 for instance, here, how exchange does take place, how 
 prices and wages, and interest and rent are fixed. It 
 does not profess to say what price or what wages 
 ought to be paid ; it only tells you how to determine 
 what will be paid. Only, if there is an iron system 
 according to which it will be determined what price 
 shall be given for what commodities, and what reward 
 for what services, it does not seem to be much use our 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 69 
 
 asking, " What is just ? " or " What ought to be paid ? " 
 And so the scientific account of the matter, which has 
 become, in one shape or another, matter of common 
 knowledge, colouring, I will venture to say, the 
 thoughts and opinions and practice of all of us — 
 the scientific account of the matter does present a 
 virtual challenge to the claim of conscience to deter- 
 mine what we ought to do in these particular matters 
 of duty between man and man. But I think I can show 
 you that there is no real challenge involved in the 
 teaching of economic science on the matter. The only 
 mistake is, that perhaps we have not let our consciences, 
 each in our own sphere, have their say as to what 
 we ought to do, and, consequently, the rule of what is 
 done has slid into the place of the rule of what ought 
 to be done ; and the rule of what is done is not so 
 near the rule of what ought to be done as it is our 
 business to make it. 
 
 Well, then, the means by which price or wages, 
 or any return in the give and take of economic life is 
 fixed, are these : On the one side, the service done, the 
 commodity or useful thing produced, must be repaid 
 with the equivalent of what it took to produce it ; on 
 the other side, a man will be content, if he can, to give 
 for the service or the commodity the equivalent of 
 what it is worth to him, in comparison with other 
 
70 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 services or other commodities which he needs for the 
 support or enjoyment of life. On this side the price 
 is fixed bjT" the exact estimate on the part of a number 
 of buyers, who are able to buy at the cost it takes to 
 produce the thing, of the comparative usefulness of 
 this and other things : on the other side by the exact 
 estimate on the part of a number of sellers of what 
 it will take to repay them for the trouble of producing 
 the thing. I need not follow out how these forces 
 work. Plainly they are the forces that fix what is 
 paid. What will the people who buy think it worth 
 while to give ? What will the people who sell think 
 it worth while to take ? The only point to which I 
 wish to call your attention, is this. On either side 
 there enters into the force that fixes what is paid, a 
 man's estimate of what is to be paid. It is not the 
 estimate of one man, I know; it is the estimate of 
 many : but multitudes are made of individuals, and 
 common standards are the outcome of individual 
 standards. And, as a matter of fact, within the 
 memory of living men, the standard of what is the 
 comparative usefulness to men of this or that com- 
 modity, the standard of what is fair repayment of 
 the pains that it takes to produce the things we need, 
 has altered. Why has it altered ? Because, one by 
 one, men have learnt to change their estimate. And I 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 71 
 
 maintain that, in the laws which fix what shall be paid, 
 you will never find any force said to be at work into 
 which the minds and wills and consciences of men do 
 not enter. The force is the common will of these units. 
 Well, then, I claim that conscience is not excluded ; 
 that its authority is challenged only in the and leaves 
 
 ,_,,..,_, . open to con- 
 
 sense that rolitical Economy cries aloud to science; 
 
 it, "Here is your field." If the laws of Political 
 
 Economy are iron, it is because men are iron ; the 
 
 laws are only statements of how men do act as 
 
 matter of fact. *'0h, but we shall never change 
 
 the ways in which men act ! " What shall I answer ? 
 
 "When the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith 
 
 on the earth ? " Or shall I say, rather, " You have 
 
 changed them " ? The common conscience is keener 
 
 and more awake, and has a higher standard than 
 
 it used to have, and our economic life is more just, 
 
 in consequence. It is a vast work. Of course it is. 
 
 It is life — nothing less — to strive by the best we 
 
 can do, each in our own sphere, to lift the lives 
 
 of men. Have faith in the individual conscience 
 
 and will ; they are the voice and the power of God. 
 
 It is through these you see that He rules this economic 
 
 world. Each individual can do little, though some 
 
 individuals can do much. But each individual can 
 
 do something. It is of grains of sand that continents 
 
72 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 are built. Each individual can say, "To the best of 
 my lights I will be just." 
 
 "I will be just." Let us look now what it means. 
 I have in me, from God, the command to 
 
 and con- 
 
 mindTjus-"'' ^^^®^ implanted as a deep desire in my soul. 
 It leads me to depend on others ; the sheer 
 need of individual life leads me to social life, leads 
 me to see that I am not, I do not exist as, I cannot 
 live as, a mere unit. I am part and parcel with 
 this man over against me. From him I am to get 
 what I need ; from me he gets what he needs. What 
 shall determine, then, what I give for what ? What 
 should determine, but that common soul which makes 
 us have a common need, which makes us able to 
 combine to attain it ? What should determine, but 
 some voice of this body to which it turns out, in the 
 working of the need of life, we both belong ? And this 
 is conscience, the voice of the common soul, the voice 
 of the Universal Mind, the voice of God, "in Whom we 
 live and move and have our being," the voice of Him 
 in Whom we are " members one of another." 
 
 And this voice says, " Be just." What does justice 
 mean ? Justice is, first, an interchancre of 
 
 which is ^ 
 
 chlnge?^" good. Exchange is a feature in the system 
 ^°° ' by which we combine to live. The whole 
 
 reason of it is that it feeds, it ministers to life. 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 73 
 
 Its spirit, then, is the spirit of good will. We 
 meet for a common good, I and the man with 
 whom I have to agree. We do not meet as enemies. 
 Unless the exchange is to be an exchange of good, its 
 whole purpose is gone. We come into it, not with a 
 grudging sense of necessity, but gladly welcoming a 
 help. We are stronger, richer, wiser, because we can 
 combine to exchange. We live a thousand lives in 
 one, because our life is not shut within the narrow 
 barriers of our personal power to provide. We are 
 the gainers; we come to meet the man who brings 
 our gain. The fruit of this system of exchange be- 
 tween you and me comes from three sources — your 
 force, and my force, and the force of our combination. 
 The combination itself is a good ; it is a multiplying, 
 an enriching power ; and you who, as simply you, 
 are but another unit in the world besides myself, 
 as the person with whom I am to exchange, come to 
 me clothed in this character of blessing — you bring 
 to me, and I to you, the gain and strength of union. 
 And the union is not only the source and multiplying 
 power of good ; it is itself a good. We break out of 
 the dismal toil of solitary lives, through this social 
 act of exchange, into a world of sympathy and fellow- 
 ship. So, then, we meet, if we know what we are 
 about, in the spirit of good will. It is impossible 
 
74 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 to insist on this too much, it is impossible to exag- 
 gerate the fruits which will follow — fruits material 
 and spiritual — in any individual life, in which a man 
 chooses to lay this down as the principle on which 
 he Avill always act — " Wlierever I have dealings with 
 man, we will meet, so far as lies in me, in the spirit 
 of good will. It is impossible to exaggerate the moral 
 and material mischief which has followed because of 
 the effect made on the imaginations of men by the 
 common picture of the economic world, as a world 
 in which my hand is against every man, and every 
 man's hand against me." It will often cost you stern 
 spiritual struggles to insist on this standard with 
 yourself — that you meet every man with whom you 
 have to do in the spirit of mutual good will. But 
 every day you do it, you will have made one step 
 more towards learning what the Apostle meant when 
 he said, "Ye have the mind of Christ." This, then, 
 is the first step — ^just men meet as those who are 
 interchanging good. 
 
 The next step in justice is this : The standard 
 (2) according o£ a just cxchangc is mutual agreement. 
 
 to mutual 
 
 agreement; Justlcc is mutually agreed upon interchange 
 of good. I have said that exchange, because it is the 
 discover}^ that we have a common, not a separated 
 life, necessarily involves the appeal to a common 
 
JUSTICE, THE LA IV OF EXCHANGE. 75 
 
 Standard. Because the organ wliicli declares this 
 standard is in each, exchange, to be just, to conform 
 to this standard, must be matter of mutual agree- 
 ment. When God made that first revelation of His 
 justice to Abraham, of which we have already spoken, 
 He made a covenant. And in a covenant, what is 
 given and taken on either side, the interchange of 
 good, is open and declared, as ths result of agree- 
 ment. This is, in fact, the character of justice, the 
 character of the fair man — that I should do, not 
 merely what I think to be fair towards another, but 
 what I have good reason to believe he and I would 
 both think to be fair. When do we appeal to law to 
 step in between us ? When the one man has done 
 what he thinks right, but the other does not think it 
 right ; when the one man has done what he does not 
 consider to be against the contract, actual or implied, 
 but the other does consider it to be against the contract. 
 What is the kind of injustice which excites our 
 highest indignation ? Is it not w^hen a man has made 
 an agreement with us, knowing that he made it in 
 one sense and w^e understood it in another ? 
 
 Nevertheless, it is not an easy thing to do to live 
 by this standard. Even if w^e never felt inclined to 
 dispute the principle — and we do — it is very difficult 
 to apply it thoroughly and consistently in practice. 
 
76 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 In the complex and intricate system of division of 
 labour by which we live, mutual agreement in fact on 
 a thousand essential matters of detail is impossible. 
 If I go into a shop to buy any commodity, I have 
 of sheer necessity to trust the man of whom I buy 
 to know for me, in a number of important details, 
 what is the kind of article which I ought to be 
 content to take at the price. He knows his business ; 
 I don't know his business. The just man will make 
 it the business of his conscience to see that he and 
 I both — not he alone, but he and I both — are the 
 gainers by his knowing the business of his trade. 
 It is not you to judge, and I to judge, and, when 
 we differ, another judge to be called in. That other 
 judge sits in your soul and in mine. We may not 
 listen to his voice, but we cannot blind his eyes. 
 
 And we do feel disposed to dispute the principle, 
 that what is mutually agreed upon is just, from 
 this same reason. We say, " A man might not think 
 himself well-used if he knew what it was I was 
 giving him for his money; but he does not know 
 my business or its difficulties ; he couldn't judge. 
 I, and I alone, can know and decide." That is 
 anything else you like, but it is not justice. It 
 may be the fruit of a system which is very hard 
 to fight against and change. And in fighting 
 
JUSTICE, THE LA IV OF EXCHANGE. 77 
 
 against it you may have to make sacrifices to 
 justice. If you have, face them and fear not ; 
 but hold, at least, by this — that you will never let 
 yourself profess to judge by yourself, and without 
 brinojino: into the court of conscience the best advo- 
 cate you can for the cause of your neighbour. Or, 
 again, we feel disposed to dispute the principle be- 
 cause a man is prejudiced and wrong-headed; he 
 compels us to take the law into our own hands. 
 Well, if you are ever prejudiced and wrong-headed — 
 and you must contemplate the possibility — and have 
 to look back on some dispute in which you must 
 acknowledge that it was so, and that a plain and 
 ordinary agreement w^ith you was out of the question, 
 how will the man have acted towards you, of whom 
 you will say, "That man was just. I provoked him, 
 but he kept his head, and he kept his heart straight, 
 and I was not really the loser " ? That is the test. 
 Act so. 
 
 And difficulties like these occur, not only between 
 individual men, but between classes of men — between 
 different branches of a trade, or different trades, or 
 between employers and labourers, or lenders and 
 borrowers. And here, more than ever, cases arise in 
 which your individual conscience, or that collective 
 conscience of this trade or other body to which you 
 
78 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 belong, has to be trustee for the other party in a 
 mutual agreement. Wherever, for instance, there are 
 questions of what is just between the different classes, 
 whom the rapid commercial development of the last 
 hundred years has estranged from any real know- 
 ledge of each others' life, what a responsibility lies 
 upon the man who has to say, " So far I will go, and 
 no further ; so much I will demand of life and com- 
 fort and ease as my claim and share, so much I will 
 allow as his " ! Well, there the responsibility does lie, 
 upon each party to the settlement, to see to it that, 
 so far as he is concerned, the settlement is such as 
 both would agree upon if all was open and the 
 barriers were down. You cannot change the collec- 
 tive judgment of your profession or your trade all 
 at once ; but do what you can, and keep the end in 
 view. And if we are to do what we can to forward 
 the cause of justice, and to spread the rule of God, 
 let us, at least, love the daylight, not the dark. 
 Let us work for open ways. Justice is at home in 
 daylight. Here, and here alone, can mutual agree- 
 ment be absolute and real, where there is nothing 
 concealed or to conceal. Every step towards mutual 
 knowledge on the part of the different members of 
 the economic body of the real life, and needs, and 
 methods, and diflSculties, and temptations of the rest, 
 
JUSTICE, THE LAW OF EXCHANGE. 79 
 
 is a step towards the recognition and the reality of 
 that justice between man and man, which is the 
 establishment of the Kingdom of God upon earth. 
 
 But, after all, it may be asked, in all these matters 
 between man and man, where is the standard (3) of con- 
 to be found ? Mutual ao^reement is the method which knows 
 
 ° the Mind of 
 
 by which it is to be found ; but where is either ^°'^- 
 my conscience or my neighbour's to look for it ? and 
 what likelihood is there that we shall agree, that we 
 shall look for it or find it in the same place ? The 
 answer to this question is the very soul and substance 
 of what I have to say. There is no standard of 
 justice outside justice itself. Would you find it ? — 
 find God, Who is the Just One. How shall you find 
 Him and His justice ? — through your conscience, and 
 your neighbour's, which He has set to be the voices 
 of His justice here in earth. Do you ask what is, 
 in fact and substance, just between man and man, 
 between class and class ? For you the answer lies in 
 what your conscience will tell you to-morrow, and 
 the next day, and the day after — till you die, and the 
 record is written with which you shall stand before 
 the judgment-seat of Christ. God's Law and God's 
 Will are the standard. Justice is the Mind of God. 
 Justice is what your conscience tells you to be just, 
 because you were made in the image of God, and are 
 
So CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 renewed by Christ in the image in which you were 
 created; and this image and likeness is, that you 
 know and love what is good, and see and abhor what 
 is evil. Day by day, and year by year, and century 
 by century, as the ages pass, God writes in the hearts 
 and lives, and builds up in the laws and institutions 
 of men, so much of that Eternal Mind, of that Eternal 
 Good, which He Himself, in His own Essence, is — so 
 much as these single souls will let Him, on Whom rests 
 yesterday, or to-morrow, or to-day, the trust of the 
 oracles of God. 
 
 Where shall justice be found ? It shall be found in 
 God, through Christ, by souls who will look and 
 anxiously discern between good and evil, between 
 right and wrong, till the diviner vision grows in the 
 inner eye of the soul, and you begin to guess what 
 He meant when He said that you shall know as you 
 are known. 
 
 This is no imaginary answer, it is no trick or artifice 
 of argument. " The just shall live by faith ; " and shall 
 not they that live by faith, by faith be just ? Meet 
 your neighbour in this spirit. You meet for good — 
 for his and yours ; you meet, at every minute of the 
 day, in every shade of expression on your face, and 
 in every tone of your voice, which plays its part in 
 the transactions of life, to find by the joint efforts of 
 
8i 
 
 that organ of the Divine Mind which is in each, the 
 justice which — here and now, in this bargain that you 
 strike, in the promise which you make and keep, in 
 the price, the wage, you demand, receive, or pay — 
 becomes a fact, an actual living visible embodiment, 
 here before the eyes of men, of the eternal glory of 
 God. 
 
 " Thou knowest the commandments." Long ago they 
 were written on the stones of Sinai. Far, far away 
 before that, when, in the eternal counsels of God, it 
 was decreed that man should be made in that image 
 in which God should be made Man, it was decreed 
 that they should be written, too, in the fleshy tables 
 of the heart of every man that should live upon the 
 earth. The writing is blurred, is it, in you ? The 
 healing Hand of Christ upon your soul will make it 
 plain. You shall hear the voice if you will listen ; 
 you shall be renewed in His likeness if you will use 
 His grace. He shall say to jou, in words that you 
 cannot mistake, " This is the way ; walk ye in it," and 
 you shall know that this God is your God for ever 
 and ever, and that He will be your guide until death. 
 
IV. 
 LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 " Beloved, let us love one another." — 1 John iv. 7. 
 
 " There was a certain rich man, which was clothed 
 The facts in purplc and fine linen, and fared sumptu- 
 richand ously cvcry day: and there was a certain 
 side. beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his 
 
 gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the 
 crumbs which fell from the rich man's table." That is 
 the first picture — the rich man and the poor man side 
 by side. We all know the picture which follows — the 
 companion picture of the rich man and the poor man, 
 with the great gulf between. What was the rich 
 man's sin ? He is not described as doing anything 
 wrong. The words of our English translation are, if 
 anything, a little hard on him. We may say that all 
 we know about him is this — he was beautifully 
 dressed, he lived a life of good cheer, bright, brilliant, 
 splendid. There is no hint of any sin, of extrava- 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 83 
 
 gance, of dishonesty, of excess, of gross and sensual 
 passion. Any of these may have been there, but we 
 know nothing of them ; they are foreign to the pur- 
 pose of his story. We know that he was rich ; that, 
 in his dress, he liked what was handsome and refined ; 
 that he lived a pleasant, happy, brilliant life ; and this 
 is all. No ; there is one thing besides ; there was the 
 poor man at his gate, and — no more. They were side 
 by side, and that is all ; the facts are left to speak for 
 themselves. There the facts are, there they were in 
 our Lord's time, and there they are still, in the 
 industrial society of to-day, in the modern city — 
 the poor we have always with us. Here the facts 
 are — rich and poor side by side ; they still speak for 
 themselves. It is those to whom they do not speak 
 who would "not hear, though one rose from the 
 dead." 
 
 These were the facts set out in this immortal picture. 
 What were the principles He meant to teach ? What 
 was the rich man's sin ? The only thing we know 
 against him is purely negative ; we do not know that 
 he cared for the poor at his door. Would he have 
 ceased, do you think, to be tormented in that flame 
 of terrible remorse, if he could have remembered that 
 he had taken pains to see that Lazarus got those 
 crumbs from his table which he sat and longed for ? 
 
84 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 Is this the teaching of the facts — "Take care that 
 the leavings of your luxury find their way to those 
 who are in want " ? Do you think it was to teach us 
 this, that our Lord drew this terribly simple picture 
 of rich and poor side by side ? 
 
 Rich and poor side by side. Economic science has 
 analyzed the causes which produce this result, and 
 we are apt to come away with the idea that economic 
 laws produce this contrast of wealth and poverty 
 side by side, and that at this point, where the rich 
 man sees the poor man at his gate, Christian charity 
 should come in — charity which gives the crumbs. 
 
 " Law " is sometimes a misleading word. The eco- 
 nomic laws which produce this result are laws of fact, 
 not laws of right. They state that, given the operation 
 of certain motives among men, certain tendencies will 
 be at work, and the issue of these tendencies is in 
 this sharp contrast of wealth and poverty. The 
 question what you or I ought to do brings us face 
 to face with quite a different kind of law — the law 
 of right, which is a part of the very nature and 
 being of God, which His command lays upon men, 
 which speaks in their consciences when they come 
 face to face with the facts which bring it into play, 
 wbich speaks in law and prophecy, to arouse, to 
 awaken, to revive the voice of conscience itself. The 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 85 
 
 laws which have to be obeyed are the laws of eternal 
 right, the laws of conscience, and of God. 
 
 But are not economic laws laws of God — the 
 laws by which He governs the world of human life, 
 just as He governs the physical world by the laws 
 which bring the rain-drops from the sky, and carry 
 them down in rivers to the sea ? Yes ; the economic 
 laws which produce this contrast of riches and 
 poverty side by side, are Divine laws — in a sense. 
 These natural laws we think it wrong not to coun- 
 teract, when they do not work for human health 
 and happiness. We drain the water off our land, we 
 carry it whither we see good ; we dam and bank in 
 our rivers ; we do not treat a noxious swamp side by 
 side with a splendid city as a result of the working 
 of Divine laws, with which it would be impious to 
 interfere. We may, at least, do so much with the 
 economic laws. Laws of God they are, laws of 
 Divine allowance — allowance of evils which we are 
 left to cure; laws of Divine long-suffering with the 
 sins and weaknesses of men, ruling the scene of 
 misguided forces and wasted good, which the light 
 of the knowledge of God's love in Christ is meant 
 to rule, to make fruitful, and to bless. Laws of 
 Divine command they are not — those laws which, in 
 this and in every other field of human action, we 
 
86 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 have to seek for and to find, to live by and to 
 realize in fact. 
 
 What the laws of Divine command are in the 
 In face of region of our economic life, we have already 
 £'^^1"^''' seen in part. The Divine law is not a 
 love. fixed code, issued once for all ; it is a 
 
 gradual growth, a gradual discovery ; emerging as the 
 creative conscience, in virtue of which man is the 
 image of God, comes face to face with facts, and, in 
 the facts, with God; feels His Spirit move upon it, 
 and, at each stage in the revelation of law and right, 
 receives, in the unveiling of some new feature in the 
 Eternal likeness, the sanction of the Divine command. 
 
 The first command is the command to live — a 
 command which rests, not upon the individual, but 
 upon the human community. The springs of its 
 working are in the individual will, but the indi- 
 vidual is addressed and is bidden to live as a 
 member of a community. " Be fruitful, and mul- 
 tiply, and replenish the earth." The desire which 
 answers to this command, is the primary economic 
 force, the desire of life. This is the first word of 
 conscience when man finds himself face to face with 
 the means of life — the command to live, addressed 
 to the community of men. 
 
 Next we find that in living out this common life, 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 87 
 
 in the work of producing and using together the 
 means of life, we are living by exchange; and con- 
 science gives out, in the face of the fact of ex- 
 change, the command, "Defraud not; be just. In 
 the exchange of life give to another what is recog- 
 nized as due, by that mutual agreement of your 
 conscience and his which makes them the voice of 
 the Eternal Justice and Right." 
 
 And now, lastly, we come to the final facts, the 
 broad result in the distribution of the good things 
 of the world. Looking away from the individual 
 acts of exchange, in which, we will suppose, we have 
 striven to act justly; looking at the way in which 
 the first command to " be fruitful, and multiply " is 
 actually fulfilled in the mass of human life, rich and 
 poor, which we have before us to-day, we have before 
 us facts which bring into play a new command — the 
 command which Dives broke — the Christian law, 
 " Love one another." 
 
 It commands no mere amiable sentiment ; it is an 
 exacting principle. Conscience, which has Theiove 
 carried us thus far in the organization of isacon- 
 
 structive 
 
 the working world in which we produce P""cipie. 
 together and exchange, due for due, the means of life, 
 does not here subside into the utterance of a vague 
 and meaningless platitude; it retains its sternly 
 
88 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 practical character, and yet rises to a command 
 above the level, it would seem, to which we are apt 
 to confine a conscience too mechanically conceived. 
 Conscience is but the awakening in man as, in the 
 experience of life, he comes face to face with God, 
 of the Divine wisdom and goodness as a working, 
 organizing power. It is the same faculty still, when 
 it becomes the voice of that principle which in the 
 Christian Creed is the originative and organizing 
 principle of the world — the principle of love. Love 
 is no mere accidental corrective. We are not to 
 live for ourselves in all our work, and in the or- 
 ganization of our common life, and then produce our 
 charity to redress the worst anomalies which result. 
 It is an organizing principle, in the light of which 
 we have perpetually to review, to reconstitute, to 
 rearrange the whole of our life. 
 
 But can we reconstitute the economic world — this 
 intricate system of interdependent interests, spreading 
 like a vast network of natural irrigation over the 
 whole field of human life ? The supposition is absurd. 
 Plead that absurdity, if you dare, as a reason for 
 leaving the principle of love, as a ruling, and not a 
 mere corrective principle, out of any part of your 
 life. It is God's work to change the world ? Yes ; 
 and you know how, and how alone, God's work is 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DLSTRIBUTION'. 89 
 
 done — by single souls that accept His Will and live by 
 His law ; and upon every single soul there rests the 
 responsibility of answering the question, as regards 
 men between whom and himself already the great 
 gulf begins to yawn — in practice, in the daily 
 business of life, do you "love your neighbour as 
 yourself," do you make your neighbour's good your 
 end? 
 
 The principle of love in economic concerns means 
 the law of help, the law of co-operation, its law is 
 
 the law of 
 
 With co-operation as an industrial system, I ^eip ; 
 have nothing to do. It may be the best or the worst 
 way of carrying out economic principles, of attaining 
 economic ends. It has helped, indeed, to envisage the 
 moral principle on which I wish to dwell ; but it is 
 with that moral principle itself, and not with any 
 particular method of carrying it out, that we have 
 here to do, and the principle is, that we live and work 
 for mutual help. We are so certain to find this prin- 
 ciple a stern and exacting law, that we may safely 
 say, to start with, that, in our economic life as it 
 stands, we shall find a much fuller operation of the 
 principle of help than the ordinary scientific descrip- 
 tion of economic life would lead us to believe. Let 
 us examine what this law of love amounts to and 
 demands. 
 
90 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 1. The first utterance of the law of help is this, 
 z>. (i)iden- "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" 
 
 tify your , . , . „ 
 
 neighbour's — that IS to Say, you must identify your 
 your own; neighbour's interest with your own. This 
 law grows naturally enough out of the relations of 
 just exchange. Justice between man and man implies 
 the recognition of a common standard as to what 
 is due from each to each. This recognition of a 
 common standard of right arises out of the recog- 
 nition of a common good in the common pursuit 
 of which they are combined ; and in the recog- 
 nition of this common standard each becomes the 
 guardian of the other's good. Each man is the natural 
 guardian of the interests of those with whom he deals ; 
 that is the truth against which the old instinct of 
 antagonism springs up in us again and again, and 
 cries, *' Am I my brother's keeper ? " If not, who is ? 
 Between you and him the whole transaction lies. Is 
 it a sheer fight, each to get the most he can ? Is each 
 seekinof the other's loss ? We revolt from such a mis- 
 representation of the life of human commerce, in 
 which we know that the spirit of good will, when it 
 is present, is no incongruous intruder. Where is it, 
 then ? In you towards him, in him towards you— in 
 each good will. You will his good ; that is your part 
 in the transaction, as a moral transaction at aU — that 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 91 
 
 is, you are the guardian of his interest. Look at any 
 of the great industrial enterprises of to-day — the 
 bridge that is just being completed across the Tay, or 
 the still more wonderful creation, transcending the old 
 wonders of the world, which is to span the Forth. 
 Wonders they are — ^wonders of sheer magnitude, won- 
 ders of skill, wonders for the daring they demand in 
 those who plan and in those who carry them out. But 
 there is a greater wonder still. The work is good ; 
 those who work it know it to be good, and for its 
 own sake put into it the best energy of brain, heart, 
 and hand, proud to bear a part in a benefit to men. 
 Measure even by the moral indignation with which 
 we should learn that any of them had been false to 
 the high vocation to which they feel themselves to 
 be called, how deep the conviction is in our minds 
 that the man who works, and the man who sells, are 
 the guardians of the good of those for whom they 
 work and those to whom they sell. There opens at 
 every turn before a man who is engaged in this con- 
 tinual give and take of due for due, of wage for work, 
 and work for wage, of price for commodity, and com- 
 modity for price, this vision of a higher level to which 
 all his life is raised, as he sees it to be the exacting 
 duty and the crowning privilege of his life to seek the 
 good of others. It is an identification, not an identity 
 
92 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 of interests. Your good and your neighbour s good 
 are not on the first blush the same ; there is a moral 
 effort needed, a constant strain, it may be a struggle, 
 after the dignity of the higher aim. But if we fail of it 
 we feel ourselves degraded ; we hide rather than parade 
 what we know to be our shame. It is a better life that 
 loves the light ; and our transactions cannot reach after 
 that moral glory and perfection in which they may 
 challenge the scrutiny of men and the final judgment 
 of God, unless each man is striving towards this as the 
 ideal of his commerce with his kind — that each man 
 should make the good of the other his own, his end. 
 
 2. And this principle, again, leads us a step further 
 (2) pursue still. Our ncighbour's good must be made 
 b4, at the our own, always in spirit, sometimes in stern 
 
 sacrifice of 
 
 your own ; f^^^t, at thc sacrlficc of what seems to be our 
 own. That sacrifice is demanded by the law of help, 
 by the law of love, by the law which is the life of 
 God, whose breach is the eternal death of the likeness 
 of God in man. " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
 thyself." Let us translate it afresh. You ought to be 
 ready to make any and every sacrifice for those with 
 whom you deal, which you would accept and approve 
 if it were made for you. We have an easy answer for 
 those who, ignorant of the real life of commerce and 
 Christianity alike, would consider sacrifice an incon- 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION, 93 
 
 gruous idea in commercial concerns. Sacrifice in com- 
 merce ? Well, commerce is the life of commercial men 
 — of all men, in so far as they live by the ordinary 
 commerce on which we all depend. Are you to banish 
 Christianity from the life of commercial men ? Christ 
 came to show men what love is, and to enable them 
 to live in it. He showed it by sacrifice. He enables 
 men to make sacrifices, to their wives, to their chil- 
 dren, to those they love, to those they pity, to the 
 miserable and degraded, sunk in sin — but not to their 
 customers ? Are these, then, not their neighbours ? 
 The main part of the life of many men is commerce; 
 an essential part of the life of all of us is commerce ; 
 and is the distinctive Christian principle, the principle 
 of sacrifice, to have no concern with commerce ? No 
 one can seriously maintain this solemn excommuni- 
 cation of large classes of human beings, this curse 
 of godlessness, cast as a ban upon whole regions of 
 human life. We have only to state it, to see it to be 
 what it is — a preposterous absurdity. We may some- 
 times, perhaps often, give in to the idea, as we give in, 
 without thought or care, to many another cynical and 
 accursed fallacy that floats suspended like a poisonous 
 miasma in the mixed atmosphere of common feeling 
 and opinion, but we don't believe anything of the 
 kind to be true. 
 
94 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 The great and obvious sacrifices may be rare ; the 
 demand for them may be rare. When they come 
 they may be difficult to make. A sacrifice is dif- 
 ficult to make, or it would not be a sacrifice at all. 
 The power to make them when they do come, to put 
 forth the strength of the Spirit, and rise to share 
 the privilege of the Son of God, comes out of a life, 
 in which the devotion of life to others is a constant, 
 dominating principle, the soul and spring of hope 
 and purpose and desire. This is the effort, this is 
 the call, this is the height of the vocation of those 
 whose life it is to feed the lives of men, to pass their 
 days in that continual give and take of work for 
 work, of life for life, in which the spirit of self-devotion 
 can find, has found, and is meant to find, its own 
 familiar home. The soldier must die, rather than 
 leave his post in battle. What would you say of him 
 if, at a critical moment, he left his post because he 
 did not think he would receive his pay ? If commerce 
 claims a place in Christian life, this means that the 
 man who engages in it pursues and lives for an end, 
 a good to other men, which he will never sacrifice 
 for anything, and to make sacrifices for which, on due 
 occasion, is an outcome of the normal working of the 
 Spirit of Christ in his soul and life. Only, if you 
 would not have that Spirit fail in you at need, dignify 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 95 
 
 with a true estimate of its high purpose and life- 
 sustaining function the daily work of the profession 
 to which you give your life. Let the spirit of self- 
 devotion to the good of others, which must carry you 
 through crises where the choice lies between heroism 
 and treason, consecrate, pervade, and bless, with the 
 beneficent presence of the Spirit of Love, the good 
 works which God has ordained for you to walk in 
 them. 
 
 But, meanwhile, what has become of that keen 
 desire for life, which we know as the first r^s^^^ 
 moving force of the economic system — that wuTfiffthe 
 
 energy of 
 
 eager strivins^ after fuller, richer life, whose Jp^e to be 
 
 ° ° ' ' theenergy 
 
 movement is sanctioned by the Divine com- °^^'^^' 
 mand, '^ Be fruitful, and multiply " ? The units of this 
 force are in the individual souls and bodies, striving 
 each for their own sustenance in life. Are they to be 
 led on until they find this first impulse wholly lost, in 
 a demand for the devotion to others of the life which 
 they seek to maintain ? Is this the end of that 
 development which the soul must follow, under the 
 stress of a moral necessity, in the growing light of a 
 conscience whose demand becomes more exacting the 
 higher the level to which we will consent to rise ? The 
 end — almost the end — the end, if we will see it to be 
 indeed the end. We desire lif(gj.Jikifi„jt turns out, 
 
 ff^^ OF THB -^^ 
 
 (minVBRSITT)) 
 
96 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 is what life means, this is what life is — not the 
 highest merely, not the noblest only, but the one 
 life alone possible at all for those who once begin to 
 mount the steep, and will not be persuaded to turn 
 back. 
 
 Love is its own end, and seeks no other, no reward. 
 The devotion of life — to give time, and effort, and heart, 
 and thought, and pains, and, if need be, anything and 
 everything to the service of others — this is the end, the 
 true end ; there is nothing beyond, nothing higher, or 
 nobler, or better, or more like to God — the only end 
 which justifies a man and glorifies a life. The rich 
 man in the parable lived for himself; that was why 
 he did not notice Lazarus at the gate. He lived for 
 himself There the facts lay before him, that there 
 were others to live for, others whom he could help, 
 and conscience spoke and echoed what Moses and the 
 Prophets had taught, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself; " and he — he loved his neighbour, probably, 
 just so much as was necessary to gratify his own self- 
 love, and no more ; and he saw no more ; he didn't 
 even see Lazarus longing for the crumbs. If you 
 would have the spiritual eye which sees the occasion 
 for mercy, your life must be ruled by that spirit of 
 love which is life itself, which finds its satisfaction in 
 the energy of self-devotion, in the life of that Love 
 
LOVE, THE LAW OF DISTRIBUTION. 97 
 
 which has given us all provision for our needs, of that 
 Love which He is, Who said, " I am the Beginning 
 and the End." His are the principles by which each 
 individual Christian soul is called upon to glorify his 
 life — that, in all the transactions of life, a man make 
 his neighbour s interest his own; that he do so, if need 
 be, at his own cost and loss, and that he find in this 
 the self-satisfying energy of life. 
 
 There is nothing here which may not be done 
 in some degree, and in a daily increasing degree, 
 in the economic world and life of to-day. "Love 
 one another^ It is the work of individual souls 
 towards individual souls. Christ did not demand 
 that the world should be set in order before He 
 came to live in it the Perfect Life. You are not 
 to expect to see the principles of Christ in acknow- 
 ledged and popular supremacy, before you will walk 
 in His footsteps by Whose Name you are called. You 
 are to live by them, and give yourself to them, glad 
 that, in so doing, you can give yourself to Christ, 
 Who has given Himself to you, so that in you may 
 live the joy of those who give themselves for love. 
 He made the interests, the needs, the aims of suffer- 
 ing humanity His own. He faced the sacrifice. " He 
 saw of the travail of His soul, and was satisfied " — 
 satisfied in love realized and acted out, love lived by 
 
 H 
 
98 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 as a stern and searching law, love leading to loss and 
 death and shame, love so offered to the hearts of men, 
 and, by the hearts of men who should be worthy of 
 such love, accepted as the law, treasured as the privilege 
 of life. 
 
V. 
 
 THE BLESSING OF LABOUR. 
 
 " Consider the lilies of the field, . . . they toil not, neither do they 
 spin."— S. Matt. vi. 28. 
 
 It is a wonderful sight for one who lives in less 
 fertile lands to come among the harvest The blessing 
 fields of the eastern counties of England, ° ^ °'"^' 
 in the midst of harvest-time. A golden land, shining 
 in the glory of the autumn sun. Everywhere the 
 golden grain ; here and there a field of waving gold, 
 elsewhere the treasure stored in the long line of 
 golden stack ; most often sunburnt, stalwart men, 
 gathering the precious gifts of God, with the sunlight 
 of His blessing on their toil. It is a picture of the 
 blessing of labour. Can it be that labour ever was 
 a curse ? How did the words ever come to sound 
 other than a blessing, " In the sweat of thy brow thou 
 shalt eat bread " ? 
 
 No doubt it mav be said of Eno^lish agricultural 
 
lOO CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 labour, that though its produce glitters in the August 
 sun, its days of golden prosperity are gone, and that 
 the sunburnt labourer, and those for whom he labours, 
 reap for themselves no golden harvest from their work. 
 But let us take the picture, none the less, for the truth 
 that is in it, and see whether it is altogether a paradox 
 to read in it that labour — this labour as it is — that 
 labour always and in itself is a blessing, 
 
 1. Is weariness a blessing ? Is it not ? " Man 
 (i) in the full goeth forth to his work, and to his labour, 
 
 employment 
 
 of energy; until the eveniug," is the culmination of the 
 Psalm of nature — the evening, the time of rest, when 
 power is spent and energy exhausted, when the day's 
 life is lived out to the full, and the hour of repose is 
 come. Labour is a blessing, first of all, because it 
 is the employment of energy. Man is a thing that 
 works, and, without work, is restless and ill at ease. 
 He is full of possibilities, unhappy till, of his own 
 power, he has made something real ; full of force, 
 uneasy till it is spent on some device; full of dim 
 dreams, half seen, half felt, of what it may be given 
 him to do, impatient till they take shape in a task 
 set, a work accomplished, and a duty done. Rest 
 after labour is the only rest. Can we conceive a 
 happy life in which the power latent in muscle, 
 nerve, and will, should never be called forth; in 
 
THE BLESSING OF LABOUR. ici 
 
 which obstacle and diflSculty should never challenge 
 the reserve of force ; in which a man should never 
 know what it is to look back with wonder on the 
 achievement of that to which he set himself in doubt 
 and fear ? 
 
 This is the treasure of a nation, this stored reserve 
 of faculty, this hidden power waiting to show itself 
 as will directed to an object, revelling in the exer- 
 cise of strength, resting only when the music sounds 
 upon the ear, " The work is done." Economic science 
 calls it labour, and its motive wages. Who can say 
 how large a proportion of its work every day is done 
 under the stress of some such force as that which 
 the Apostle described when he said, " Woe is me, if 
 I preach not the Gospel," because the power pent 
 up must find its way out into life, because of the 
 sheer joy of work, the delight in the exertion of the 
 energy that stirs and quickens within us, that seeks 
 blindly for some object on which it may spend itself, 
 in gaining which it may have rest ? On the face of 
 it, this is a blessing — a blessing to thank God for — 
 that we have known what it is to feel this power 
 moving within us, to feel it at work in the labour of 
 day after day and year after year, to see it embodied 
 in work done, and to thank God, not only for the 
 result, but for the power and its use. 
 
I02 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 2. And yet, after all, is it not practically true that 
 
 (2) in the ^ "^^^ works, not to employ his energies, but 
 wages of life; ^^ ^^^^ j^-^ ^^^^^ ^ Certainly, it is the 
 
 second blessing of labour, that the labourer is worthy 
 of his hire. Wages earned are a blessing. It is good 
 that a man enjoys the fruit of his labour, that he 
 holds in his hand the witness that his work is done. 
 It is a part of the gift of power and its use to see 
 and feel it gain its end. This end, among other 
 ends, is a thing towards which it has been directed, 
 to support the life from which it comes. At its 
 lowest, honest labour done for wages' sake is so far 
 blessed in wages earned ; but to the man to whom the 
 power and its use are themselves a blessing and a 
 gift, wages also are a gift — earned, and yet a gift, 
 the other half of that double gift which is made up 
 of work and its reward. The work itself, in the 
 doing of it, absorbs all energy and thought, and 
 wages for work done come as an added good; they 
 are a blessing most of all to those to whom work 
 itself is a privilege and a blessing. 
 
 All work, be it good or evil in its motive and its 
 character, gains in the end its wages and reward — 
 from the selfish desire which gains the reward of 
 death, the wages of sin, up to the labour which works 
 in the spirit of the rule, "Give, and it shall be 
 
THE BLESSING OF LABOUR. 103 
 
 given to you." All honest and true workmen know, 
 as a matter of fact and experience, that the earning 
 of wages is a blessing, that good received is doubled 
 where it results from good done or good attempted. 
 It is good for a man to feel that he possesses his own 
 means of life in right of his own labour. Labour 
 that is coldly measured to match a calculated wage, 
 gains only the poor and meagre reward for which 
 it works; but even here the good is done in some 
 measure, and in the same measure good is received. 
 Labour that is given with the full heart of a life 
 that loves to spend itself in work, rises to the fruition 
 of that great reward, which is beyond all earning, and 
 is rightly called a gift, the gift of life. 
 
 Is not this the sum and substance of what men 
 desire as wages, of what we think they have a right 
 to ask ? The wages of work is life. This is the 
 blessing bestowed by rights upon all who work — they 
 live ; they have, as the outcome of their labour, what 
 is worthy to be called a life. This is the standard 
 of comfort to which, by testing it, we have to teach 
 men to rise, that they know what it is to live. Life 
 is not only faculties evoked, energies employed, 
 force exercised to the full, but desires fed with the 
 achievement of the objects of desire, will spent in 
 effort after an ideal of happiness which can satisfy 
 
I04 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 the will, and a heart moving and yet resting in the 
 peaceful activities of a home, where the love that 
 goes up like a prayer to Heaven is answered by the 
 love that bends like an angel of blessing over the 
 living image of Heaven upon earth. 
 
 For this is the last and crowning blessing of labour ; 
 (3) in the it is the instrument and the life of love. 
 
 living energy 
 
 of love. Here, at least, in the highest claim for 
 labour, we endow it with no imaginary glory. Men 
 do work for the love of those on whom they may 
 spend the wages of their work — for their wives, for 
 their children, for their home. Labour is the trodden 
 road of love, the means of all the daily sacrifices by 
 which men serve those whom they have learnt to love 
 — even when it is also the unconscious, or even the 
 unwilling, service of those whom they have not yet 
 learnt to love. And in proportion as labour is felt to 
 be by those who work the channel along which those 
 energies find vent, whose stoppage would be death, 
 and is rewarded in wages with a life worthy of the 
 work which earns it, love widens out from wife and 
 child, for whom men work, to fellow -labourers who share 
 the toil, to all with whom the organization of labour 
 brings the worker into living and human relations. 
 
 Labour is the way of sacrifice, which makes love 
 a strong and energizing principle, instead of a weak 
 
THE BLESSING OF LABOUR, 105 
 
 and enervating sentiment. It is the test of its sin- 
 cerity and the satisfaction of its true desire. Love may 
 begin as the desire to possess, but, as a living spirit, 
 it is the desire to serve. It finds out its true vocation, 
 it learns the secret of the impulse whose strength, 
 at first, it feels, but does not understand, when this 
 impulse carries it, at the cost of daily self-denial, 
 along the road of daily duty. And the natural course 
 of its development, as it fills the days of men with 
 labours done and pains endured for love, is that it 
 should grow to be an end to itself, no longer satisfied 
 with the sphere which remains its centre and its 
 home, but cannot limit its radiation or restrict the 
 scope of its life. He who loves at home, and works in 
 love for home, finds love to be a life that seeks a 
 wider range, a feeling that is ready to spring forth on 
 every occasion of social contact, a spirit that is ready 
 to enter into the body prepared for it in the very 
 framework of the society of men. 
 
 Labour forces love to know itself The love of 
 home is a test to which a man may bring back his 
 conduct in the wider world, and ask whether it was 
 worthy of the ideal which he would not be content 
 to forsake. And in the wider world, in the more 
 ordinary business relations with men, labour affords 
 a field of fellowship in the common efforts of men 
 
io6 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 working side by side for common ends, and, still more, 
 opportunities of sacrifice and self-denial, which the 
 true spirit, bred in labour done for love, will recognize 
 if it is awake, will grasp at and use if it is alive, till 
 the man learns to know, in all those with whom he 
 has to do, his brethren in the family of the Everlasting 
 Father ; and in labour, even unrepaid, by which their 
 brethren gain, the sons of God, working in the spirit 
 of His love, see of the travail of their souls and are 
 satisfied. 
 
 Such is the blessing of labour, as we see and 
 know it may be now lived in and enjoyed. There is 
 no doubt about its reality, however true it may be 
 that the picture we have drawn is an ideal. The 
 reality of the world of labour as it is, affords a far 
 different picture, and one which we cannot look upon 
 too often, and can never look upon without pain. But 
 the ideal, too, is a reality — a living and working reality ; 
 it is an ideal which men have before them ; it is a life 
 which they know to be the best, and strive in some 
 measure to attain. The blessing of labour is real. 
 
 Turn, then, from this ideal to another, to what is 
 Contrast ^Iso iu part au imaginary picture of the 
 ideal the blcsslug of au unlaborious life — of the lives 
 
 unlaborious 
 
 ^f^- of those of whom it has been said, with an 
 
 unfortunately contemptuous perversion of the words. 
 
THE BLESSING OF LABOUR. 107 
 
 that " they toil not, neither do they spin." There 
 are few things in this world more beautiful than 
 one of the homes of those of whom the words have 
 been lately used. Whether or not we acquiesce in 
 the indictment which is implied, as just, we cannot 
 fail to acknowledge the grace and beauty of what at 
 first seems to be a beautiful, because it is an effortless 
 life. Put aside for a moment all knowledge but that 
 of a child, who knows of no hard world beyond the 
 fence, and walks with a delight which centuries of 
 life inspire, along the walls to which time has given 
 its glory, under the trees which time has made to 
 tower over pleasant parks and meadows, and learns 
 from the gladness of a garden of flowers a joy whose 
 memory will never die. Is not all this a blessing 
 — a blessing because it comes unsought — a sheer, 
 unworked-for gift, the blessing of the enjoyment of 
 unlaborious good ? " Consider the lilies of the field, 
 . . . they toil not, neither do they spin." 
 
 And yet if we bring back to the experience and the 
 enjoyment of a child the knowledge and the The life 
 
 that need 
 
 conscience and the heart of a man, is not "o'^ labour 
 
 ' cannot be 
 
 such a scene as this, with all there is in it, byfharfnl^' 
 
 •11 PI 1 r¥Ti ^^ blessing 
 
 a very wilderness 01 death ? The walls were of labour. 
 raised in beauty with the toil and pain of other days : 
 would those who built them be content that men 
 
io8 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 should stroll within their shelter or their shade ? If 
 there is grace and beauty in all that is about us, 
 it is the grace and beauty given by labour, and by 
 labour for the love of home. And for the flowers, " Con- 
 sider the lilies of the field, . . . they toil not, neither 
 do they spin." What did He mean, but that they busy 
 themselves with no superfluous and futile anxiety 
 of toil, to secure what is already given to their 
 appointed labour after their kind. The garment of 
 glory which they wear is woven by their own proper 
 power and energy, which is His gift. Their beauty is 
 the work of their labour. The scene is full of forces, 
 slumbering, or still at work, pointing to some further 
 end, longing for a fuller use. Here, not least, '' creation 
 groans and travails, waiting for the adoption, to wit, 
 the redemption of their bodies," "who do not walk 
 worthy of the vocation with which they are called." 
 It is not to be said that many do not use largely, and 
 for good, the resources of life and love with which the 
 labour of past ages has blessed them ; but it is to be 
 said that the life of labour afibrds the test of the 
 degree in which those are to be counted blest, to whom 
 the liberty is left to live an unlaborious life. A life 
 without eftbrt is not the life of Christ, or of those who 
 follow Him. 
 
 Labour is the blessing of all lives — the blessing, 
 
THE BLESSING OF LABOUR. 109 
 
 first, in the employment of power. What range of 
 power is given to those on whom has descended the 
 inheritance and fruit of the energies of other days ! 
 The blessing is to use this inheritance to the full ; to 
 employ, to exhaust the faculties and possibilities of 
 work which are dormant in the material, and ready 
 to burst into life in the moral heritage of those the 
 satisfaction of whose needs is provided. What bless- 
 ing of weariness may be theirs ! What a challenge 
 to the soul to live itself out into all this framework 
 of life, to find the new and higher needs, for whose 
 satisfaction the man is predestined to toil who need 
 not work for life. It is as though a man, who had 
 known the joy of strength in a common human frame, 
 should feel his soul suddenly called to animate with 
 superhuman power the nerves of a vastly more highly 
 organized braio, and the sinews of a giant's strength. 
 The vigour and the joy of sheer life may be multi- 
 plied a thousand-fold by the efforts of a man's own 
 will and the cravings of his own heart ; but upon 
 these the efforts of the wills of others, and the cravings 
 of the hearts that have long ceased to beat, have 
 redoubled the blessing of their gifts. 
 
 The wages of labour is life. Contrast the living 
 death of a life of mere enjoyment, spent amid all the 
 resources of wealth, with the life of one who should 
 
no CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 see himself repaid in the coin such labour earns for 
 the living use of the opportunities of wealth. Enjoy- 
 ment earns the wages of death ; the powers of enjoy- 
 ment decay in the using, and leave no new faculty 
 to grow in their place. Labour earns always the 
 infinite increase of life. What would a man be worth, 
 what would he deserve, who should use to the 
 full the faculties and opportunities of a life which 
 begins with needs satisfied to the full ? He would be 
 rewarded, in the natural return of wages for work, 
 with new faculties, with new opportunities, only too 
 great to be borne with humility and used in faithful 
 life, but that " with God all things are possible," and 
 " He will with the temptation make a way to escape." 
 One spirit, and one only, could gain such wages, 
 or could bear to receive them — the spirit of Him Who 
 emptied Himself for the love of men. For amid all 
 the glory of a life in which the resources of wealth 
 should be used in loyal labour, unconstrained but by 
 the spirit of love, there will remain that one gift, 
 which to give to God and to men is the ennobling 
 privilege and consecrating grace of all alike — the gift 
 of self This is the true spiritual labour, the human 
 prerogative of which no wealth can rob a man, the 
 duty which no riches can make easy, the spirit with- 
 out which no labour avails to do good. This may be 
 
THE BLESSING OF LABOUR. iii 
 
 the saving grace of a life, the very luxuriance of whose 
 opportunities might else be more than man could bear. 
 This is the spirit which turns the curse of labour to 
 a blessing — the spirit of self-sacrifice, the spirit of 
 Christ. And the field of labour, as it is, cries aloud 
 for this spirit to descend upon it, in the living sym- 
 pathy of those who, by bearing their own share of 
 the burdens of men, have earned the right and the 
 power to lighten the load of the heavy-laden. 
 
VI. 
 THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 
 
 There are three great factors in economic life. 
 The typical Thcj are present with the obligations that 
 rha"Tf°the'^ bclong to their work, in different degrees and 
 labour. combinations, in the various members of the 
 economic body. Labour is the most universal. The 
 universality of the duty and the blessing of labour 
 has been the subject of the sermon preceding this 
 essay. Labour, in one or more of the senses covered 
 by the full width of its meaning — labour of hand or 
 brain or heart, is the economic function of all men 
 as men. But we should distinguish, for the duties 
 which belong to them, the present labour which earns 
 wages, from the past labour to which is paid in 
 interest the natural fruit and growth of the resources 
 it provides for present labour; and, secondly, in 
 present labour we should distinguish labour proper 
 from the special labour of management and direction. 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY, 113 
 
 Labour proper, labour in the ordinary and narrower 
 sense of economic science, needs resources to provide 
 the raw material upon which it works, the tools with 
 which it works, and the wages which anticipate its 
 share of the produce. And labour, in the narrower 
 sense, needs further the management which gives it 
 direction, which conceives its end and plans its method, 
 and is able to obtain command of the resources which 
 are needed for its work. 
 
 I wish to deal, in this and the following essay, with 
 some aspects of the duty proper to each of these two 
 latter factors in economic life. Economists differ in 
 their treatment of this part of their subject. Some 
 speak of the profits of capital, grouping under the single 
 name the wages of the labour of management, and the 
 interest on the resources which the power of manage- 
 ment enables the master or capitalist to command. 
 Others distinguish the two elements in profits, as 
 earnings of management and interest. For our 
 purpose, the essential thing to observe is that the 
 power of management, the head-work, the brain power, 
 is not only itself at the command of the man who 
 possesses it, but confers upon its possessor the com- 
 mand of resources. He has duties, it may be, as the 
 personal owner of resources, for the loan of which he 
 receives interest. He has duties as a labourer — a brain 
 
 I 
 
114 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 labourer, but a labourer still. But both as a brain 
 labourer, and in the command of resources which brain 
 power gives, he has special duties ; and these may, I 
 think, be most effectively dealt with in a consideration 
 of the moral aspect of monopoly. 
 
 The term " monopoly" has two precise meanings : the 
 sole right to deal in a given commodity conferred by 
 law — a meaning with which we now have little to do, 
 except in regard to the instructive instance of the rights 
 of patentees, and the sole power of dealing in a given 
 commodity, gained in the use or abuse of free competi- 
 tion by an individual or by a body of individuals. 
 
 Generalizing from these two instances, we may say 
 that monopoly meaus any command of wealth, or of 
 resources for its production, which becomes concentrated 
 in the hands of one man, or of a body of men, and 
 enables them to fix a price for it in no way propor- 
 tioned to what they can afford to take, but only to 
 what the buyer can be induced to give. Or, briefly, 
 it is the command of resources which enables a man 
 to fix his own price. 
 
 Before we consider what are the duties attaching to 
 this command of resources, it is necessary to point out 
 that monopoly of one kind or another, more or less in 
 accordance with the above definition, is a fact occurring 
 far more widely than in the two instances noted above 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 115 
 
 of legal and natural monopoly. It may be said with- 
 out paradox, and with a very important degree of 
 practical truth, that, as owners of property, we are all 
 monopolists, morally responsible for the command of 
 resources whose market value we, in some degree, 
 contribute to fix at our own will. In a ring, or trade 
 combination, every member of it is plainly a joint 
 monopolist with the rest. In trades unions and labour 
 combinations a strike brings into play the power of 
 a body of monopolists, who claim to fix their own 
 prices in the belief that they command resources 
 which the rest of the world cannot do without. And 
 in the more informal combinations and common agree- 
 ments, by which bodies of men instinctively agree on 
 the interest or profits they will demand, or on the 
 standard of comfort below which they will not sink, 
 it is by their power as monopolists that they are 
 able to make their own terms. Any considerations, 
 therefore, as to the duties involved in this unique 
 command of resources will be in some degree appli- 
 cable to all members of the economic body. 
 
 There is one kind of systematized monopoly, the 
 most important instance of which should be noted, in 
 the ownership of land. The rent of land is a kind 
 of monopoly price, though it differs from an ordinary 
 monopoly in two important respects. It is a monopoly 
 
Ii6 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 price, in so far as it is not a remuneration of any labour 
 of the owner, and is therefore not proportioned to 
 what he can afford to take, but to what the tenant 
 can afford to give. It is unlike other monopolies, 
 because rent is not fixed at the apparently capricious 
 will of an individual, or of a compact body of men 
 acting in concert. It is determined by competition 
 at the maximum which the tenant can afford to pay. 
 It is unlike other monopolies also, in that the owner- 
 ship of land is an investment, whose returns have so 
 far to be decided on the same ground as those of any 
 other investment. With these qualifications, however, 
 it remains true, that in the enjoyment of so much of 
 his rent as does not remunerate his own superin- 
 tendence, and so come under the head of earnings of 
 management, and is not interest on capital invested 
 in improvements, a landowner is a monopolist, liable 
 to the duties and responsibilities of the unique com- 
 mand of resources which puts it in his power to 
 demand a price not proportioned to any service done 
 for which it is the return. 
 
 The leading instance, however, of monopoly, for a 
 consideration of the duties belonging to it, is found in 
 the case of the manager or director of industry, who, 
 in the old Political Economy, was loosely called a 
 capitalist. The director or manager of labour is a 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 117 
 
 monopolist in more senses than one. In the first place, 
 he can, to a large extent, command his own price for 
 his own brain-work; to a larger extent in proportion as 
 his mental or moral power is greater or more unique. 
 In the second place, he can demand his price, not only 
 in what is virtually his salary or his wage, but in the 
 command of resources which his ability enables him 
 to secure, it may be, to the loss of other competitors. 
 In the third place, he is able, in his command of 
 resources, to claim a more or less arbitrarily large 
 share of the produce of industry for the remuneration 
 of the service done in the loan of resources. He may, 
 that is, in particular instances, in his own industry, 
 influence the relative amount of the produce which 
 goes to interest and to wages respectively. The exact 
 accuracy of this analysis of the position of the capitalist, 
 or employer of labour, is not material to our present 
 purpose. It is plain that he has an unusually large 
 power, as compared with other members of the eco- 
 nomic body who contribute to the production of 
 wealth, in fixing his own remuneration. It is plain, 
 further, that on the principle on which we have said 
 above, that every man who has any command of 
 wealth or of resources for producing it at all is, in 
 some measure, a monopolist — on the principle that the 
 division of produce between the various parties to its 
 
ii8 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 production is the issue of the action of a large 
 number of responsible wills and consciences — the em- 
 ployer of labour has a larger individual responsibility 
 than any one else. It is not denied that the mass 
 of labourers have succeeded in raising the standard 
 of wages; it is not denied that, in the struggle for 
 the division of produce, capital has the advantage 
 over labour of greater mobility, and therefore plays 
 the larger part in determining the division of produce. 
 It cannot be denied that the employer of labour is the 
 person in whom is concentrated the responsibility of 
 wielding this command, this power over the distribu- 
 tion of produce. Clearly, therefore, we shall be safe 
 in considering the duties and responsibilities of the 
 capitalist or employer of labour, as the duties and 
 responsibilities of a monopolist — of a man, that is, who 
 has unique command of resources such as enables him in 
 no small degree to fix his own price. What, then, are the 
 moral principles governing the action of a man who 
 has such a command of mental or material resources, 
 as enables him in any degree to fix his own price ? 
 
 There are few positions of power so great as this, — 
 The privi- that a man should be able to calculate that 
 privilege of thc world — his world, at any rate — cannot 
 
 self-depend- 
 ence, gg^ Qjj without him. There are few posi- 
 tions in which self-dependence is so complete, as that 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY, 119 
 
 in which a man knows that he may count upon the 
 needs of others to bring his powers and resources into 
 play. The mere consciousness of power breeds confi- 
 dence and self-dependence. The sense of having great 
 resources at command gives a man a certain strength 
 and self-reliance. But there is a peculiar exaltation 
 in the knowledge that personal power and material 
 resources are not merely ours to use when we will, 
 but that there is a constant demand and desire 
 towards the treasure of which we keep the key. Of 
 all forms of mastery none is so proud as that which is 
 built upon the hearts and lives of men whose desire 
 is toward their brother. Self-dependence is scarcely 
 the name for the confident security of those whose 
 resources, personal or acquired, set them on this pin- 
 nacle of power. And yet self-dependence describes 
 the distinctive character of their position. Contrast 
 them with all other kinds of men, and they least of 
 all depend on others for the satisfaction of their needs, 
 for the choice of their vocation, or of the surroundings 
 of their life. They can choose what they shall be and 
 do; they owe no man anything — no debt, no grati- 
 tude, no regard of obedience. Centred in themselves 
 are the resources, mental or material, which, because 
 they enable them to command the lives of other men, 
 enable them to command their own. Who can be 
 
120 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 surprised that there has appeared in the speculations 
 of socialism some tendency to rebel against the laws, 
 which put any man in a position where he depends so 
 entirely upon himself for conduct, by which the lives 
 of other men are profoundly and widely affected ? In 
 this country, at least, the attack is not yet sufficiently 
 threatening to provoke a very serious defence. The 
 defence, when it is made, must resort to the "laws" 
 which produce as their result the position of the 
 capitalist. A glance at these laws will show us the 
 Law by which the man who does occupy such a 
 position must first of all be governed. 
 
 1. The holder of a legal monopoly in ancient or 
 (i) This self- modern times can give a very simple answer 
 
 dependence . , . . , 
 
 is a gift; to the question, what has put mm in the 
 position he occupies. The law has done so ; and the 
 reason why it has done so is the public advantage. 
 In ancient times monopolies were often given, in fact, 
 to enrich the Government, but the original purpose 
 was, probably, to secure the sale of a pure and sound 
 article, or in some way to serve the general interest in 
 respect to its supply. And the modern monopoly of 
 patent, or copyright, is given because it is considered 
 to be for the public interest, that invention should be 
 encouraged by the security, that the inventor should 
 himself enjoy a special benefit from what his own 
 efibrts have produced. 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 121 
 
 The holder of a natural monopoly will begin to 
 defend his position by a claim to enjoy the fruits of 
 his own efforts, and will then represent the paralysis 
 of effort which would follow on any diminution of the 
 power or wealth, which individual effort may hope to 
 have within its reach. He will go on to show how 
 his position is only attained by the use of his natural 
 capacity to minister to the needs of men, whose needs 
 will not be studied without the motive of the attain- 
 ment of that reward, which he claims the right to 
 enjoy. In other words, his plea will be the plea of 
 public advantage. 
 
 What moral restraint arises out of this justification 
 of a self-dependent position ? Surely this : that on 
 the very principle on which the self-dependence of 
 the capitalist is claimed and defended, it is a gift. 
 Not only is it true, in a moral consideration of the 
 position, that a man owes to inheritance and educa- 
 tion, and, even in the case of the most strictly self- 
 made man, to the organized society in which he lives, 
 the whole of the power which he wields; not only 
 does he in this way stand face to face with God as 
 the Giver of all that he uses and enjoys — in the 
 living faces of the men of his own day, who make the 
 society that has made him, and in the ghostly faces 
 of men of other days, with the unconscious enjoy- 
 
122 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 ment of whose spiritual bequest he is endowed ; 
 beyond this, that same societ}^ which, through the 
 action of law, gave the old, and still gives the 
 modern monopolies for the public good, assigns to him, 
 by its deliberate adoption of the system which has 
 called him, the capitalist, into being — assigns to him 
 the position which he holds. Oh no ; it is the laws 
 of Political Economy that have given him his position ! 
 " Law " is a convenient general expression for the 
 general action of the wills of men. It is the general 
 action of the wills of men which puts this man in his 
 place. Law has not given to him, as to the monopolist 
 of older days, or to the patentee of to-day, his power, his 
 rights ; but society has given them, by the exercise of 
 that prerogative of allowance which sanctions a larger 
 body of human action than law itself, and whose law- 
 making power is acknowledged in prescription and 
 custom. The holder, therefore, of a natural monopoly 
 occupies a self-dependent position, because society 
 gives him a self-dependent position. His position is 
 a gift — a gift of God he would, no doubt, allow in 
 words; a gift of God, in fact, by the hands and wills 
 of men, it is more material that he should both allow 
 and gravely consider it to be. His position is a gift. 
 He does not, therefore, cease to be self-dependent ? 
 By no means. His power is not diminished ? Not a 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 123 
 
 whit. He remains self-dependent. But his self- 
 dependence is a gift ; and in the mere fact that this 
 is so, the whole moral complexion of his life is 
 changed. A despot by Divine right — though even he 
 thought his power to be a gift — a despot by Divine 
 right, who should learn and appreciate the fact that 
 he has become a constitutional sovereign, would not 
 have to undergo a more complete change in the esti- 
 mate of his position than the capitalist who has 
 revelled in a purely self-dependent power, when and 
 if he should realize that his self-dependence and his 
 power are his, indeed, in truth, but are his only by 
 the gift and allowance of the society whose economic 
 life he seems to sway. Even if there were no further 
 moral consequences to be drawn, the mere fact that 
 his life is rooted, not in himself, but in the will of 
 others, would be felt at once, most of all by himself, 
 to alter his whole moral attitude, the estimate of his 
 duty, of his responsibility, of the privileges of his 
 position. It would do so for this one reason — it would 
 give him a duty ; not merely the duty under which 
 we all lie, that vague and shadowy obligation which 
 we do not realize by applying it to the special circum- 
 stances of our own particular lives, but a duty 
 specific and real, belonging to that very position 
 which seems, at first sight, to fulfil the dream of 
 
124 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 passion — power without responsibility. He seemed 
 to be the realization of a moral paradox, a man who 
 was an unsocial thing. With the establishment of the 
 principle that his special character is a creation of 
 society, duty lays its iron hand, upon his soul. He 
 may not know yet in what direction it will force him 
 to advance, how far it may bid him recede, whether 
 it will turn him to the right hand or the left ; but it 
 has hold of him. He has not a duty, but his own 
 duty — the duty which belongs to a man, who, in the 
 exercise of a unique and self-dependent power, can 
 demand his own price and get it. 
 
 Others than himself have entered into his life. 
 (2) it is a They will maintain their moral footing. 
 
 responsi- 
 bility; Others have given him his position. To 
 
 others he must answer for it. His position is a gift ; 
 the gift makes him liable to a duty for whose fulfil- 
 ment he is responsible. Duty brings responsibility — 
 responsibility to God, no doubt. As with the gift, 
 so with the responsibility, it is a cheap acknow- 
 ledgment, if the responsibility acknowledged to 
 God is not realized in acknowledged responsibility to 
 men. 
 
 The holder of a legal monopoly was responsible to 
 the Government who gave it. If the Government 
 gave it for its own gain, and the purpose of social 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 125 
 
 benefit was violated for which in theory it was given, 
 society asserted its rights, and the wisdom of the 
 Government was shown in the withdrawal of an 
 obnoxious and abused prerogative. 
 
 The holder of what is called a natural monopoly is, 
 as we have seen, no less really, though less obviously, 
 the recipient of a gift from society. He is no less 
 really, though it may be not legally, responsible to 
 society for his use of its gift. In extreme cases 
 the misuse of monopoly rights, in the ownership of 
 land, has provoked that social condemnation which 
 is the lowest grade of social punishment. Criminal 
 misuse of any economic position calls into louder 
 utterance that voice of moral judgment, whose 
 whisper, at least, may always be heard by those who, 
 in less degree, abuse their economic rights. In pro- 
 portion to the self-dependence of the individual is his 
 social responsibility. The more absolute his power, 
 the wider is the range of those who are affected by 
 and have a right to criticize its use, the keener the 
 criticism whose scrutinizing eye scans the details of 
 his economic conduct, the deeper the curse of condem- 
 nation which is breathed over a life, whose powers of 
 blessing measure the degradation of the spirit that 
 can neglect them. Upon the conscience and heart of 
 the man who boasts and claims a self-dependent 
 
126 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 position, society will rightly fix the stain of a selfish- 
 ness too deep for words, if he fails to find in his 
 power the reason and motive of those weighty and 
 far-reaching obligations, which no great power has 
 ever disregarded except to its ruin. From his heart 
 and conscience will be demanded the spontaneous flow 
 of the impulse towards that life of beneficence, as 
 wide as the world from which he gains, whose oppor- 
 tunities are patent to all to whom his power is a 
 wonder, to whom its use might be made the mani- 
 festation of the glory of God. 
 
 Let him shrink from this publicity if he can. Let 
 him close his ears to the voice of public opinion, and 
 decline to submit to the verdict of the public con- 
 science. The social character of his life pursues him 
 into the sanctuary and the solitude of his own soul. 
 It is a solitude in which, because of the myriad ties 
 which link his every act with consequence of good or 
 evil to men, he can never be alone ; it is a sanctuary 
 on whose altar, if there do not lie the offering of a life 
 devoted to the good of men, consumed by the fire 
 whose intensity is in proportion to the purity and 
 activity of his human good will, there shall smoulder 
 devoted and accursed, in the slow flames of a sup- 
 pressed remorse, a heart that strives in vain to be so 
 cold and dead as not to know that the power which is 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 127 
 
 not power for good is the power of the worm that 
 cannot die. In the court of his own conscience and 
 heart there are gathered the ghostly multitudes of 
 those whose living bodily needs, in that real world 
 without, he feeds or disregards, to cry, with mute 
 faces of pain, their silent accusation of him before his 
 own soul, or to reflect, in the gladness of those who 
 have received the gift of love, the blessed sentence of 
 the judge who sits enthroned in the chosen sanctuary 
 of the Eternal Love, " Well done, good and faithful 
 servant." If it be so, he has entered already into the 
 joy of his Lord. If he has learnt that his power is 
 a gift, and that the gift is a responsibility from which 
 he cannot escape, he has learnt more. 
 
 Power, subject to duty and responsibility, may 
 seem to be precluded from the pleasure (3) above 
 
 all, it is a 
 
 which belongs to power. The pleasure of privilege. 
 power is the pleasure of freedom, and duty and 
 responsibility bring restraint. The self-dependent man 
 revels in being able to do as he likes. Duty marks 
 him out a narrow road, and warns him from straying 
 to the right or to the left. Responsibility realizes the 
 restraint of duty, where conscience coincides in and re- 
 echoes the reproof of public judgment. But with the 
 enforcement of the duty comes the appreciation of the 
 privilege of help. The pleasure of self-dependence is 
 
128 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 in power — but in power to do what ? The pleasure of 
 caprice is evanescent. Mere power ceases to be plea- 
 sant, unless it has a definite direction towards the 
 definite attainment of an end, habitually chosen and 
 deliberately taken as the object of desire. Power 
 finds limits to its exercise in every direction but 
 one. All the pleasures of self-aggrandizement in self- 
 indulgence or in pride create a craving which grows 
 greater, and is satisfied less, as life goes on. Pleasure 
 in the exercise of power is, while it lasts, better and 
 higher than pleasure in the gratification of desire. 
 But power does not rise to the level of privilege, can- 
 not be appreciated as a gift or realized as a responsi- 
 bility, until it sets itself an end, partial failure in 
 whose attainment is the root, not of disappointment, 
 but of humility and hope; where "life succeeds, in 
 that it seems to fail;" and human power loses itself, 
 as it is absorbed in the pursuit of the purposes of 
 the age-long work of that eternal power, of which 
 it is born, to which it has bowed itself in the 
 acceptance of a law, by which it is blessed with the 
 privilege of the life, that blesses those that give and 
 those that take. The freedom of self-dependence is 
 not lost. Freedom is of the essence of privilege. 
 Privilege is a freedom which is a gift ; it is no 
 imagined creation of wilful caprice and unrestrained 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 129 
 
 desire ; it is bom amid the blessings of dependence, 
 and nurtured in the obedience of love. Its freedom is 
 not in licence, but in the liberty of a law which has 
 become the life of the soul, the heai-t and spirit of its 
 high desire. And this law is the law of help and 
 love, a law whose restraint is chosen and its obedience 
 willing, a love which moves along the lines of the 
 impulse which is the privilege of souls to whom the 
 promise is fulfilled, " I will set My law in their 
 hearts, and in their minds will I write them." 
 
 There are many lives in which this spirit is at 
 work, which takes all the powers and opportunities 
 of life as God's gift, to be used subject to His law, 
 that men may learn in them the supreme privilege 
 of help. Such men never fail of the exercise of 
 their privilege, for want of opportunities adequate 
 to the manifestation of its glory and its blessing. 
 Yet they are hampered by limitations of power, 
 haunted by visions of infinite usefulness, far beyond 
 the instruments and occasions with which it has 
 pleased God to allow men to bless them. What 
 would not such men give to have the use but for a 
 day of the powers and opportunities — powers wasted 
 and spent in works of evil, opportunities that lie idle 
 along the path of dull and heartless lives — of those 
 who might realize and enjoy a privilege beyond all 
 
 K 
 
I30 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 dreams ? It may be a visionary hope, it may be a 
 vicious imagination, that society should find means to 
 enforce upon those who neglect this privilege the 
 performance of the duties, which, to the world's loss 
 and their own, they blindly or wilfully neglect. But 
 suppose for a moment that it could come true — that 
 some law could be enacted v/hich, without sapping 
 the roots of freedom, or robbing helpful lives of the 
 felicity of choice, could exercise a pressure so gentle 
 and so sure, or hold up an ideal of such a winning 
 and cogent fascination, that the man on whom these 
 are bestowed as a gift, and laid as a burden of duty, 
 should be forced and drawn, in every detail of life, 
 into the full and willing exercise of the privilege that 
 they convey. It is no imagination. The law is an 
 eternal truth, its enactment is a present fact. The 
 law of love and help is from everlasting ; it wells out 
 of the very heart of God, from the day when, out of 
 the infinite resources of His power and His love, His 
 wisdom made the worlds. It is written on the open 
 arms of the Cross, where He hung. Who, being in the 
 form of God, thought it not a prize to be equal with 
 God, but poured forth His soul in service and suffer- 
 ing for the love of men. It is stamped upon the heart 
 and conscience of man, made in the image of the 
 Eternal Love, consecrated to the fellowship of the 
 
THE PRIVILEGE OF MONOPOLY. 131 
 
 service of Christ and the sacrifice of the Cross. It is 
 the everlasting hope, the resource that never fails 
 the hearts and wills of those, who have learnt, in the 
 knowledge of God in Christ, that the privilege of 
 infinite power is the privilege of help. 
 
VII. 
 THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 
 
 If a man wishes to provide for himself, or for those 
 In invest- for whom he cares, a certain means of sub- 
 
 ments we , i n ^ r • • i 
 
 look for sistence, he nnds a safe investment, ^.6. he 
 
 (i) security, 
 
 terest^^We P^ovides resources for the production of 
 for^(i)L°goCd some commodity, on the constant need of 
 
 object, (2) 
 
 just interest, wjiich he may securely count. All labour 
 for the satisfaction of any need requires, besides the 
 mere labour itself, and the mind and will that direct 
 it, a certain command of resources, of the results of 
 past labour. The powers of mind and will which 
 direct and manage labour are not within the gift of 
 man. These command the direction in which re- 
 sources already provided by labour shall be applied. 
 But the resources themselves are, in any case, sure to 
 be required. They may be gained in greater or less 
 amount by any labour, and once gained, they are a 
 certain source of further gain. It is with the duties 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 133 
 
 incident to the possession of resources, the fruit of 
 past labour needed for present labour, that we have 
 now to do. 
 
 Money which can be, or is invested, is the symbol 
 of these resources. A very large proportion of the 
 community live on money so invested — live, that is, 
 on the payment received for resources provided by 
 past for present labour. Most of those who so live, 
 and rejoice in the security of the means of subsist- 
 ence given to them by the possession of the resources 
 which present labour always needs, are guided as 
 to the destination of the funds at their command by 
 two considerations only. They ask what investments 
 are safe ; they ask what investments pay the highest 
 interest ; they look, that is to say, to the quality 
 and to the quantity of the return they are to 
 obtain. 
 
 It is to this large class in the community that we 
 have to propose another question. What ought you 
 to obtain in return for the resources you provide ? 
 As to quality, we shall have to ask them not only to 
 look to the security that the industry they assist 
 will continue to give them the means of subsistence, 
 but to ask further, whether the industry be of 
 such a kind that it deserves return at all. As to 
 quantity, we shall ask them to consider what amount 
 
134 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 of the produce of labour is fairly due to those who 
 provide the resources needed for labour. Is the use 
 to which they put their resources good ? Is the 
 amount they gain from them just? And in order to 
 answer these two questions, we have first to ask 
 another, Why have they a right to a share in the 
 produce of labour at all ? 
 
 1. All labour needs certain resources to start with. 
 (OThe These resources may be either provided by 
 
 reasons why *' \. %i 
 
 entidedto naturc, unassisted by human effort, or they 
 all, may be the result of human labour. It 
 
 seems clear that, in so far as they are provided by 
 nature, they should be open to all ; and that, in so 
 far as they are the result of human labour, they are 
 rightly at the disposal of the individual will, and for 
 the satisfaction of individual desire. The labour, that 
 is, that has provided them, should in this case be paid 
 like other human labour. 
 
 Of these two principles, I am content to leave 
 the first — that resources, in so far as they are natural, 
 should be open to all — without justification. The 
 second, that resources, in so far as they are the result 
 of human labour, should be paid for, needs some 
 justification. The labour that produced them has, 
 in the natural course of events, been paid once ; why 
 should it be paid any more ? The answer to this 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 135 
 
 question seems to be, that human labour, like the 
 labour of nature, is infinitely productive. The ques- 
 tion of the right of those who provide the resources 
 of labour to anything more than the repayment of 
 what they provide, has sometimes been treated as 
 though the circumstances out of which it arose were 
 merely those of greater or less physical capacity and 
 moral effort. But even in an ideally perfect moral 
 community, where all the members of the economic 
 body laboured, so as to have, not only something to 
 live on, but something to save, there would still be 
 room for the remuneration of past labour as past. 
 
 If we suppose the individual man to turn to 
 account, as material for his present labour, the pro- 
 duce of his past labour, it will plainly be the case 
 that the amount of produce which he gains as the 
 result of his labour in one year, will make his 
 labour in the next year more productive than it 
 would otherwise have been. His labour of last year, 
 already paid in produce, Avill go on being paid this 
 year, in the increased produce which will reward 
 this year's labour, because it has at its command 
 the result of last year's labour. And, quite apart 
 from the irregularities produced by the varieties of 
 energy and sloth, of thrift and self-indulgence, there 
 will be room for the exchange, between one and 
 
136 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 another of the ideal members of the moral economic 
 system, of the produce of their labour in the past, 
 with the possibilities which present labour may 
 realize from it, no less than of the produce of their 
 present labour itself. 
 
 Past labour, then, no less than present labour, 
 deserves its reward. It should be paid in proportion 
 to its relative value in comparison with present 
 labour, just as different kinds of present labour should 
 be paid in proportion to their relative value, deter- 
 mined by their comparison one with another. 
 
 This account of the matter, however, leaves two 
 important questions to be determined. First, in the 
 provision of resources for the labour of to-day, how 
 much is to be credited to nature, and received as 
 a gift ; how much is to be paid for as the produce of 
 the labour of the past ? And, secondly, how is past 
 labour to be weighed against present labour? How 
 are we to know what proportion of the produce of 
 present labour is to go in wages for this labour itself, 
 and what proportion is to reward the past labour 
 that provides the resources which present labour 
 needs ? 
 
 As to the first question, how far the resources now 
 afforded to the labour of to-day are to be taken as 
 the gift of nature, and how far they are to be 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 137 
 
 credited to the labour of the past, the obvious remark 
 to be made is, that any formal distinction is im- 
 possible. Natural resources do not become available 
 as the subject of human labour at all, until such 
 amount, at least, of human labour is spent upon them 
 as is involved in the selection of this kind of matter, 
 or this kind of ground, rather than another. And 
 from the first moment of selection, appropriation, and 
 enclosure, natural gift and human labour become in- 
 extricably fused. To labour only does nature render 
 up her gifts. Only with the gifts of nature does 
 labour become productive, or exist at all. There is 
 no formal distinction possible, between the amount 
 and kind of resources which are the gift of nature 
 and those which are the result of the labour of men. 
 The only practical inference which can be drawn 
 from the double source of the material labour of to- 
 day, is the twofold inference that the labour of the 
 past should continue to be rewarded out of the labour 
 of the present, and that the labour of the present 
 should never be actually or virtually denied access 
 to what is in part the produce of past labour, but in 
 part also the gift of nature. 
 
 As to the relative value, again, of the labour of the 
 present, and of that labour of the past which provides 
 it with its necessary material and resources, no formal 
 
138 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 definition can be made. It is plain that as the relative 
 value of the produce of different kinds of present 
 labour will vary from time to time, on any and every 
 theory of the nature of value, so will the relative 
 value of past and present labour. 
 
 It would seem, then, that the right of the man 
 who provides resources for labour to a share in its 
 produce is identical with the right of labour to its 
 wage ; but that it is a general character of this 
 right, that it must be measured, not by any formal 
 law, but by the agreement of the conscience and 
 judgment of those who are parties to the exchange. 
 If this be true at all, it is impossible to insist upon 
 it too strongly. If it is denied, it will be denied upon 
 one of two grounds. The claims of past labour may 
 be denied ; but this will be only on the principle 
 which denies to present labour its future wage. Or 
 it may be affirmed that the relative share of past and 
 present labour is to be determined by the relative 
 need of each member in the exchange, by the need of 
 the past labourer to reap the continued fruit of his 
 labour, and of the present labourer to have the 
 resources which enable him to exercise his powers. 
 But this latter objection only attempts to state in 
 non-moral terms the moral fact of the interdependence 
 one on another of the labour of the past and of the 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 139 
 
 present. If each needs the other, each is responsible 
 to and for the other — each to each for their common 
 use of the resources of social life, each for each to God, 
 "Who has made each his brother's keeper. 
 
 These, then, are the considerations to which we must 
 look, if we would determine what is right as to draw- 
 ing income from investments. You are entitled to an 
 income at all on precisely the same grounds that a 
 labourer is entitled to his wages, viz., that you do, 
 or help to do good work. You are entitled to this or 
 that amount as the amount which conscience — yours 
 and that of the other party to the contract — assigns to 
 you, as your just share of the produce of the present 
 labour which, in virtue of your ownership of the 
 rights of past labour, you are able to assist. 
 
 2. As to the character of the work from whose 
 profits we draw interest, where the business (2) show that 
 
 you are 
 
 is one which plainly panders to vice, or lives J'hat"th? ^^^ 
 by the oppression of labour, the right and wSyoT 
 wrong of the matter is beyond question. Few good, 
 are willing to live avowedly on a share in the proceeds 
 of vice or oppression. The question is, how far will 
 the principle carry us which is involved in this reluc- 
 tance ? What of a business which panders, not to 
 vice, but to low and degraded tastes ? What of a 
 business which is ready to meet any tastes, whether 
 
I40 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 they be low and degraded or not ? What of house 
 property, where, if the rents are not the proceeds of 
 overcrowding in unsanitary dwellings, they are the 
 price paid for an ill-built and comfortless tenement ? 
 You would not take shares in a company of sweating 
 tailors. What of the industry from whose produce 
 you do receive your income ? Is it justly paid ? If 
 you refuse to live on the proceeds of actual vice and 
 oppression, does not this mean that you acknowledge 
 an obligation to live only on the proceeds of work 
 that does good and is good ? Does not this mean an 
 obligation to know whether the work on whose 
 proceeds you live is good or not, to discern between 
 good and better, and to choose the best ? The idea 
 of such an obligation seems strange. There are many 
 investments to which it would appear to be in- 
 applicable. And there is no machinery for applying 
 it to the rest, and for ascertaining, not merely whether 
 an investment pays well and is safe, but whether 
 the production which is safe to pay is a production 
 of good, and a production by good methods. 
 
 The idea of an obligation to discern between 
 morally good and bad investments would seem in- 
 applicable, for instance, to Government stocks. The 
 fact that it would seem so is worth considering in 
 itself, even though here the obligations of the drawer 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 141 
 
 of interest differ only in principle from those of the 
 citizen. Each is bound to see that, so far as in him 
 lies, the life of the State is governed by the aim at 
 good ends, and carried on by honest methods ; the 
 one, because, as a member of the State, he bears his 
 share of the responsibility for the public acts of the 
 body to which he belongs ; the other, because he takes 
 pay from the nation for helping in what is done. 
 But this latter obligation deserves attention for its 
 own sake. English investors have helped by their 
 loans, and been paid by interest for helping, other 
 Governments than their own. It will be allowed to 
 be open to question whether, by so doing, they have 
 not helped to keep standing what had better have 
 been allowed to fall; whether their income has not 
 been drawn from methods of government and taxation 
 which, if they had known them, might have disturbed 
 their rest. Investments in the Funds are the taking 
 on of debt originally incurred for specific purposes — 
 as, for instance, for the wars of the last two centuries 
 — in which we cannot be considered to take on the 
 responsibility. But the general purpose which covered 
 all of these is the maintenance of the national life ; 
 and when we draw interest on loans to our own 
 Government, we do incur a fresh responsibility for 
 the methods by which now, as a matter of fact, the 
 
142 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 nation pays its way. The national life is, in one 
 aspect of it, a commercial concern, and the man who 
 takes pay for assisting in the processes by which it 
 is carried on, has a moral interest in the end at which 
 from time to time it aims, in the justice of the wages 
 it pays, in the general moral character of the methods 
 by which its ends are pursued. There are a vast 
 number of quiet and ignorant people, who may invest 
 their money in the Funds in a general faith that to 
 help the Government is an honourable and praise- 
 worthy employment of wealth. It becomes, then, an 
 additional duty for ordinary citizens to see that 
 Government work is done in accordance with prin- 
 ciples which, if the investor were brought face to face 
 with them, he ought to approve. 
 
 But if it seems absurd to suppose that the ordinary 
 man should concern himself with this responsibility, 
 it seems even more paradoxical to say that such an 
 oblisfation can be reojarded in other investments. It 
 seems paradoxical, not so much because the obligation 
 to draw profit from work that serves a good end by 
 worthy means is in itself in any way absurd, but 
 because the fulfilment of the obligation seems to be 
 absolutely impossible. We shall come across a similar 
 difficulty in dealing with the moral question as to 
 buying cheap goods. 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE FAST. 143 
 
 The answer to the difficulty I believe to be, that 
 we do not see how to ascertain whether any com- 
 mercial concern, to which we may contribute the 
 support of a loan, is a business whose end and methods 
 we can approve, because we do not want to ascertain 
 it. I plead that a man is bound, if he takes part 
 of the profits of a business, to know, not only that the 
 business is safe to pay, but that it deserves to pay. 
 The answer amounts to this : No one thinks of asking 
 as to an investment any other questions than, " Is it 
 safe ? " and " How much interest does it pay ? " The 
 obligation is not cancelled by an assertion that no one 
 regards it, and the difficulty of fulfilling it is at once 
 amply accounted for and removed. If people want to 
 know whether the business by which they profit is 
 good or not, and will not invest in it until they do 
 know, it will become the interest of the managers of 
 the business to let them know. In the progress 
 towards the fulfilment of any unfulfilled duty, towards 
 the attainment of any unattained ideal, the steps are 
 taken by individual consciences and wills — consciences 
 which refuse to be blinded, and wills which refuse 
 to be baffled, by difficulties such as only challenge 
 the force of the will to carry through into practice 
 principles, whose intrinsic truth and absolute obliga- 
 tion no difficulties can aflfect. 
 
144 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 3. What rate of interest ought you to expect and 
 receive, given that you have ascertained that you are 
 (3) and that to rcccive it from a worthy source ? What 
 
 the return "^ 
 
 itTsfuchTs ought to be your payment for providing 
 yVu/dL. the resources needed for productive work ? 
 This is primarily a question for the direct employer 
 of labour. But the employer of labour has to hire 
 resources, as well as to hire labourers, and in his 
 personal judgment the demands of the holders of 
 resources contend with the demands of labourers for 
 their share of the produce. As to this contest there 
 are two remarks to be made. 
 
 (1) It is broadly true to say that it is a contest 
 between those who demand the means of subsistence, 
 on the one side, and those who demand the means of 
 more comfortable subsistence on the other. This fact 
 is morally significant in itself, and affects the question 
 how far it is right to swell the pressure of a demand 
 for high interest. But its moral significance is in- 
 creased when we realize that the demand of capital 
 for employment — partly because it is more easily 
 transferred, partly, for this very reason, that it can 
 wait for what it demands — has the advantage in the 
 struggle over the demand of labour for the employ- 
 ment on which the labourer lives. And this advan- 
 tage is derived from the command by the individual 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST. 145 
 
 of resources which are in large measure the result 
 of the past labour, not of the individual, but of 
 the society. Their fruitfulness is the best gift of the 
 ages of labour that are gone by. It is a gift of the 
 past to the present, transmitted through individual 
 hands which can claim payment for the gift, but 
 in truth a common heritage, due to the growth of 
 faculties and the organization of industrial society. 
 This suggests what should be the ruling spirit of 
 the economic action of those, who do hold as indi- 
 vidual possessions any part of the produce of 
 past labour, such as present labour has need to 
 buy. This spirit is the spirit of gift to need. He 
 who has received a gift, and lives on a gift, owes 
 a gift. 
 
 We have said that there is an obligation to invest 
 only in industries whose products and methods are 
 good in themselves. Is there not also an obligation 
 to choose for investment those industries which need 
 help most, even if they cannot pay the highest price 
 for it, and to make a gift of the denial of increased 
 luxury or comfort which is involved in the choice ? 
 Is there not an obligation to aid the maintenance of 
 a standard of luxury in those who live at ease, such 
 as shall allow for the growth of the standard of true 
 comfort in those who live by labour, paid out of 
 
 L 
 
146 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 what is left from the satisfaction of the demands 
 of ease ? 
 
 (2) This remark applies to all, or nearly all, who 
 live on the interest of investments. There is another 
 remark to be made concerning those to whom it is 
 open to raise the question, How long shall I go on 
 building up further gains out of the payment I can 
 get for lending the resources which represent what 
 I have already gained ? There is no doubt that the 
 duty does not diminish, but increase, with the increase 
 of wealth, to use wealth productively. But there is 
 surely doubt whether the desire for more should be 
 allowed, in the case of those who have more than 
 enough, to maintain a competition for the largest 
 share it can get in the purchase of labour, either with 
 the labourers to whom accumulated resources help to 
 give employment, or with holders of resources whose 
 need is greater. Might not those who hold resources 
 at their command in such quantity as this, consider 
 whether some of the many doubtful enterprises or unre- 
 munerative tasks, which cry aloud to be undertaken 
 for the good of the community, do not lie within the 
 sphere of absolute obligation for them ? The poor we 
 have always with us. There will never fail to be sin 
 enough to breed weakness and want ; but the position 
 of the very rich, if every increase of their riches is to 
 
THE PRODUCE OF THE PAST 147 
 
 be the means of further increase, is, to say the least of 
 it, a moral paradox. If giving is not to be the ruling 
 spirit of their lives, it will be hard to assign any 
 meaning at all to the saying, that " it is more blessed 
 to give than to receive." 
 
VIII. 
 WEALTH. 
 
 " Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." 
 
 S. Matt. vi. 19. 
 
 The Law of Christ is prone to disguise, though the 
 What is th disguise is always such as to provoke inquiry. 
 iSmptibie C)ne form which is taken by truth in this 
 tendency to disguise is parable. Another, 
 is that taken by the truth in the text — negation. 
 Behind the negation, as behind the picture of the 
 parable, lurks the truth to be expressed. 
 
 The truth to be expressed here is the Law of God 
 as to wealth ; and the Christian principle as to 
 wealth is taught first by a negative. " Lay not up 
 for yourselves treasures upon earth." Not upon earth ? 
 Where else ? Treasure surely belongs to earth. Not 
 where moth and rust corrupt ? What should treasure 
 be but corruptible ? It is an earthly thing, of course ; 
 it has to do with earthly things — with prudence, and 
 
WEALTH, 149 
 
 comfort, and ease, and all the things of this world 
 which pass away. Treasure in heaven ? Wealth in 
 heaven ? What have treasure or wealth to do with 
 heaven ? These banks, and shops, and warehouses, 
 and docks — what have they to do with heaven ? 
 What would your friend say when you met him 
 to-morrow morning, hurrying along the pavement 
 with his rapid business walk, if you gravely dropped 
 a word hinting at some distant connection between 
 wealth and heaven ? He might be inclined to say 
 that, as to laying up treasure in heaven, he had been 
 about that sort of business to-day, and that, at any 
 rate, his week-day business was to lay up treasure on 
 earth. And yet our Lord's command is not "Lay 
 up treasures on earth for six days in the week as 
 much as you like, provided you lay up treasures in 
 heaven on the seventh day;" it is, "Lay not up 
 treasures on earth." And it is the truth contained 
 in these forbidding words with which we have to 
 deal. 
 
 If the latter part of the sentence stood by itself, 
 *' Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven," we 
 might mistake it for a mere metaphorical expression ; 
 but as it is, the two parts, the prohibition and the 
 command, plainly refer to the same subject-matter ; 
 they describe alternate ways of dealing with the 
 
ISO CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 same thing. They refer to wealth; they command 
 the making of wealth an object, but with a difference 
 — in heaven. So that this saying of our Lord, so 
 far from establishing a distinction between earthly 
 and heavenly concerns, cancels and obliterates that 
 distinction. 
 
 " Wealth in heaven." These hurrying crowds that 
 will course in interlacing lines down these streets to- 
 morrow under the shadow of the dome, are every 
 one of them trying to lay up treasures, to lay up 
 wealth — in heaven or not ? Every soul in this cathe- 
 dral^ is laying up wealth, or living on wealth laid 
 up — in heaven or not ? 
 
 Wealth is an object. We are commanded to pursue 
 it ; we are commanded to " lay up treasures." Nay, 
 we are commanded by the instincts of our nature, 
 responding to the necessities of life. The desire, the 
 instinct to seek for wealth is universal ; it produces 
 results more wonderful, more amazing than almost 
 anything else in God's wonderful world. We have 
 gathered together this year,^ for show, away west 
 from here, some of the various products of the desire 
 for wealth — the things that men treasure — from all 
 parts of our empire. We walk through that exhi- 
 
 ^ Preached at S. Paul's Cathedral. 
 
 2 The year of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition. 
 
WEALTH. ISI 
 
 bibion with wonder. But what is this, the wonder 
 (^f the eye, to the far greater wonder of the vast 
 and intricate system of modern industry and trade ? 
 Think of it — its vastness, world-wide, its intricate 
 complexity, its rapid movements, its tremendous 
 result. All of it is animated by one motive — the desire 
 to lay up wealth, to lay up treasure — in heaven or 
 not ? What is the character of our desire for wealth 
 as a nation, or as individuals ? We know when 
 trade is depressed. Do we ask if it is degraded ? We 
 know when industry is unemployed. Do we see 
 when it is perverted ? If we asked these questions, 
 we might find the answer better, as well as worse, 
 than we expect. But the question I want you to 
 answer is, What is the character of the desire for 
 wealth which our Lord commands ? Not on earth. 
 He says, but in heaven — and to explain and give the 
 reason for this — not corruptible, but incorruptible. 
 
 1. What is wealth — the wealth we seek, the wealth 
 we desire ? The first and most obvious ,, 
 
 I. Money? 
 
 answer is, money. And money is not ^ypei^^^ 
 
 . n •! 1 i 1 T • wealth liable 
 
 especially corruptible. Among the qualities to decay, as 
 which recommend the precious metals as con"d?tion^of 
 standards of value and means of exchange, "" '^^" 
 one is their durability. And yet our Lord's words 
 claim these metals, like all earthly things, as subject to 
 
152 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 the law of decay. The process of decay is slow ; but 
 time is long, and it is in the view of eternity that 
 He is testing the value of wealth. But, in fact, in any 
 true view of value, mere money, if you take that for 
 wealth, is dead long before its lustre is dimmed, or its 
 substance corroded by the process of decay. Decay, 
 when we speak of material wealth, is the transience 
 of a condition of utility. The elements of the decayed 
 thing remain after its decay, but no longer in a shape 
 to fulfil the purpose which gave them value; and 
 money, mere money, is in itself already a dead and 
 useless thing. Its life is in exchange. Except as a 
 means of exchanging the good we can do, which it 
 repays, for the good we can gain, with which it repays 
 it — it is useless. We desire money for the sake of 
 what it will bring to us. It is a convenient and 
 portable shape in which to transfer from hand to 
 hand the fruit of labour, the right to demand the 
 necessaries and the pleasures of life. As a matter of 
 fact, in that vast system of exchange of which we 
 spoke just now, actual coined money fills a very small 
 place compared with paper symbols, which are more 
 obviously mere tokens of what money will buy. 
 
 And the miser, the only man who acts as though 
 mere money were wealth, who delights in the mere 
 possession of money, whether it be coined metal or 
 
WEALTH. 153 
 
 any other symbol of wealth — the miser, who takes 
 the symbol for the reality, is regarded as a fool. 
 And yet it is worth while pausing at this first 
 example of the breach of the Divine law, "Lay 
 not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where 
 moth and rust doth corrupt." He is a fool ; he 
 gloats over his money, and never gets his money's 
 worth. Its mere possession is his pleasure — the 
 knowledge that he has it. It is a means to an end 
 — to a thousand ends ; and he treats it as though it 
 were an end in itself, and gloats over it, and never 
 uses it. There it lies before him, the possibility of 
 every kind of use and enjoyment ; but he does not 
 use it ; he likes to possess it. The money, the source 
 of his pleasure, will last his time, as a material 
 substance that keeps its shape. Decay cannot rob him 
 of it. No ; but decay has passed from it to him, and 
 the corruption of his own mind and heart has already 
 coloured, with a more deadly corruption than any 
 mere physical decay, the utmost possibilities of wealth 
 that reside in what he treasures. It is well to pause 
 before him as an example; for we see him to be a 
 fool, and he is no bad picture of those of whom we 
 shall speak as we go on, who repeat and exaggerate 
 his folly and his sin. The man who gloats over his 
 money and does not use it, is a fool. But there are 
 
154 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 more fatal fools than he. The man who gloats over the 
 things that money buys — over food, and fine clothes, 
 and ease, and leisure — and does not use them; the man 
 who gloats over life, the life which these things feed 
 and cherish, and does not use it ; the man who mis- 
 uses life and the means of life alike, and penetrates 
 them with the corrupting influence of a selfish, love- 
 less soul, — of all these the miser is a type. 
 
 2. But let us look at their answer to the question, 
 What is wealth ? It is the answer we should 
 
 2. Abun- 
 dance of the j^Qg^ Qf ^s orive. Wealth is the abundance 
 
 means oi o 
 
 liable to ^^^ of the means of life and enjoyment. It is 
 
 decay, as i i • 
 
 "the gradual for thc sakc of thcsc that we desire money ; 
 
 substitution 
 
 forVhTgher ^^ ^s thcsc that wc wish to provide. We 
 
 form of life." , ■ f» c 
 
 prize money, most oi us, as a means oi 
 exchange. Houses, and clothes, and food, and furni- 
 ture, and pleasures ; pictures, perhaps, and books, and 
 the power to travel, — these, and such as these, with 
 money in the background to provide more of them, 
 are the things that make up the wealth we desire. 
 The power to marry, the power to educate our children, 
 and start them in the world, and put them in the 
 way of attaining the same standard of ease and enjoy- 
 ment as ourselves — these are the treasures we lay 
 up. Are these treasures upon earth ; are these such 
 as moth and rust will corrupt ? Such of them as are 
 
WEALTH. 15s 
 
 material, we may think, will last our time, like the 
 miser's gold. But even these are relative to the power 
 of enjoyment. Taste, and hearing, and sight, and less 
 material powers of enjoyment than these, decay as 
 life goes on, decay as life decays. And some part of 
 our idea of wealth is already more than material ; it 
 is personal. It is of the kind of which we speak in 
 the Litany, when we say, " In all time of our wealth, 
 good Lord deliver us." Wealth — the wealth we desire 
 — includes a state of mind and body and soul; it 
 includes all sorts of faculties and endowments, the 
 gifts of nature, or the result of education and experi- 
 ence. As surely as money is of value only for the 
 sake of the means of life and enjoyment which it will 
 provide, so surely are these means of life and enjoy- 
 ment themselves only of value for the sake of the life 
 to which they minister. Life : wealth is a life — fed, 
 it is true, by material things, supported and sur- 
 rounded by food and furniture of all the kinds of 
 which we spoke — food and furniture, animate and in- 
 animate; food and furniture for the body and the mind; 
 but the life itself resides in a person, to whose pleasure 
 all these things minister only if he has powers to 
 enjoy them. Who has not had cause to regret in 
 later life, when some means of enjoyment lay before 
 him, that a defective education had made them use- 
 
156 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 less for want of the power to enjoy ? Who does not 
 know that one of the most difficult parts of the 
 problem of relieving the poverty of the poor, is how 
 to give them the power to rise to the enjoyment of 
 better things ? Who does not see of himself, that 
 most of the enjoyments he treasures are due to his 
 possession of certain faculties, which form part of the 
 original endowment of nature, or which early training 
 and education have developed ? 
 
 Well, then, it is in the satisfaction and employment 
 of these faculties and powers of enjoyment that 
 wealth consists. And it is of these — the faculties 
 and powers of enjoyment to which material wealth 
 ministers — that we must ask, are they corruptible ? 
 Are they not ? Moth and rust will not corrupt the 
 comfortable income which provides for the satisfaction 
 of our needs, though that, too, is liable to accident 
 and loss. But, as with the miser gloating over his 
 gold, the golden coin will not decay so soon as 
 the fingers in whose clutch it lies, so with us and 
 our wealth — we need not wait till the body is laid 
 cold and stiff, and the soul has fled away, to see that 
 our powers of enjoyment are corruptible. Where 
 are the opportunities of youth, the glory of its 
 promise, the power of its hope ? Where is the life 
 that we felt within us then — all that we had it in us 
 
WEALTH. 157 
 
 to do ? Where are those splendid possibilities which 
 were a part of ourselves then ? They are gone — far, 
 far down the wind. It is not only that opportunities 
 were wasted, and that the faculties we did not feed 
 faded away ; it is not even that, as life went on, we 
 were bound to narrow down the scope of our ambition 
 and our activity. It is that life dies in the using, its 
 vigour fades, its range contracts ; day by day it is less 
 vivid and intense. At best, with the faculties we use 
 and develop there is a process of decay, steady, slow, 
 progressive, aiming at the grave, tUat gradual substi- 
 tution of a lower for a higher form of life, which, 
 when we speak of living things, is the nature of 
 decay. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon 
 earth," for earthly powers of enjoyment, of work, of 
 thought, of feeling, of life itself, are all subject to decay. 
 3. We rebel against this doom of death. There is 
 something^ in us, there is something even 
 
 . . 3. Love. 
 
 in our aim at w^ealth, that can meet it with THsaioneis 
 
 ' not subject to 
 
 defiance. A man provides for those that excep^\'S"' 
 
 "the dis- 
 
 live with him, for those he loves, for those appearance 
 
 of the oppor- 
 
 that come after him, for his wife, for his [ove"^un- 
 child. They, too, may die ; but there is one 
 thing that does not die, that is careless of death, that 
 lives through death, and in spite of it, and that is his 
 love. 
 
158 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 It is true. At last we have reached " treasure in 
 heaven," what neither moth, nor rust, nor any other 
 power of death can corrupt, if it be true to itself As 
 money is good for the means of life which we get by 
 it, and the means of life are good for the life which 
 they support, so life itself is good for the love that 
 lives in it, and that is not subject to corruption or 
 decay. Life is a means to love; and wealth — the 
 true wealth, the only true well-being of the soul and 
 body of man — is love. And all other wealth — money, 
 and houses, and lands, and pleasures, and enjoyments, 
 and faculties of body and sense and intellect — all are 
 wealth, true wealth, " treasure in heaven," if they are 
 absorbed in love, dedicated to love, and used by love. 
 
 It is not a far-away and unpractical doctrine. What 
 is the wealth, the well-being of a nation ? Is it not 
 in the life they live with one another ? Is it not in 
 a great system of mutual help, putting in the reach 
 of every man that is born within its bounds a life 
 in which, because his labour shall contribute to the 
 good of all, all the whole world about him shall 
 in turn contribute to form, to guard, to gladden his 
 home ? 
 
 As it is, look at your life, the food you eat, the 
 clothes you wear, the house you live in, the work you 
 do, the pleasures you enjoy : all of these come to you 
 
WEALTH. 159 
 
 by the help of others, in return for what you do for 
 them, or what you or others have done for them. 
 And the wealth of a nation is that this interchange 
 should be willing, ready, just, complete, between the 
 members of a nation, and between them and all the 
 world ; and that in this vast system of a mutual help 
 all should find their happiness and their place ; and 
 that in it, as in a body, should live and work the soul 
 that really belongs to it, the spirit of mutual good- 
 will. Wealth is the actual realized existence of this 
 interchange of good. 
 
 It is not a far-away and unpractical doctrine. It 
 is plain, everyday matter of fact. Your wealth, 
 whatever it may be, little or great — the wealth you 
 make, the wealth you spend — is treasure, corruptible or 
 incorruptible, treasure on earth or treasure in heaven, 
 according as it is or is not, in the making and the 
 spending, the instrument of love. The transaction 
 across the counter by which you gain your money, 
 is every bit as much the concern of love as the 
 bestowal of it on your wife or your child. You can't 
 borrow money in hell to spend in heaven. Would 
 you feed your child on crime ? The sternest law of 
 love applies to the making of money. God has set 
 you in the world with other men to learn, by mutual 
 interchange of the means of life, the laws of love ; to 
 
i6o CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 multiply by love, to multiply, as we do multiply, by 
 working for one another, the means of life ; and every 
 transaction between you and your neighbour should 
 be for the good of both, otherwise you are multiplying 
 corruption, you are linking yourself to the kingdoms 
 of corruption, and it will avail you little that the 
 pure flower of loving lives draws life in part and 
 unknowing from the corruption that you breed. 
 
 In the making and in the spending, wealth is the 
 instrument of love. We are all familiar nowadays 
 with the picture of the poor working man, who, 
 when he has received his wages, is tempted half-way 
 home to the public-house, and drinks while his wife 
 and children starve. A terrible picture, and a true 
 one in many cases, as we see and know ; a terrible 
 picture, and a true one of you, if you spend on selfish 
 pleasures what might at least be spent on pleasures 
 social, and shared with those you love. Are there 
 no thin, pale souls about you, whose very faculties 
 of enjoyment are starved, in reach of your help, while 
 yours are glutted, sated, dulled ? How many of us 
 neglect and ignore the vast gifts of love we might 
 bestow, by caring for the better education of those 
 who depend upon us, or might depend upon us, 
 multiplying not only their powers of enjoyment, but 
 all the faculties and energies of useful and loving life ! 
 
WEALTH, i6i 
 
 And your wealth, meanwhile, goes, evaporates in 
 little trifling self-indulgences, scarcely substantial 
 enough to seem subject to decay; but the heart 
 decays, and the conscience — the power to feel your 
 degradation, the power to sympathize, the power to 
 love. 
 
 Decay — it is its last and most terrible feature — 
 decay, when we speak of spiritual beings, is the dis- 
 appearance of the opportunities of love. They pass 
 away as a dying man feels his senses fail him as he 
 dies, and the faces of his friends fade, and the power to 
 lift a hand to touch them is gone, and the light grows 
 dull in the eye, and he is cut oflf — alone. The oppor- 
 tunities of love pass away. Does love itself remain ? 
 Has it used them and grown strong, or has the soul 
 lived a selfish life, laying up for itself " treasures upon 
 earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt " ? 
 
 Is it corruptible wealth, or incorruptible, that you 
 desire — wealth to feed love, or wealth to feed selfish 
 pride and display, selfish ease and indulgence ? It is 
 right to desire wealth, it is wrong to be content with- 
 out it — true wealth, openly, fairly, and justly gained 
 by true work ; true wealth to be spent on the purposes 
 of love. The man who goes on piling up wealth upon 
 wealth, more than he can manage and use for the good 
 of society, who desires, senselessly, what will not help 
 
1 62 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 life or increase enjoyment, what he will never use 
 for his own good or the good of others, in constant, 
 aimless discontent, is both selfish and a fool ; but that 
 man is no less selfish and a fool who is content with 
 small means to low ends, whose ambition is not 
 widened by the desire to help to a higher and hap- 
 pier life those who depend upon him, who is content, 
 without the aspirations which employ the energies 
 of love. 
 
 What will you be the better for the wealth that 
 has been given to ijou when you pass away from these 
 material things, when you pass away from the 
 occasions and opportunities of love ? What will you 
 leave behind to those for whom it is your duty or 
 your privilege to provide ? The means of life, if you 
 may; but, with them or without them, if you have not 
 these to leave, the memories and the legacy of love. 
 There was One that left to the world, and to every 
 soul in it, the greatest treasure that the world has 
 ever known. Who, while He lived, had not where to 
 lay His Head. There is One that looks down on you, 
 for Whom your soul, be it old or young, fresh or worn 
 with life, innocent or old in selfish, worldly sin, has a 
 value far, far above all earthly treasures. Give to Him 
 your wealth, be it little or great, your labour, your life, 
 your powers, your soul, yourself. Give them to Him, 
 
WEALTH. 163 
 
 that is, let Him possess them and fill them with the 
 spirit of His love, that you may shine through and 
 through all your life with the light of His presence 
 and His possession, and transmit the radiance of His 
 love, and be His in the day when He makes up His 
 jewels. 
 
IX. 
 THE ECONOMIC BODY. 
 
 " From "Whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by 
 that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working 
 in the measure of every part, maketli increase of the body unto the 
 edifying of itself in love." — Eph. iv. 16. 
 
 A Christian life is a new life — new in contrast to the 
 That Chris- human life that is not Christian: new, again, 
 
 tian life is > > is > 
 
 iife?b the ^^ every step by Avhich we put on Christ. 
 s.^Pauif^ ° What, then, is the character of this new life ? 
 what is its impress, its mark upon the soul, upon the 
 relations of men ? S. Paul gives many answers. That 
 which he gives most often may be expressed by saying 
 that the Christian life, the new life, is — to sum up in 
 one word his view of human duty and the grace of 
 God — a corporate life. He recurs over and over again 
 to the metaphor of the body. 
 
 A recently popular book has illustrated, from the 
 conquests of modern science, the lessons which may be 
 drawn from a study of organic life. But the plain 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 165 
 
 spiritual and moral meaning of the metaphor of the 
 body, may, perhaps, be still best found in a study of 
 the writings of S. Paul. The metaphor of the body, 
 the description of the spiritual life by its comparison 
 to organic life, may be followed through all the more 
 important of the Epistles. In the First Epistle to the 
 Corinthians it comes, first, in connection with the Sacra- 
 ments, the means of Christian life — " We being many 
 are one bread, and one body : for we are all partakers 
 of that one Bread ; " and, again, " For as the body is 
 one, and hath many members, and all the members of 
 that one body, being many, are one body : so also is 
 Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into 
 one Body." By the gift of the Spirit, and by the in- 
 dwelling of Christ, we are drawn closer to one another, 
 and to all who, through whatever means, live by any 
 measure of the grace of Christ, in a common or cor- 
 porate life. And then, from the diversity of operation 
 of the different members of the same body, is drawn 
 the lesson of the mutual interdependence between 
 the members of the Christian Body, and of the duty 
 of mutual consideration, care, and sympathy. Again, 
 in the Epistle to the Romans, the same doctrine 
 of our membership one of another in the Body of 
 Christ is made the root-principle of all Christian 
 duty, at the beginning of that moral summary which 
 
1 66 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 concludes the great Epistle. Pass on to the Epistles 
 of the first imprisonment, and the same metaphor 
 appears, with another side of its meaning expanded 
 and put forth. Christ is " the Head of all things to 
 the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of Him 
 that filleth all in all." It is as members of His Body 
 that we receive His grace. He " reconciles " Jew and 
 Gentile "unto God in one Body by the Cross." " There 
 is one Body, and one Spirit, even as we are called in 
 one hope of our calling ; one Lord, one Faith, one 
 Baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all, 
 and through all, and in us all ; " and " to every one is 
 given grace according to the measure of the gift of 
 Christ." And the purpose of the gifts of grace — and 
 here comes in another lesson frcJm the metaphor — is 
 mutual help — that " speaking the truth in love," we 
 " may grow up into Him in all things, which is the 
 Head, even Christ : from Whom the whole Body fitly 
 joined together and compacted by that which every 
 joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in 
 the measure of every part, maketh increase of the 
 Body unto the edifying of itself in love." And the 
 Epistle to the Colossians here, as elsewhere, treats 
 of the same subject, only in the different tone which 
 belongs to the special aim of the Epistle. 
 
 Here, then, under the metaphor of the different 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 167 
 
 relations of the members of a body to one another, 
 and to the head, is a description of the general 
 character of the Christian life, of the new life — that 
 we are members of a Body. And this general cha- 
 racter may be summed up in three laws — 
 
 1. That each member of the Body is a part, depen- 
 dent on the rest. 
 
 2. That each receives life from the Head. 
 
 3. That each lives for the good of the whole Body, 
 to help others. 
 
 This is the general character, these are the laws 
 laid down as belonging to the highest society, The chris- 
 the Christian Church, whose object is to corporate 
 
 '' life apply, 
 
 renew the image of God in man. They have "h^ socfai° 
 their bearing on the relationship between church, but 
 
 to all social 
 
 the members of a Church, between those relations. 
 who hold "the Faith once delivered to the Saints," 
 in any particular nation, or country, or place. But 
 we shall not see what their full meaning is, unless 
 we follow them out into other relationships as well. 
 As the laws of that society which is to renew the 
 image of God in man, they are the laws by which 
 man, as man, ought to live, the laws of human life in 
 all departments. They define the spirit in which a 
 man is to live, the general character of human duty ; 
 but this spirit has to work in the body of the 
 
i68 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 actual, everyday relations between man and man — the 
 general character has to take special shape in appli- 
 cation to the special duties of every part of the life 
 of man in every age. There are not one set of laws 
 for the life of man as a member of the society of the 
 Christian Church, and quite another set for his life 
 as a member, say, of the family, or the State, or of 
 society in any other aspect. Rather, these different 
 spheres of social life make up a part of that whole 
 mass of human conduct which has to be inspired and 
 ruled by these principles. In all alike the same laws 
 obtain, the same image of God has to be shown forth. 
 In the life of the Church itself is their first and 
 clearest application, just because the object of the 
 Church is their universal application. And if they 
 obtain in a different way between men who recognize 
 a common source for the common Spirit which rules 
 and sanctifies their lives, and receive God's grace by 
 His appointed means, they obtain also in regulating 
 our everyday relations to those who live, as we do, 
 in the reception of that degree of grace which, by 
 whatever means, God gives to them, even though 
 they do not recognize, as we do, the source from 
 which it comes, or use the means through which it 
 is ordained to flow. 
 
 So, then, we should not be prevented from working 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 169 
 
 out the application of these principles to the various 
 spheres of everyday life, either because we may 
 seem to be applying them to worldly matters, or 
 because we are applying them to our dealings, not 
 only with one another, but with worldly men. It is 
 our duty to spiritualize the whole of our life ; it is our 
 duty to behave as Christians to all men; as far as 
 ever they will allow us, to apply to our relations to 
 them the rules which are set to regulate the conduct 
 of the members of Christ one to another. 
 
 I propose here to suggest the application of these 
 principles to one special part of our life. 
 God has made us men members one of economic 
 another in a thousand wavs — in this amone: " ^^^' ^'^ ' 
 others, that we live, and support our daily material 
 life, and provide ourselves and one another with the 
 necessaries and pleasures of life as members of one 
 body. If I am to use the ordinary technical term, 
 I propose to ask, what bearing on our economic duties 
 have the principles of Christ as defined by S. Paul ? 
 I need not insist specially in this relation that our 
 Christian duty as to the material side of our life is to 
 spiritualize it, to transfuse it with spiritual principles ; 
 this will appear sufficiently by the way. 
 
 1. Take first, then, the law of mutual dependence 
 one on another of the members of a body. " The eye 
 
I70 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee : 
 (i) the law nor again the head to the feet, I have no 
 
 of mutual 
 
 dependence necd of vou." In the orie^lnal passaoje S. Paul 
 
 between man ^ o x o 
 
 and man ; 'g dealing wlth Independence in the form of 
 conceit, an exaggerated view of the value and import- 
 ance of our own endowments, especially of our own 
 wisdom and knowledge. But there are other forms 
 of independence besides conceit. 
 
 Now, independence in the matters I am speaking 
 of is commonly reckoned a virtue. And this view 
 represents one side of the truth. It is good for a man 
 to make his own living. " If any will not work, 
 neither should he eat." It is good to feel that we live 
 on what we earn, that our support and our pleasures 
 are the fair due of our services. It is good and right 
 even to rest thankfully and securely in the possession 
 of what is lawfully and rightly our own, whether we 
 have earned it, or whether it has been earned by 
 others, and given or bequeathed to us. It is a fair 
 and good ground of confidence to feel that there is 
 nothing we use or enjoy of which we cannot say, 
 *' I bought it, and have paid for it, or can pay for it. 
 It is as truly mine as if I had made it." For the 
 moment, let us put all this aside without further 
 consideration, and look only at the other side of the 
 truth. This is true independence ; but there is a true 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 171 
 
 dependence which goes along with it, and the denial 
 of which is a false independence. 
 
 Our means of life fairly earned and received are our 
 own. Well, if they are received by gift or bequest, 
 it is not hard to see that we are also dependent. 
 Our whole material life, then, is a gift, truly ours ; 
 but a gift the creation, the workmanship of some one 
 else. It is some one else's doing, not ours. There is 
 the fact to be remembered — we are dependent on 
 others, though it may be on those who have passed 
 away out of our sight. And if our means of life 
 are earned, what then ? Why, then, surely S. Paul's 
 words come in, " The eye cannot say unto the hand, 
 I have no need of thee." We earn as parts of a 
 system dependent on others and on the whole. Eye 
 and hand, indeed, have their parallel in the direction 
 and the work of almost any industry, mental or 
 bodily; and far more complex than the interdepen- 
 dence of the parts of the physical body are the mutual 
 give and take between the infinitely various members 
 of that spiritual organism — for spiritual it is — by 
 which we enable each other to provide for one 
 another's needs and for our own. 
 
 True, this system may be presented rather as a 
 combination for self help, in which each member is 
 pursuing his own ends. Let it be so. I am not at 
 
172 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 present concerned with our ends. Let us get the 
 bare fact that, in earning what we call our own, we 
 do depend, and depend very largely, on others. It 
 is needless to trace the same truth through the process 
 by which we use our means, and buy and pay for 
 what we want. It is ours; we pay for it. By all 
 means ; but for what is ours we do depend on others. 
 They have their own motive for providing it, no 
 doubt ; but there it is provided, and we depend on its 
 being provided for our sustenance and comfort. As 
 matter may be analyzed into an assemblage of forces, 
 so the sustenance and comfort of our lives is made up 
 by and in its very substance consists of the work, the 
 energy, the life of other men. 
 
 And this is not all. We do depend for mere 
 material things, not only on the actual work and 
 contribution of others, but on moral and spiritual 
 qualities in them, to which self-interest is at best but 
 a contributory motive, and which often lie altogether 
 beyond the range of its effects. It is difficult for 
 any one who has thought of it to speak coldly of the 
 vast spiritual machinery of our economic life. Look 
 only at a single force in it. Look at the working of 
 trust. See how far we live on trust, by observing 
 with what horror we discover its violation, and the 
 social outlawry which visits the crime. How vast 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 1 73 
 
 an amount of the business of the world, by which 
 our needs are supplied, rests upon the assumption that 
 any given man is what he professes to be, and will 
 do what he professes to do ! We depend upon trust- 
 worthiness ; we live on it. 
 
 Or, again, to take an instance in every one's personal 
 experience, how much we depend on kindness ! In 
 the largest single industry in the country, that of 
 domestic service, we all know that our needs are 
 not met without a fellow-feeling and a sympathy 
 which wages cannot buy. A good servant means 
 a sympathetic servant. We depend upon kindness ; 
 we live on it ; it is our very breath. 
 
 Here, then, to start with, is a fact. For your life, 
 for your living, however wholly you support yourself, 
 no less wholly you depend on others. We are apt 
 to dwell on the value of independence until we forget 
 this, until we feel as if we stood alone in a comfort 
 and ease of our own making. I do not ask yet 
 what consequences we draw as to our liberty to 
 use our means as we will. It is not the fact; we 
 do not stand alone ; we are dependent upon others, 
 dependent for everything, for what is most our 
 own, and very peevishly we take it if they fail us 
 in that for which we have been used to depend on 
 
 >^ OP THB^^ 
 
 '■g'BflVBRSITr] 
 
174 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 This is one side of the truth, then, about the 
 support of our lives. We depend upon others. 
 
 2. Now let us go back upon the other side of our 
 position, that we depend upon ourselves, and 
 
 (2) the law "- ■'••'■ 
 
 denci'on" ^^^ ^^^ Hves are our own, and let us look 
 at this in the full light of S. Paul's second 
 principle of social life. What hast thou which thou 
 hast not received ? What, indeed ? Is there anything 
 which can be said of spiritual endowments, of "the 
 grace given to every man, according to the measure of 
 the gift of Christ," — as that there is no good thing in 
 us, no power, or qualitj^, or faculty, or condition which 
 is not the grace or gift of God — is there anything like 
 this which cannot be said also, and with equal truth, 
 of material gifts, and the faculties that concern them ? 
 Restrict your vision for a moment to what your 
 earthly eyes can see — to these material things of 
 beauty and pleasure and comfort with which your 
 life is surrounded, and measure even by them, as they 
 pour upon the bodily senses of the man who receives 
 them, the "proclive weight and rush" of that full 
 stream of the Everlasting Love of God, which casts up 
 these as mere light foam to brighten its surface, and 
 to betray, even while they veil from view, the awful 
 depth and strength of the Eternal tide ! 
 
 In a general way we acknowledge, of course, that 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 175 
 
 all is the gift of God. But with what reality ? That 
 home in which you live, its space, its warmth, its 
 light, its comfort, these are the gift of God, and so is 
 the power to enjoy them. Books and pictures, and 
 the pleasures of hospitality, and of talk with your 
 friends, these are the gift of God, and so are the 
 higher powers which they employ. That investment 
 from which you draw a part of your income, this 
 business which you conduct, this office where you 
 direct men's minds and hands, the power and scope 
 they give to the energy of mind and will, in whose 
 exercise you revel even more than you do in their 
 results, these are the gift of God. Sometimes, perhaps, 
 we dare not remember that they are so, for the use 
 that we make of them. How much more the home, 
 the power to marry, the memories of happy years 
 sown with self-sacrifice and self-denial, fruitful in the 
 joys of love ; bright children's faces, and sons and 
 daughters grown up in strength and beauty to be the 
 joy of age ! If these things stand for the use by which, 
 most of all, you have made what you have earned 
 your own, surely these are indeed the gift of God. 
 
 Yes ; and in all these we are within the range and 
 scope of that Eternal purpose of predestinating love, 
 by which He purposed to reconcile you to Himself, 
 through Him, Who is not only "the Head of the Body, 
 
176 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 the Church," but " the image of the Invisible God, the 
 Firstborn of every creature," Who is " before all things, 
 and by Him all things consist;" "the true Light, Which 
 lighteneth every man ; Who was in the world, and the 
 world was made by Him, and the world knew Him 
 not." Know Him. You know Him in grace, in that He 
 has given you *' power to be the sons of God." Know 
 Him here, too, in this natural order of His working, now 
 illumined and transfigured by the light and life of grace. 
 Know Him, it is He in " Whom all fulness dwells," of 
 Whom you have received all things that are good. 
 
 What hast thou that thou hast not received ? Nay, 
 what art thou that thou hast not received ? Pass 
 from the outward gifts to the body, soul, and spirit 
 of yourself You, the clay moulded and inbreathed 
 by His love, what are you but a vessel, a power to 
 receive His gifts — and thai a gift; a vessel filled 
 with all that He can pour upon you, by His love 
 made visible in the human hands of those on whom 
 your life depends ? What are you ? Nothing more ? 
 Yes ; there is one gift more — the power to give back 
 that which you have received. 
 
 3. From Him, in the words of S. Paul's own state- 
 ment of the third law of social life, the (3) the law 
 law of help, "the whole Body, fitly joined help. 
 together and compacted by that which every joint 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 177 
 
 supplieth, according to the effectual working in 
 the measure of every part, niaketh increase of the 
 Body unto the edifying of itself in love." Have 
 material interests, do you think, no part in this 
 blessing ? Is not our intercourse in material things 
 the very body into which this Spirit has to flow ? 
 "Was it not in dealings with material needs that 
 this Spirit was first set forth visibly before our 
 eyes, and men "beheld His glory, the glory as of 
 the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and 
 truth " ? Should not the Spirit of Christ be at home 
 in these things, not as an occasional intruder, to effect 
 a compromise in disagreement, to demand an alms for 
 accidental poverty, but as the governing and per- 
 vading principle, harmonizing the efforts and the wills 
 of all in our common war with want and pain ? What 
 are you at all in the economy of God's world, as 
 revealed in the revelation of His Son, unless you live, 
 and live altogether, for the use of others ? The eye 
 is for seeing, the hand for shaping, and man for help- 
 ing ; and you for your work, for your help to the 
 body, for your peculiar service, and for nothing else. 
 For what else do you receive all that God gives to you ? 
 " Indeed, the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have 
 no need of thee ; " what is it for but to guide the hand ? 
 You have need of that on which to bestow what you 
 
 N 
 
178 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 have received. This is the general law of the function 
 of any part of a body, that it should help. Those 
 with whom you have to do, whether through man's 
 sin their call ever reaches the ears of their soul or not, 
 are predestined with you, in the purpose of God, to 
 show forth His love. As God is known to us as Love, 
 so we, who are made and renewed in His image, are 
 made to transmit, and in transmitting to reflect and 
 embody the love that is poured upon ourselves. This 
 is the whole spiritual substance and reality of our 
 being. And the greatest gifts of love are these : 
 powers to help, powers to do good, powers to be like 
 God, in the systematic and deliberate working of 
 plans and purposes of love, living ourselves out in 
 them, manifesting in them what we are. And so the 
 body, the society, grows and makes increase, and 
 builds itself up in the likeness of God — the Body of 
 Him Who is the brightness of God's glory, "and the 
 express image of His Person," and we contribute, each 
 in our measure, to its growth and to its glory. 
 
 Each in our own employment and position in life 
 have to view it as the employment and position of a 
 member of the Body of Christ, living on the life 
 of others, receiving love from God, receiving it in 
 substantial shape, that we may show it forth in lives 
 of love towards those with whose lives God has 
 
THE ECONOMIC BODY. 179 
 
 entwined our own. In lives of love — love that is no 
 passing feeling of a luxurious hour of religious medi- 
 tation, but the controlling and informing power of a 
 life of work ; love that is no meaningless sentiment, 
 but a principle, sober and deliberate, working by 
 rule, aiming at clear ends by methods that will 
 always bear the light, with strenuous, steadfast will, 
 inspired day by day by the Universal and Eternal 
 Love of God ; love that will make sacred with its 
 presence and its touch all that we are and all that 
 we enjoy, and measure daily duties by the Divine 
 standard of that Eternal Love, Which builds up the 
 dust out of which we are made into the image and 
 likeness of God. 
 
X. 
 THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 
 
 It has been noted as a curious omission in Adam 
 A supposed Smith's enumeration of the economic advan- 
 
 omission in n ^ t«* r»Ti aIxi 
 
 the theory tagcs 01 thc divisiou 01 laoour, that he 
 
 of division 
 
 ofiabour. (jQgg jjQ^ include the advantage which arises 
 from each man doing the work which suits him 
 best. It would have been very remarkable if the 
 master, who surpasses most of his disciples in the 
 human interest he finds in his subject, should have 
 omitted to notice the most distinctively human 
 element in the economic system he describes at the 
 outset of his work. The fact is, that the advantage 
 of individual talent and capacity is disguised in the 
 list given by Adam Smith, under the term, "in- 
 creased dexterity of the workman." This appears in 
 the section " Of the principle which gives occasion to 
 the division of labour," where he argues that the 
 difference of natural talents in different men, i$ 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. i8i 
 
 much less than we are aware of, and that the 
 apparent difference is " not the cause, but the effect 
 of division of labour," and arises, " not so much 
 from nature, as from habit, custom, and education." 
 
 It is much more remarkable, and a very curious 
 instance of the unconscious arrogance of the science 
 founded on the speculations of Adam Smith, imagin- 
 ing itself to be a spontaneous growth of these later 
 centuries, like the industrial system, whose method it 
 reflected and described, and in no way indebted to 
 the wisdom of earlier ages, that the late Professor 
 Fawcett, in noting the supposed omission of Adam 
 Smith, should represent the missing principle as 
 supplied by the discovery of Mr. Babbage ! The 
 reader who studies Political Economy as a part of 
 the knowledge of the social life of men, governed by 
 the principles which the experience and the wisdom 
 of ages has established, though one age has differed 
 from another in the mode of their expression, will be 
 inclined to wonder why Mr. Babbage should invent 
 what is the leading principle in the most important 
 constructive work of Plato, even if there do not float 
 across his mind some hazy memories from the writings 
 of S. Paul. Most people will be inclined to agree 
 with Plato, and Mr. Babbage, and Professor Fawcett, 
 and to think that the differences of natural talent 
 
i82 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 and ability, transmitted or created by the intricate 
 laws of heredity, are material, and are clearly 
 distinct from the special aptitudes resulting from the 
 education and the habit of the individual life. A 
 consideration, such as we here propose, of division of 
 labour, as representing the moral method of economic 
 life, might proceed upon either theory, regarding the 
 differentiation of individual capacity, with Adam 
 Smith, as the effect of industrial organization, or, 
 with our other authorities, as partly its cause and 
 partly its effect. I shall prefer, as a matter of fact, 
 to proceed upon the latter hypothesis, because I 
 believe it to be true in itself I shall do so without 
 discussing the alternative, because I suppose this to 
 be the more generally accepted view. 
 
 It has been observed that division of labour is 
 The division not an altogether fortunate name for the 
 
 of labour 
 
 implies the svstcm of iudustHal organization which it is 
 
 combination •/ c 
 
 and^Ehr^*^^ used to denote. This system has two main 
 functions, fcaturcs — the combination of labourers, and 
 the division of functions. The division is a feature 
 in the development of that combination, which is the 
 first step towards what might, perhaps, be best 
 described as a whole under the name of the organiza- 
 tion of labour. 
 
 The first question, then, which we have to ask in a 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 183 
 
 moral view of the system is, what leads men to com- 
 bine ? And we may go to Plato for our 
 
 •^ *=• I. Need is 
 
 answer. It is " our need " — our common need, ^^^.^^Xna- 
 our mutual need one of another. Poverty 
 is the first moral endowment of man. He faces the 
 world with need as his spur to energy, the curse 
 which he has to convert into a blessing. Sheer 
 physical need is his first safeguard against sloth, and 
 remains his safeguard against selfishness. Common 
 need is the source of fellowship. The mere fact of 
 need appeals to that human sympathy, which is the 
 sense of a condition that we share. And the desire 
 of that enrichment of life, which enables us to satisfy 
 anything more than the most elementary needs of 
 physical existence, is a constant motive to engage 
 in that organized system of life, of which mutual 
 need is the very spirit and life. 
 
 One is sometimes disposed to regret that the desire 
 to limit the range of an excessive interference in the 
 working of the economic system, on the part of the 
 State, led the science of economics to assume the name 
 of Political Economy. But the name seems in some 
 degree to mark the fact that man, as an economic 
 animal, as a creature that provides by deliberate 
 methods for his physical needs, is essentially a social 
 animal. The general reason and knowledge of right 
 
i84 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 which is embodied in law, and animates a political 
 constitution, strictly so called, is active in the form 
 of social instinct in organizing the economic system. 
 Construe this instinct into an explicit principle, and 
 it declares, not indeed that nature is an enemy with 
 whom man's single force does not enable him to 
 cope; but, at least, that nature invites that com- 
 bination and organization of human forces, by which 
 the resources of nature are disclosed, and the social 
 character of man is realized and wrought out. It 
 gives an abiding moral value to the organization of 
 labour, that it keeps constantly in view the sheer 
 need which is the first impulse to the vigour and 
 fellowship of social life ; that it emphasizes fellowship 
 as the condition of mere life; and, above all, that it 
 exhibits the necessity, which, indeed, it tends to 
 exaggerate into a misfortune, of mutual dependence 
 and mutual support. The worst evils incident to the 
 working of the economic system have at least this 
 moral advantage : so far from disguising, they de- 
 clare that need is the first condition of life, that 
 mutual need and its correlative, mutual help, are the 
 constant condition of happiness. The facts that are 
 eloquent in declaring the principle may speak of 
 need unsatisfied in the poor, whom we have always 
 with us, of the privilege of help disregarded, and the 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 185 
 
 duty of relieving need undone. But eloquent they 
 are, nevertheless, of the first and last condition of 
 spiritual progress, in the poverty whose physical ex- 
 ample is the parable and sacrament of that spiritual 
 insufficiency of man to himself, which makes the poor 
 in spirit blest. The system, indeed, preserves the 
 vitality of the moral principle of need more and 
 more completely as it is more and more efficiently 
 developed. The needs of the savage, whose life 
 afibrds the lowest example of the organization of 
 labour, though they may press hard upon what seems 
 to us all but an impoverished life, are nothing to 
 those of any member of a civilized society, whom 
 no perfection of industrial organization will allow to 
 forget that any one of the various needs, for whose 
 satisfaction he has learnt to trust to the effi^rts of 
 his fellow-men, may fail him in the last resort, and 
 leave him the poorer for the remembrance of what is 
 lost. Mutual need is the very life of the system. 
 It supplies the constant pressure which keeps every 
 man in his place and at work, when energy and 
 higher motives fail. And this is in itself a moral and 
 spiritual advantage, the constant reading of a lesson 
 as to that character of the nature of man, which no 
 moral or spiritual, far less any material progress 
 obliterate from our minds, except to our loss. 
 
1 86 * CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 2. The system of the organization thus rests upon 
 2 Division a foundation, grows out of a root of human 
 
 of function "-* 
 
 cipk oT"" need. This is the original motive to organize 
 works, and to combine, and it is a motive which 
 remains constantly in operation. We have next to 
 consider the principle on which the system works. 
 This principle is the performance by every individual 
 member of the society of some particular 
 
 discerning 
 
 for'^tSn-"^ function, for which he has the requisite 
 (a)hispower natural aptitude, and has received the re- 
 
 to help ; . -r»i 1 '11 
 
 quisite training. Plato has summarized the 
 duty of the member of a society in a phrase of 
 untranslateable simplicity,^ which we can only repre- 
 sent in relation to the present matter by saying, that 
 the duty of any member of the economic body is to 
 perform the economic function which is his own. 
 
 It should be observed, first, that this principle 
 assumes a natural obligation, arising out of a natural 
 capacity to help. If poverty is the first, the faculty 
 of help is the second of the moral endowments of man. 
 Man, as man, possesses it, though man differs from 
 man in the form which it may take. In the power 
 to share his fellow's need, and to identify it with his 
 own, he has the faculty of conceiving a social purpose 
 and a social end ; in the power to will a common or 
 
 ^ Ta aiiTov TTpdmiv. 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 187 
 
 collective good, he has in him that which converts all 
 physical capacities for the service of his own life into 
 faculties for the service of others. And this faculty 
 grows into an obligation. By its mere presence and 
 existence it presses towards its own realization. Its 
 first movement reveals that what seemed the desire 
 of an individual was in idea, and must become in 
 fact, the impulse of the fragment and part of a 
 collective life. And this collective life, revealed as 
 the condition of the individual, existence, becomes the 
 source of that kind of motive which we distinguish 
 from mere desire as obligation or duty. But what 
 we find in men, as a matter of fact, and in ourselves, 
 is not the mere faculty and correspondent obligation 
 to help in the abstract, but faculties often difficult to 
 discern and define, but, when rightly discerned and 
 successfully defined, precise and particular in their 
 tendency and scope, giving rise to desires and ambi- 
 tions — obligations, if their fulfilment were not thwarted 
 by the perversities of life ; duties, if they were not 
 transformed by the magic of the spirit of help, whose 
 patient working meets and overmasters every difficulty 
 and every check — transformed into higher duties of 
 abnegation and self-sacrifice. If ever our system of 
 education becomes anything more than a haphazard 
 jumble of preparation for examinations of a greater 
 
i88 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 or less degree o£ practical inutility ; if ever the dis- 
 cernment of human individuality and the development 
 of various capacity is recognized as an essential part 
 of that moral training of the whole man, which is 
 not yet seen to be its purpose and its scope, we may 
 succeed in strewing the waysides of human industry 
 with fewer wrecks of thwarted and deformed desire, of 
 stunted and perverted ambition, of power to help, and 
 joy in congenial service, wasted, withered, and trodden 
 under foot. As it is, let us at least see that division 
 of labour rightly means that every man has some 
 work which he is fitted to do, in which he is destined 
 to rejoice, through which he is called, by a Divine 
 vocation to convey his own peculiar share of that 
 Divine blessing, which is bestowed through the agency 
 of human wills and hearts ; though the work may be 
 undone, the rejoicing not even longed for, because 
 it is unknown, the call unheard, and the blessing sus- 
 pended over lives that have to find another blessing, 
 or to go unblest, because we have not learned that 
 man is made to help — that each man is made to help 
 in his own way, shaped by laws and forces which we 
 do not yet understand, but whose results we can 
 perceive if we will, or disregard if we choose, to 
 our loss. 
 
 And, following the development of the principle 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 189 
 
 in those cases, in which this need is not disregarded, 
 let us see, further, how the natural faculty {B) the life 
 
 ia which it 
 
 and natural obligation, as they demand a finds vent; 
 special education, so exact a particular devotion. 
 They exact it ; and where a man finds his true 
 vocation, he may see how they find it — find it often 
 in spite of imperfect and ill-directed education — and 
 make the happiness of lives absorbed in congenial 
 duty, where every power is employed and is at work, 
 and duty and desire become so far identified, that the 
 intoxication of unimpeded energy brings the danger 
 of overtasking the powers of a brain and heart, 
 whose labour is tiring in proportion as they work in 
 one. Contrast the life of the man whose life is spent 
 in the work, not merely which he likes, but which he 
 can do, Avhich gives scope to his special ability, with 
 that of the man who is busy, but in work for which 
 he has no special fitness, and towards which he has 
 no natural disposition, whether because what special 
 fitness or natural disposition was in him has never 
 been drawn out or discovered, or because the dull 
 necessity of an imperfect organization of labour has 
 forced upon him the need of some work, but has pre- 
 cluded him from that which he would choose, or, at 
 any rate, has found him none but this. The life of 
 a man should be, as far as he and others can make it 
 
I90 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 SO, one steady progress from a dimly felt desire, through 
 a clearly conceived ambition, to the daily more perfect 
 performance of a task, in which the capacity to hope 
 for perfection would be the source of ceaseless efforts 
 to excel the standard that has been attained, to desire 
 new methods and imagine higher aims, and in which 
 the stem control of duty would be felt none the less, 
 because duty was allowed to be the guide to happi- 
 ness and help. 
 
 There is a moral gain and a nobility, no doubt — for 
 (c) the sacri- those who cau rise to this view of their 
 subordina- misfortuuc — lu thc earnest spirit of self- 
 
 tion which it 
 
 demands. sacrificc aud humility, with which good men 
 abandon the life they would have loved for that 
 which the necessity of their own lives, or of those 
 they love, forces upon a reluctant nature, and upon 
 a mind that is always longing to glance aside at 
 some other aim. By no means let us ignore or 
 underrate the moral rank of a virtue, for which 
 our system affords so many opportunities. In any 
 conceivable perfection of the working of the system 
 of division of labour, there must be many dull 
 lives, many careers in which labour cannot excite 
 a lively interest, though it may enjoy a real allevia- 
 tion in other and collateral pursuits. Sacrifice and 
 humility of this kind the organization of labour will 
 
tHE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 191 
 
 always demand, and if the nature of the person who 
 has humbly to submit to the sacrifice is not outraged 
 and wronged by the task which we set him to do, 
 such sacrifice and humility will be near akin to those 
 which the system of division of labour forces upon all, 
 who have to choose for life a defined and limited 
 career, and to content themselves with performing, as 
 their personal contribution, some small part only of 
 the work whose success they wish to see achieved. 
 For every definite career involves the self-sacrifice of 
 limitation, of limitation to be accepted in the end 
 at which we are allowed to aim, of limitation to be 
 overcome in the means which are off<ered to our use. 
 All ambitions look large at the first; they narrow 
 down to the dimensions of fact. The first dream is 
 vast ; it shrinks to the level of human stature. Its 
 vastness was no illusion in itself; it was prophetic of 
 what shall be accomplished through us, unless we be 
 misled by vanity, and in so far as our efforts have 
 not failed our hope. Through us, but not by us. 
 Ours is the small and limited part of what we saw 
 should be done. Still less can the mind, confident in 
 the choice of its vocation, predict the means, unchosen 
 and uncongenial to the fancy of an untaught desire, 
 through which, by the reluctant sacrifice of fancy, an 
 accomplishment of ambition shall be wrought, far 
 
192 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 exceeding in substantial joy and good the wide and 
 shadowy imaginations of youth. Nor will the 
 inevitable sacrifice even thus obtain its fruit, unless 
 mind and heart are humble to unlearn mistakes, to 
 banish false ideals, to be guided by the thread of duty 
 which cannot be mistaken, along roads whose course 
 we cannot see to lead to the end which we desire. The 
 law of the organization of labour is, every man to his 
 own function — every man to a limited function, small 
 in comparison with the aim by which its fulfilment 
 ought to be inspired, small in comparison with the 
 complex system of human forces by which alone any 
 great aim can be attained, in which every ambition, 
 however justly high, must be content to be subordinate. 
 Nor is it allowed to any consolatory knowledge that 
 the object for which we sacrifice is worthy, and the 
 work to which we contribute great, to rob sacrifice 
 of the reality and the pain of its denial, or to make 
 humility a disguise of pride. In mere worldly success, 
 it is the men who make sacrifices, or accept them, 
 coolly and relentlessly, who win the race ; it is the men 
 who actually and really do think nothing too small 
 or too mean for their attention and their efibrt, who 
 rise to positions of command, and even then do not 
 lose their humility. Meanwhile, every sacrifice and 
 every humble life is ennobled, in which it is felt that 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 193 
 
 we bear our part, however small, in the work which 
 God works from the foundation of the world, and 
 bring into the sacrifices which we make for the sake 
 of those we love, and those with whom we live, the 
 spirit of the one Sacrifice once made by Him, Who 
 came to do Ood's Will and was content to do it. 
 
 These, then, are the principles involved in the 
 system by which each man performs the particular 
 function which is assigned to him — the principles of 
 sacrifice and of humility. 
 
 3. Lastly, we have to ask, what is the moral issue 
 towards which the working of this system 3. spiritual 
 
 , union is the 
 
 leads. And the answer is, that the ideal of issue to- 
 
 wards which 
 
 organization is spiritual union. As he is led " '^^'^^• 
 along the path which the division of labour assigns 
 to him, a man ceases to expect to do or be the whole 
 of that which his ideal or his hope held before him. 
 But he and his work become a part of a larger whole. 
 The larger end which he serves fills his vision and 
 absorbs his desire. He is greater because he is a part 
 of a greater thing, and a part in such wise that the 
 greatness is distributed to all the parts, and not 
 divided amongst them. For the division of function 
 itself is a part of the accomplishment of any particular 
 design, and a man glories in a limitation which, in 
 himself and in others, contributes more than anything 
 
 o 
 
194 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 else to the fulfilment of their common end. And, in 
 proportion as he sees this to be the case, will the 
 labourer in some partial province of a single industry 
 see in his limited labour, not merely a contribution to 
 this single end, but his own share in the attainment 
 of the universal end of that unconscious organiza- 
 tion of mankind for common happiness in mutual 
 help, which all special organization s^of labour, under- 
 taken in the true spirit, serve to make at once more 
 conscious and more perfect. And this organization 
 itself, and the spirit that belongs to it, become to 
 every single labourer who is subject to them, as they 
 are in truth and in themselves, a good to be aimed 
 at and achieved, to be lived for and enjoyed, in any 
 and every particular organization in which this spirit 
 is embodied and obeyed. As " business '* is a magic 
 word to business men, calling up a whole ideal of 
 trustworthy character and methodical sense directed 
 to any end that may happen to be in view, so labour 
 or work comes to mean the organized system of life, 
 in which a man gives himself and his whole powers 
 to the particular work that he has in hand, knowing 
 that in doing so he gives himself to the spirit in 
 which that work is done — the spirit of mutual subor- 
 dination, seen as the high end of human work, 
 and of millions of laborious lives, in which men can 
 
THE ETHICS OF DIVISION OF LABOUR. 195 
 
 detach their spiritual vision from the details through 
 which, nevertheless, this spirit is realized in fact, and 
 concentrate it upon the spiritual object itself — the 
 mutual subordination of soul to soul, in the universal 
 labour of human help. 
 
 And last, but not least, the worker in the organized \ \ 
 system of labour learns and practices subordination ' 
 not only to a great ideal end, and helps not only 
 the life of a dimly conceived community, living and 
 working for the most part out of his sight. The 
 vision of this ideal and the devotion to humanity are 
 inspired and made real by the sight of human faces, 
 and the feeling of human needs in men and women 
 and children above him and below him and around 
 him, towards whom his own daily and definite task 
 directs his eyes, with whom his daily labour is a 
 bond. The atoms of this great spiritual organization 
 are human atoms after all. They cohere by human 
 love and kindness and help, by a humility and a 
 forbearance which are practical and real, which make 
 ties between soul and soul of memory and gratitude 
 and familiar love. 
 
 Even in the smallest corner of the world of labour, 
 those who work together, just because they work 
 each at their own appointed part, diverge minutely 
 but really from one another along diverse roads, the 
 
196 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 intervals between which must be bridged by sympathy 
 and self-denial. Each has to live out the spirit of 
 his own peculiar work, and to harmonize one with 
 another the ideas which shape themselves from day 
 to day in the mind of each, as to how his particular 
 part of the general object is to be attained, and in 
 what relation to the parts with which other men are 
 charged. Perhaps it is in these details that the 
 keenest moral test is applied by the organization of 
 labour to those who share in it, where they are called 
 by it to follow in His footsteps. Who not only said of 
 Himself, " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," 
 but of Whom it was said, " He pleased not Himself" 
 
XI. 
 PROPERTY. 
 
 " Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own ? " — 
 S. Matt. xx. 15. 
 
 One of the delusions as to economic duty, of which we 
 have to dispose, is that in economic matters Theproperty 
 
 of God in 
 
 we have to do with thino^s, or with people the persons 
 
 '^ ' ^ ^ and souls of 
 
 who may be treated as things. This is [JpeoVpro- 
 especially the case w^hen we are dealing things. 
 with commodities as property. It is curious, there- 
 fore, that the words which are probably most often 
 the subject of unconscious quotation, when a man 
 claims the full and unlimited right of property, are 
 originally used, not of things, but of persons. It is 
 the eternal wage of the spiritual labour of life, the 
 destiny of the undying soul, of which it is said, " Is it 
 not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own ? " 
 In fact, we never reach the moral or spiritual truth of 
 any, the slightest of mere material things, until we 
 
198 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 have reached through it, and found out the personal 
 relations of which it is the occasion or the result. It 
 is a touching-point between soul and soul, between 
 the soul and the Eternal Spirit. When the memory of 
 it arises in that flash of universal recollection, which 
 we may picture as an element in the judgment of the 
 lives of men, it will recall the pain of remembered 
 hate, or the pleasure of remembered love, the remorse 
 of neglected duty, or the gratitude for duty done. 
 
 Plato has made Socrates say of the soul of man, 
 that it is a possession of the gods ; and it is virtually 
 of this possession that it is said, " Is it not lawful for 
 me to do what I wiU with mine own ? " Certainly, 
 the Bible claims for God, over and over again, the 
 right to dispose of man as His property. His own. 
 " Who art thou that repliest against God ? Shall the 
 thing formed say to him that formed it. Why hast 
 thou made me thus ? Hath not the potter power 
 over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel 
 unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"^ "Let 
 the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. 
 Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it. What 
 makest thou?"^ "But now, O Lord, Thou art our 
 Father; we are the clay, and Thou our Potter; and 
 we are all the work of Thy Hand."^ The burden 
 1 Eom. ix. 20. ^ ig^. xlv. 9. ^ jg^. Lxiy. 8. 
 
PROPERTY. 199 
 
 tlirouo:hout is, " Is it not lawful for Him to do what 
 He will with his own ? " 
 
 In a moral view, as we have said, we never deal 
 with things ; always with the persons, of our relation 
 with whom things are the symbol and occasion. 
 Every assertion of property in things is a virtual 
 assertion of property in some part or feature in the 
 lives of others. It is worth while, then, to see what 
 limits the Bible suggests for the right of property, 
 in that instance in which property in souls is most 
 indisputable and most absolute — the ownership of 
 God over the souls and bodies of men whom He has 
 created. 
 
 "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with 
 mine own ? " There is the assertion to the right ; but 
 it is asserted plainly and clearly here only as the 
 right to do good. " Is thine eye evil because I am 
 ofood ? " And where it seems to be asserted other- 
 wise, as by S. Paul, in the passage quoted above, 
 it is in controversy with those who deny God's 
 possessicm, and question His justice and His love, to 
 whom the only possible answer is an assertion of the 
 abstract right. The nature of the right and the law 
 of its exercise are, indeed, always to be found in the 
 subject in whom it resides. The child, who forgets 
 the wisdom of a mother's or a father's love, can only 
 
200 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 be met by the demand of implicit obedience to a 
 right that has no limit, except what it gives to itself 
 as the command of love. There is tenderness as well 
 as power in the words, "Is it not lawful for Me to 
 do what I will with Mine oivn ? " 
 
 Let us follow out the nature and source of the 
 right of property in things, as it is commonly claimed. 
 The parallel of God's ownership of men will scarcely 
 forsake us at any step of the way. 
 
 1. The simplest and most obvious source of the 
 I. Property right of property is labour. We have seen 
 ofthecrea- that when the Bible claims for God the 
 
 tive power 
 
 of labour. right of owncrship, the claim is made on the 
 ground of creation. Man, made in the image of God, 
 has the image of the creative power, in his preroga- 
 tive to fashion, out of the elements supplied to him, 
 that which, because he has made it, he shall feel to 
 be his own. Out of the indifferent mass of material 
 things his judgment has chosen that which will 
 answer his purpose. The mere raw material of labour 
 is his by the right of discernment and choice. His 
 mind has gone out upon it, and is embodied in it, as 
 a thing set apart to be the subject of his labour and 
 to serve his end. And actual labour itself makes 
 things the record, the vehicle, and the embodiment, 
 of the will, and effort, and purpose, by which they 
 
PROPERTY. 201 
 
 are fashioned and shaped, until the original stuff is 
 so disguised, that there seems to be nothing left of 
 what was given to the forming hand. Where land 
 in its natural state still remains to be appropriated 
 for the first time by the labour of man, it is by the 
 labour, first of fencing in, and then of cultivation, 
 that the right of property may be claimed. That on 
 which a man has spent his labour has become a part 
 of himself, his soul has gone out upon it, his mind 
 and will have left their impress upon it, nothing but 
 his own gift can alienate from him that which his 
 hands have made to be what it is. 
 
 Law secures to men what their labour has made. 
 Law constitutes property ; that is, property is a social 
 fact, the creation of society. But the social conscience 
 proceeds upon principles in allowing and securing pro- 
 perty to this man or to that. It is with the principles 
 on which it proceeds that we have here to do, and, 
 first, with the general social recognition, more or less 
 perfectly embodied in law, that a man is entitled to 
 possess what he has made. 
 
 This claim to property pursues the results of labour 
 through the most complicated processes of exchange 
 and distribution. There are other principles on which 
 property depends, but they in turn depend on this. 
 A man may own what has been given to him, or has 
 
202 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 descended to him by a succession of gifts. At the 
 other end of the chain will be the man whose labour 
 first gave him the right to possess, and therefore the 
 right to give. A man may come to be the recognized 
 possessor of what has not been given to him, even 
 where it is not the result of his own creative labour, 
 if his use, in which labour is an element, has assumed 
 for him the property in that which had subsided, as 
 unused, into the condition of raw material, of an 
 unappropriated natural thing. A man owns what he 
 earns because we recognize that, through the division 
 of labour and its produce, this is what he has virtually 
 made, it is his own. 
 
 There are higher and lower degrees of property, 
 according to the amount, and to the individual character 
 of the labour which has created that which is possessed. 
 The labour of mind and will and hand is often 
 directed through the immediate subject of labour to 
 some object, which, by means of it, is to be attained. 
 Where the heart is in the object itself which is 
 fashioned by the hand, there seems a closer and 
 more indissoluble union between the maker and 
 that which he has made. Authors and artists 
 have a love for the works in which their soul has 
 gone out from them ; and no sale or exchange can 
 altogether alienate from its spiritual owner the 
 
PROPERTY. 203 
 
 creation of genius or the work of love. The man 
 who sets his heart even on making a fortune, loves 
 his wealth more than the son to whom he bequeaths 
 it. Aristotle has observed how this principle of affec- 
 tion going out into that on which we have spent our 
 pains is an element even in friendship, in the case of 
 those who feel persistently well-disposed towards 
 men on whom they have conferred a benefit.^ It is, 
 perhaps, a deeper view of the same truth to say that 
 a man cannot easily detach himself from that on 
 which he has spent his love. Men do, in fact, extend 
 the range of their personality in life, in the lives 
 whose opportunities and resources they create or 
 increase by gifts; and prolong their existence, their 
 will, and their affection beyond their death, in those 
 to whom they bequeath the result of their labours. 
 
 2. And this is the second source of property — gift. 
 By the gift of the living or of the dead, as 2. Property 
 well as by our own labour, we hold things to of gift from 
 
 the living or 
 
 be our own. Here property is a directly the dead, 
 social thing. The right whose origin is in the labour 
 of the original maker and possessor, secured to him 
 by the social recognition of the public conscience and 
 by law, is secured by the same authority, as a right 
 of another kind, to the man to whom he has chosen to 
 » Arist, ♦« Eth. Nic," IV. i. 20 ; IX. vii. 4. Plato, " Rep.," i. 330. 
 
204 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 make a gift of that which was his own. To the new 
 owner it belongs by the exercise of the good will of 
 the giver. All property bequeathed is our own plainly 
 by this right. There are cases in which the bequest 
 is rather the transmission of an ancestral purpose, for 
 the preservation of the corporate existence of a family 
 in its several successive representatives, than the gift 
 of the immediately preceding owner. But some 
 original labour or service, some exertion of power 
 over the subject of property has been the first source 
 of ownership, and some transmission by gift has made 
 ownership a right to the present possessor. 
 
 But there is another and equally important case of 
 whether appropriation by gift. We have observed 
 through the that, under the existing system of division 
 
 process of 
 
 exchange. Qf labour and exchange of produce, a man 
 possesses much of what he owns as the indirect 
 result of his own labour. It is to be observed, 
 however, that this strictly applies only to that 
 portion of the produce of the common labour which 
 would have resulted from his own unaided work ; 
 and, since a division is inconceivable of the hypo- 
 thetical produce of isolated labour from the rest of 
 the joint result of the organized work of mankind, 
 we may say that, in the ownership even of what a 
 man earns, there enters into his right another element 
 
PROPERTY. 205 
 
 besides the right to own that which he creates. In 
 all exchange, by which we receive our share of the 
 joint produce of the labour in which we bear a part, 
 there is an element of gift. Exchange, indeed, is a 
 mutual gift. The free-will of the other party to the 
 exchange, conveying what is his to us, is the source 
 of our right to its possession. But, beyond this, com- 
 bination multiplies the produce of toil, and the actual 
 produce we receive is not merely — as the result of 
 labour itself — a gift of God, like the endowments of 
 whose use it comes ; it is a social gift, received from 
 those who willingly share with us, as we with them, 
 the fruit of fellowship. The social character of 
 property by gift belongs, therefore, not only to that 
 which we owe to the express personal donation of 
 friends alive or dead, but also to all that passes to us 
 by exchange, in which are involved, as a part of the 
 forces that have created it, not merely the separate 
 labour of every hand that has had a part in its pro- 
 duction, but also all the forces of that fellowship, into 
 which men have been drawn under the impulse to 
 provide for the common life. 
 
 The gift of inheritance may come to us laden with 
 the memories of individual love, with the traditions of 
 usefulness and of good will embodied in the substance, 
 stamped on the very surface of that which we inlierit. 
 
2o6 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 Property may be, then, eloquent of the duties which 
 arise out of its social character as a gift. Or, again, 
 it may come to us from unworthy or reluctant hands. 
 If it should do so, we shall surely feel, not that it is 
 freed from the burden of social obligations, but rather, 
 that it bears a larger debt, that its ownership carries 
 the burden of a duty, to make up in some measure 
 the arrears of use and fellowship in which others have 
 failed, to embody in it the spirit, through which the 
 mere fact that it is a gift at all should colour it, 
 consecrating and beautifying the dull and unlovely 
 material of selfishness or sin with the purifying and 
 ennobling energies of love. 
 
 It may seem a paradox to import into the product 
 of a process of exchange, conducted, probably, it will 
 be said, on strictly business principles, the incongruous 
 associations of gift or of good will. The answer to 
 this objection is twofold. In the first place, as a 
 matter of fact, direct and personal good will, and the 
 pleasure in being able to give to others the good 
 which our combined labour puts at every man's 
 command, are very much more real and practical 
 forces in the economic world, than the picture left on 
 our minds by popular economic science would lead us 
 to imagine. Fortunately, when the question once 
 occurs to our minds, we can appeal to our experience 
 
PROPERTY, 207 
 
 to correct the result of an abuse of unscientific 
 imagination. 
 
 But even in so far as this is not the case, and 
 where the individual from whose hands we actually 
 receive what is the bounty of the spirit of fellowship, 
 or, at least, the result of the combination of men to 
 serve their common needs, has not himself acted in 
 this spirit or desired this result, we need not keep our 
 possessions as the clothing and embodiment of a selfish- 
 ness which does good against its will. The enriched 
 possessions which we have and enjoy are the produce 
 of a system which, like every other bodily existence 
 — like the system of inheritance, for example — has a 
 spirit which belongs to it, and is at home in it. In 
 obedience to this spirit its purposes are best fulfilled. 
 This is the relation of the spirit of good will to the 
 system of exchange. Exchange is essentially exchange 
 of good, and of good the greater because of the system 
 which makes exchange necessary. All the purposes 
 of the interchange of good are more truly and com- 
 pletely answered, if exchange is carried out in the 
 spirit of good will. We are, as a matter of fact, in- 
 debted to the man from whom we receive that increase 
 of produce which is due to combination. Reluctantly 
 or willingly, hypocritically or sincerely, he has given 
 us a gift. It should have been given in the spirit of 
 
2o8 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 giving. If it was not, it brings with it a share in 
 that sad, but self-rewarding duty which forms a part 
 of almost every social obligation — the duty of acting 
 up to an ideal which we desire the more to see realized 
 in fact, because fact, as it is, contrasts with it. 
 
 3. We have, so far, spoken of labour and gift as the 
 3. Property sourccs of thc right of property, without 
 ofuse, whkh drawing out the obligations which arise from 
 
 is the duty • i i t • 
 
 of possession thc cousidcration that they are so. It is 
 
 and Its pn- '' 
 
 viiege. 1^^ fulfilment of those obligations which 
 constitutes the third element in the right of property 
 — use. 
 
 Use is not often in itself a source of the right of 
 property. It is so in some cases. Right of way is 
 an instance in which use can deprive one man of 
 exclusive possession, and transfer a share in what 
 belongs to him to others. Prescription, again, is an 
 instance of use superseding any other rights of 
 property, whatever they may be. But, over a much 
 vsdder field than is covered by such instances as these, 
 use is an element that enters into the right of posses- 
 sion. We have seen that law, and the operation of 
 the social conscience, secure to man the possession of 
 what has become his own by his own labour, or by 
 gift and bequest. It does not seem too much to say 
 that this security is given, within very large limits, on 
 
PROPERTY. 209 
 
 condition of use, and is barred by any flagrant mis- 
 use of what is otherwise rightly possessed. Property 
 is constituted by law ; where there is no law, actual 
 or implicit, there is no property strictly so called. 
 But law claims in this, as in other matters, to act 
 with absolute freedom for the general good. It is 
 held to be for the general good that the rights of 
 property should be left as unconstrained as may be. 
 But they are left unconstrained to the performance 
 of duty, on the part of those who hold them, because 
 it is held to be for the general good that they should 
 be so, because it is believed that this furnishes the 
 best stimulus and security for their use. It remains 
 none the less true that the principle and condition, on 
 which the rights of property are secured by law, is 
 that they should be used for the public good. 
 
 We feel use to be an element in possession. A man 
 scarcely realizes that he has property until he has 
 used it. There is a far more real and genuine posses- 
 sion on the part of those who use their property than 
 on the part of those who neglect it. As the sustain- 
 ing power of God in creation carries on the creative 
 force itself, so the use which realizes possession is often 
 scarcely distinguishable from the labour which creates 
 it. Property is a living right, existing in its exercise. 
 It should be the occasion of the constant putting forth 
 
 P 
 
2IO CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 of force ; it should be tlie sphere of wise design and 
 energetic work, the field for the development of all 
 the faculties of that personality to which it is attached. 
 And further, as we have implied, use in this relation 
 means use for good, use for the good of others. 
 Here, again, we feel that true use makes true pos- 
 session. A spendthrift can scarcely ever be said to 
 possess the wealth, which he allows to slip through 
 his fingers in purposeless waste, nor a miser to have 
 any property in that which lies idle in his idle hands. 
 True possession implies use, and use for good. And 
 this is not only the last realization, but the duty and 
 privilege of property. It is its duty. The man who 
 owns what has cost labour, and does not labour with 
 it, is false to the principle on which he lives. The 
 man who owns what is the outcome of the working 
 of the spirit of fellowship and good will, or the direct 
 bequest of love, and does not use in love and in good 
 will what they have given, commits a distinct and 
 undoubted wrong against those from whom he has 
 received what he calls his own. Property carries with 
 it, not the exemption from labour, but the tradition 
 and the duty of labour. Is it not lawful for me to 
 do what I will with my own ? At least do — do 
 something. Do not let it rest and lie idle. It is your 
 own, it is a part of yourself. You are responsible for 
 
PROPERTY. 211 
 
 it, for its inaction and its inutility, not less than you 
 would be for dishonesty in gaining, or for wrong and 
 crime in using it. 
 
 It is a duty to use it for the good of others. And 
 this duty covers the whole field of its use. It is a 
 duty, and the duty, like all duties, is a spiritual 
 privilege. It is your own, a part of yourself, of the 
 personality which is consecrated by the possession of 
 God and of the Spirit which works everywhere and 
 always in love. And throughout, in every part of it, 
 you are in contact with the souls and bodies of men 
 who need, and who, through the true use of that which 
 you possess, may be satisfied and enriched. There is 
 a sacrifice demanded of the ease and unrestraint of 
 possession in the constant energies of use and help. 
 It may be that the duty of use may lead along a 
 harder road, and call upon you literally to sacrifice 
 and give up that which is your own. In some 
 measure this degree of sacrifice is required of all, who 
 have anything that they can call their own. All 
 property needs the initiatory sacrifice of the clear 
 gift of a part to God and to the purposes of love, 
 if the rest is to be filled in energetic labour, 
 and in helpful use with the spirit that consecrates 
 possession. 
 
 You, and all that you have, are His, Who owns you, 
 
212 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 in right of His creation. He will not possess you 
 except by your own gift of yourself And the object 
 of this gift is that you may be filled by the Spirit, 
 Which will use you for the fulfilment of the purposes 
 of the Eternal Love. 
 
 a 
 
XIL 
 ''GIVE ME MY PRICE." 
 
 Value has been said to be the central conception of 
 Political Economy. This practically means vaiue, the 
 that Political Economy regards commodities Sccon"' 
 
 ception, is 
 
 primarily, not as things produced, or as things determined 
 distributed, but as things exchanged. Justice Pffect"uai°"' 
 
 , , . , r» 1 11 • demand, and 
 
 IS the virtue oi exchange, and. exchange is final utility. 
 
 ° ° What is the 
 
 between persons. Value, however, seems to [^°J''of7hgse 
 be a matter of things, or of abstractions. '^^^' 
 Behind the things, then, and the abstract terms, we 
 have to find, between the persons who deal with the 
 one and are implicitly denoted by the other, what are 
 the just relations which involve and realize a true 
 conception of value. 
 
 For this purpose we will take three technical terms 
 of the economic theory of value, and examine what 
 are the human and moral facts that underlie them. 
 Value, in the technical sense, belongs to anything, the 
 
214 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 demand for which has caused its production by labour. 
 The cost of production fixes the price, but the cost of 
 production varies with the amount demanded and 
 accordingly produced. Thus, any demand which is 
 effectual, that is, which leads a man to be willing to 
 pay the price, helps to govern the price which is 
 paid. The price which any one is willing to pay for 
 any given commodity, is the result of a more or less 
 unconscious comparison of the relative worth to 
 himself of the satisfaction of his various needs and 
 desires. The exact comparative utility of a thing, 
 which fixes the price at which a man will buy it, is 
 called its final utility. 
 
 In the system of exchange every one is concerned, 
 both in supply and in demand, and is buyer and seller 
 in turn. Every one, therefore, has to be just, both as 
 buyer and as seller. The question is, do you give 
 what you ought, price for commodity, and commodity 
 for price ? Price is the cost of production. Supply 
 furnishes the commodity which meets the effectual 
 demand. What ought we to give as cost of pro- 
 duction ? With what ought we to meet the effectual 
 demand ? and what is the moral bearing of the 
 comparison of our various needs and of the idea of 
 final utility ? 
 
 1. We may adopt the language of Political Economy 
 
" GIVE ME MY price:' 215 
 
 SO far as to say, that what we ought to give as the 
 price of a commodity is the cost of its produc- ^ ^^^^ ^^ 
 tion. But we must give our own meaning to p'^''^^^^^"- 
 the term, and see what is the cost of production, the 
 human cost, the moral cost. Cost of production, in 
 the sense of Political Economy, includes, as elements 
 that enter into it, rent,^ interest, earnings of manage- 
 ment, and wages of labour. We may say that the re- 
 presentatives of the first three of these are fairly well 
 able to take care of themselves, and that the conscience 
 of the buyer has principally to concern itself with the 
 price paid for a commodity, in so far as it affects the 
 wages of the labour that has produced it. If the de- 
 mand for cheap goods presses at all, its pressure will, 
 sooner or later, be most heavily felt by the labourer. 
 In any case, if we keep the wages of labour in view, 
 we shall be considering the typical case of pressure on 
 the producer. Earnings of management are only the 
 wages of another kind of labour. Interest is the fruit 
 of past labour. Rent is in part the interest on an 
 investment, in part the wage of management or 
 direction ; and in so far as it is neither of these, it 
 can obviously best afibrd to submit to pressure. We 
 shall therefore keep the variations in wages which 
 
 ' According to strict economic theory rent should not be included, 
 but cf. Toynbee, " Industr. Rev.," pp. 137, 138. 
 
2i6 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 follow on variations in price as the main point to be 
 considered. 
 
 The broad statement of our duty in the matter is 
 simple enough. It is to see that the price we pay 
 for things affords fair wages to those whose labour 
 produces them. The question what is a fair wage, 
 we need not here consider. If we come to discuss the 
 matter with those who receive the wages, there are 
 differences of opinion, but they are differences which 
 could be solved in mutual agreement. 
 
 The practical difficulty of doing our duty is, how- 
 ever, quite different from this. It lies in the fact that 
 we do not come face to face with those for whose 
 labour we, nevertheless, help to fix the wages or the 
 price. Our immediate duty is to give the price to 
 which the immediate seller is entitled. The imme- 
 diate seller generally sees that we do this. But the 
 immediate seller is not equally careful of the interests 
 of those who stand behind him. We do not know 
 what falls to them, and especially we do not know 
 what wages the actual workers have received. I wish 
 to press this point. In a moral consideration of prices 
 it is, at present, the main point — we do not know. We 
 do know that working men and women, on the 
 average, get more nearly what they ought to than 
 they did fifty years ago. This is a very good thing 
 
" GIVE ME MY PRICE r 217 
 
 to know, as far as it goes; but it does not go far. 
 When you are dealing with millions of human 
 beings, an average may satisfy the intelligence, but 
 it will not satisfy the conscience. And, though we 
 know that the average workman receives more than 
 he used to receive, we have no assurance that he 
 receives what he ought to receive, what we and he, 
 if we came face to face, should consider to be his 
 due. We do not know the average workman or 
 the life he lives. When we go into a shop to buy 
 cheap goods, we don't think about him. And yet 
 we buy him, and buy him cheap still, in spite of 
 encouraging statistics. In a general way we do 
 know that there are many industries where men 
 and women are overworked and underpaid. But we 
 do not know which they are. It is a plain point of 
 private duty not to buy of any dealer, whose supply 
 we know to rest on a system of labour underpaid and 
 oppressed. But the few cases in which we know this 
 are nothing to the mass. We do know, thank God, 
 of dealers and manufacturers, whose business is 
 managed on principles which make it a privilege to 
 deal with them. But these, again, are nothing to the 
 mass. We do not know the mass. Is there no duty 
 to know ? If any force of public opinion demanded 
 that we should know, the knowledge would be ours. 
 
2i8 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 If the spirit of inquiry into the matter were once 
 roused, light would be let in on the dark places, where 
 men do wrong which they scarcely acknowledge to 
 themselves, and make the mass of the buying public 
 partakers in injustice, if not against their will, at least 
 without their knowledge. 
 
 Are there any real reasons, which are not bad 
 reasons, why the essential facts should not be known ? 
 Why should it not be matter of common knowledge 
 and notoriety, at the price of what rate of wages we 
 purchase the cheapness of our goods, except that there 
 is no common desire to know facts, with whose moral 
 significance the common conscience does not care to 
 concern itself ? And yet, if we may know and do not 
 know, we are partakers in any injustice that is done, 
 and that not against our will, but with it. No doubt, 
 with any amount of knowledge on the subject made 
 available, injustice and wrong would have their lurk- 
 ing places still ; but, at least, we should not, in the 
 execution of an obvious social duty, be faced with the 
 impossibility, from blank and absolute ignorance, of 
 doing anything else but neglecting it. Our neglect 
 would not rise up against us now and then, with crying 
 facts of misery and degradation. Will it not rise up 
 one day against every one of us, with a cry which shall 
 be in itself a condemnation ? We ought to give the 
 
" GIVE ME MY price:' 219 
 
 cost of production; we ought to be able to see the lives 
 which produce what we buy at the nicely calculated 
 price of, say, 2s. llfd ; we ought to see the cost — the 
 cost of life, the cost of pain, the cost of crime. It is 
 one part of the matter to get nearer to the lives of 
 those who work. Then we can see what low wages 
 mean ; we can quicken pity and sympathy into 
 indignation, and nerve them into the resolution that 
 will bear fruit, through work and self-denial, in our 
 own lives and surroundings. It is another part of the 
 matter that it should belong to the credentials of a 
 trade that the wages it pays should be known, and 
 the conditions under which its labour is carried on 
 should be open to inspection and verification. 
 
 We are no longer to be scared by the fear that any 
 rise of wages will be followed by an increase of popu- 
 lation which will absorb it. We know that education, 
 and the advance of wages themselves, the gain of self- 
 respect, and the subjection to the better influences of 
 morality and religion, cause a rise in what Political 
 Economists have rather curiously called the standard 
 of comfort, and that better wages mean a better life. 
 " The standard of comfort " is a phrase that stands for 
 a varying rate of improvement in the ideal of the 
 working class, as to the life with which they will be 
 content. It might mean, without any forcing of the 
 
220 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 words, the ideal of a tolerable life, which those who 
 buy should be content to provide for those who work. 
 The force of all that I say here depends on the belief, 
 that if those who buy saw the price in pain and 
 degradation of their cheap enjoyment and convenience, 
 they would submit to inconvenience, sacrifice what 
 had ceased to be a joy, and live lives of less material 
 comfort, rather than purchase ease or pleasure at the 
 price of wrong, and that man, face to face with man, 
 if only one desires that each shall have his due, will 
 agree on what is due when all is done. 
 
 2. It may seem as if we turned to the duties of 
 2. Effectual another economic class, when we ask what 
 ought to be supplied to meet demand. In 
 fact, as we have said, we are all, in one way or 
 another, sellers as weU as buyers. Even those who 
 live on the interest of money invested have some 
 responsibility for the choice of the industry from 
 whose profits they draw their income. Either they 
 are justly paid for something, or they are unjustly 
 paid for nothing. No doubt there is a great difference, 
 both in the manner and in the degree in which this 
 duty presses on difierent classes of the community. 
 But no member of any class can afibrd to be secure 
 that his share of the duty is slight and inappreciable, 
 until he has considered in what the duty consists 
 
" GIVE ME MY price:' 221 
 
 of those who supply the demand for any com- 
 modity. 
 
 Political Economy deals only with effectual demand. 
 The distinction between effectual and ineffectual 
 demand suggests three different spheres of obligation. 
 
 You are responsible, in so far as you contribute to 
 the supply of any commodity, for seeing that the buyer 
 gets what he asks for and can see that he secures. 
 Even here, where interest and duty coincide, the 
 operation of the economic force is not always certain, 
 and there is room for moral motives to come into 
 play, to supplement the working of the economic 
 machinery. Supply aims at meeting the main mass 
 of the demand, such as it is. But demand is not an 
 indiscriminate mass, it is not all equally intelligent, or 
 equally blind ; and dealers often succeed in lowering 
 themselves to the level of a stupid and undiscerning 
 machine, by declining to take into account any indi- 
 vidual variations from the average and uninstructed 
 demand. This tendency is not only stupid and 
 mechanical, it is wrong. It demoralizes, because it 
 dehumanizes industry and trade ; it deprives it of 
 its character as an intercourse between the members 
 of a community of moral and spiritual beings ; it 
 degrades all those who play any part in a system 
 which declines to rise to the human level. It is our 
 
222 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 duty, in suppljdng demand, to be keen to discern 
 what it is best to demand and to supply ; to be open 
 to see distinctions between intelligent need and blind 
 and habitual fashion, to learn from the one, and to 
 educate the other. 
 
 But demand, which is supposed to be effectual, 
 often asks for what it cannot see that it secures. 
 Here there is a wide range for the working of con- 
 science. The division of labour has been so rapid, 
 and has become so multitudinous, that scarcely any 
 individual, however well-informed, can understand the 
 processes, or judge the results of the industries of 
 whose products he makes use. A man may know 
 very well what he wants, and yet not know how to 
 see that he gets it. If we leave out of account all 
 tricks of the trade, all devices for seeming to give 
 what we do not give, and deceiving the eye of the 
 ordinary man — devices of whose dishonesty there can 
 be no question — there remains, in the supply of a 
 demand which is supposed to be effectual, a wide 
 difference between conscientious and unconscientious 
 trade. Suppose a dealer to have got past the point, 
 at which he can bribe his conscience with the neces- 
 sity of doing what others do, as though thieving and 
 murder went by fashion; he may still, avoiding 
 obvious dishonesty, fall far short of the standard 
 
" GIVE ME MY PRICE.'' 223 
 
 which we expect to be attained by the man whom 
 we call a good and trustworthy tradesman. We call 
 a man trustworthy who knows what we want of him 
 as well as we do, but who, knowing how to give it, 
 and whether he gives it or not, a great deal better 
 than we do, does give it, and acts as what he is, 
 trustee for his customers. Industrial organization 
 has become too complex for it to be possible for a 
 customer to know for himself, in every instance, that 
 he is getting what he wants, what he says he wants, 
 what he is known to want. Either the man who 
 supplies it must see that he gets it, or — what is the 
 alternative ? The alternative is, that we fall, more 
 or less insensibly, into the condition, in which we 
 cheat each other, with no better excuse than that we 
 know we cheat each other, and acquiesce in it. We 
 " not only do such things, but take pleasure in them 
 that do them." The currency of morals is debased. 
 No one is supposed to do really and thoroughly 
 what he says he does, to make, to the best of his 
 ability, what he professes to make. It is taken for 
 granted that we take each other in to a moderate and 
 decent degree. Excellence, and the very idea of an 
 aim at perfection, tend to disappear and die away. 
 Our standard is not what is just — not what I who 
 sell, or you who buy, think to be just, but what I 
 
224 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 who sell can decently pretend to be just ; while you 
 who buy laugh in your sleeve, and contentedly pay 
 a price, which you know to be lower than that which 
 would purchase sound and good ware, because, though 
 it exceeds the value of the poor and second-rate 
 production you receive, it does not exceed it by 
 more than, in the present state of morals, you must 
 reasonably expect. Effectual demand is an imaginary 
 thing. There is a wide borderland between demand 
 that is really effectual to secure what it demands, and 
 demand that is ineffectual altogether. 
 
 And what of this — the ineffectual demand ? If we 
 could picture it, if we could envisage it in any pre- 
 sentation of facts, and they need not be imagined, 
 what a satire it would be on the working of the 
 perfect economic machine ! There rises, indeed, from 
 either side in the great exchange, from buyer and 
 seller alike, an ineffectual cry for help that is not 
 given, for hope that is not to be fulfilled. If it could 
 be fulfilled ! If most men would strive, as some men 
 do, to give their fellow-men their price, life for life, 
 to take the life that is given them, such as it is, and, 
 grateful for its joy and its blessing, to render back 
 their best — the best service that they can give by 
 their own work and trade — to the lives of others, 
 what quickening would there be of the lives and 
 
" GIVE ME MY PRICED 225 
 
 energies of all, as they felt exchange to become a 
 living transaction, a spiritual privilege ! We want 
 we know not what. As in prayer to God we stretch 
 out the hands of a blind and speechless supplication 
 for gifts and blessings beyond the wishes we can frame 
 in words, so the unspoken prayer goes out to our 
 fellow-men ; only there is no hearing ear, no wisdom 
 to construe, no heart to satisfy our need. There is 
 an ineffectual demand, vocal enough to be effectual, 
 if we would listen and would answer, for truth and 
 soundness and solidity, for vigour and grace and 
 beauty, for useful and trustworthy help in work 
 and in its product. To make this demand effectual, 
 the motive of self-interest will never avail. There is 
 an appeal, as of one blind and dumb, from those who 
 know not to those who know, to which charity and 
 justice alone can give the answer — justice whi(ii acts 
 without regard of consequence, and charity that loves 
 to give without reward. 
 
 But here we pass into another region. The view 
 which we have taken of the human cost of production, 
 of the delusion of effectual, and the pathos of in- 
 effectual demand, leads to a different way of looking 
 at what we see to be the exchange of life for life. 
 
 3. Your demand, say the Political Economists, 
 the demand which you succeed in making effectual, 
 
 Q 
 
226 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 which helps to determine the cost of production, by 
 ^ affecting the amount which, at any given 
 utility. ^Qg^^ ^'^ l^g demanded, is itself the result of 
 a kind of unconscious competition in your own life 
 between different objects of desire. The price you 
 will give measures the exact comparative utility, 
 the final utility of the thing you buy to you. 
 There they stand over against you, the human souls 
 and bodies that toil and suffer to produce for you. 
 To which will you beckon ? Whose product will you 
 choose? Which will you count worthy of the 
 sacrifice of the rest? Which is the thing that has 
 final utility for you ? Final utility ! The words have 
 an ominous ring. As you weigh your pleasures and 
 conveniences one against another, you are dealing 
 with the produce of human life and toil and pain. 
 Weigh it well, and think whether, in this conflict 
 between various desires, there be no room for a desire 
 to see those who serve you, for this pleasure or for 
 that, themselves in the enjoyment of some pleasure in 
 their life. 
 
 In the final choice, even now, is not this worth 
 weighing and taking into account — I do not say 
 whether your ease is purchased at the cost of some 
 perfection in the work by which you pay for what 
 you get, but whether your variety of comforts is not 
 
•* GIVE ME MY price:' 227 
 
 bought by paying for each at such a price as gives no 
 comfort to those who furnish them ? May you not 
 be demanding, at the one end, a payment for your 
 work in wages and in ease, such as to enable you, at 
 the other end, to keep up a lively competition between 
 the trades which minister to your ease, and in whose 
 products you take out your payment ? You are 
 measuring, in fact, not merely as it seems to you, the 
 comparative worth to yourself of this or that gratifi- 
 cation or advantage, but the comparative and final 
 utility of yourself, and your own life, and your com- 
 plete enjoyment, as against the selves and lives of those 
 on whose labour you live. The mass of the demands 
 and desires which you are matching one against 
 another, to see which you can afford to gratify, make 
 up the price which you demand for yourself The 
 subdi^'ision in the mass, in the allotment of reward 
 for the supply of one element after another of your 
 comfort and enjoyment, marks your answer to the 
 demand which meets you from soul after soul that 
 labours and suffers for you — "Give me my price." 
 And one after another may add, as he goes down to 
 death, " A goodly price, that I was prized at of them/* 
 
XIII. 
 THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 
 
 Political Economists draw a distinction between 
 _ . productive and unproductive labour which, 
 
 The distinc- ^ ■"■ 
 
 productil^r" ^'^ stated with some unnecessary paradox, 
 ductive has given rise to a good deal of fruitless 
 
 labour -~ 
 
 tion concern 
 ing con- 
 sumption. 
 
 better stated controvcrsv. The true upshot of the con- 
 as a distinc- "^ ^ 
 
 tention of the Economists may perhaps be 
 
 stated in the form of the proposition that 
 
 luxury is not good for trade. In any case, for the 
 
 purpose of economic morals the distinction can be 
 
 best expressed as a distinction between productive 
 
 and unproductive consumption. 
 
 Consumption is at once the end and the beginning 
 
 Consump- of a cvclc of ccouomic events. Consump- 
 tion IS the "^ '■ 
 
 andJKd tion is the end of production, exchange, 
 o economic ^^^ dlstributiou : everything is produced 
 in order that it may be consumed, is exchanged in 
 order that it may be consumed, is distributed in 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 229 
 
 order that it may be consumed. The whole process 
 ends in the consumer. And the consumer, on the 
 other hand, is the beginning of the process. He is 
 able to produce because he has consumed. His 
 production is the use which is served by his 
 consumption, its issue and effect. We have to 
 consider what ought to be the efi'ects of the con^ 
 sumption of wealth. 
 
 We have observed that competition between our 
 own desires, between the diflerent products which 
 feed and minister to a well-provided life, tends to 
 force down the standard of comfort of the various 
 industries which have each to produce at the lowest 
 possible price, in order to enable their own product 
 to stand its chance. This consideration what is the 
 
 moral rank, 
 
 belongs to the morals of exchanore. The with respect 
 
 o o to their re- 
 
 main duty, however, of the consumer, as ferent kinds 
 
 ofconsump- 
 
 consumer, is to rate the respective values tion? 
 of the different ways of consuming wealth, not with 
 a view to the conditions precedent to their supply, 
 but with a view to the consequences of the different 
 forms of consumption themselves. 
 
 There are three obvious forms of motive to con- 
 sumption. We may consume wealth on ourselves, 
 we may consume it in further production, or we may 
 consume it in help or pleasure to others. We 
 
230 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 have to estimate the moral value of each of these 
 three. 
 
 We must first consider their relation to one another. 
 What a man consumes for the satisfaction of his own 
 desires may still be so consumed as to forward 
 production and to help others. In any life a certain 
 minimum of provision for self is needed to maintain 
 the man in efiiciency as a productive machine, or 
 as an organ of help. Again, things consumed in 
 assisting further production are so consumed, in 
 great part, for the personal gain of the man who 
 devotes them to this purpose. His motive may be 
 to enrich the provision for his own life, or for that 
 of his family; or the personal motive may take 
 another shape, namely, the gratification and pleasure 
 felt in the energy of production itself And the use 
 of wealth in production generally serves a helpful 
 purpose, and may be dictated by a helpful spirit. 
 Lastly, wealth devoted to the express purpose of 
 the help of others will help production, in so far as 
 it helps producers, and will minister a high kind of 
 personal pleasure to him who must still be considered 
 as primarily and by initiative the consumer. 
 
 These considerations will suggest the special lines 
 of duty in each kind of consumption. We shall take 
 the different kinds in the inverse order to that in 
 which we have mentioned them. 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 231 
 
 1. It is plain that the duty of help is the dominant 
 motive of the three. The moral purpose of ^ 
 
 ■^ ^ 1. Consump- 
 
 the whole economic system is mutual help, Sthin 
 and the moral end of the life of the 
 individual man is to live for the good of others. 
 But, apart from the influence of the law of help 
 on the production he assists, and on his individual 
 expenditure, every man is plainly bound to devote 
 a certain amount of wealth to the direct purposes 
 of help. This is, perhaps, an easy thing to do, but 
 it is not an easy thing to do well. Help to the 
 helpless is simple and straightforward enough — to 
 those who are helpless from the weakness of infancy 
 or age, or from disease, or from misfortune. But, 
 until we arrive at the impossible ideal of a perfectly 
 working economic life, there will always be number- 
 less cases calling for help by need, and yet in which 
 the wrong kind or degree of help will only foster 
 helplessness as a disease. Often men come, for a 
 time at least, to a helpless condition from a shifting 
 of the centre, or the market, of an industry, or from 
 some cause in which they are not to blame ; often 
 from intemperance, or idleness, or vice in themselves, 
 or in some member of their family; often from a 
 complication of moral and economic causes, since 
 the effect of the latter is soonest felt by those 
 
232 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 who have some moral or physical disqualification. 
 And it is in this great variety of cases, certain to 
 be always arising, certain to exist — if we don't see 
 them, they exist unseen — in which it is difficult really 
 to help. The immediate need may, and must be 
 relieved. But Political Economists have rightly 
 suggested the caution, though the caution has often, 
 unfortunately, stood as a substantive principle and 
 acted as an excuse for indifference, that to let people 
 live on help is to teach them to be helpless. The 
 difficulty is one to be met in detail. It cannot be 
 sponged out by any general statement; it is only 
 shirked by reckless abstention from almsgiving, or by 
 a reckless resort to it. But two principles suggest 
 themselves as guides, where the obligation is once 
 seen or felt to help in some way. 
 
 This obligation must stand first. It is perfectly 
 certain that there are individual cases of want, 
 resulting from inevitable causes or from vice, in the 
 reach of every one of us. The range of every single 
 individual includes cases enough to employ to the full 
 his help-giving power. The help which he does not 
 give is not given. There is a gap left in the moral 
 provision for the needs of man. No one can fill your 
 place. He has enough to do to fill his own. 
 
 But when the main obligation is recognized, to find 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 233 
 
 out who there is within our reach whom we can help 
 — and modern means of communication give charity 
 a very long arm — to pass by no opportunity for help 
 where help can be given, there remain two considera- 
 tions by which to be guided. First, the truth which 
 underlies the caution of the economists. The man 
 whom you help has got to be himself a help-giving 
 and a producing animal. Unless you help him to 
 this, your help is not worth much. If you merely 
 give a selfish satisfaction to your own feeling of com- 
 passion, you give an anodyne to conscience, but you 
 do not obey its behests. You have helped the "man 
 as little as you could, to help him at all, and you may 
 have given him, with your help, evil which will more 
 than outweigh it in value. The mere giving of 
 money to those who ask for it is help of this kind. 
 It has helped to create a class of professional impos- 
 tors, who practise as a trade the appeal to sensi- 
 bilities which are too delicate to enable us to pass 
 by pain, but not too delicate to enable us to feed and 
 foster the vice which multiplies pain a thousandfold. 
 You have got to give help of such a kind, and in such 
 a way as will put the man you help in the way of 
 himself becoming helpful, a useful and productive 
 member of society. There are associations formed all 
 over the country for carrying on the work of this 
 
234 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 discriminating charity, which helps by giving work, 
 or by sending men where they may get work. These 
 associations are often blamed for the mechanical and 
 imperfect way in which they do their work. Let us 
 first see that their work is the work that needs to be 
 done, and then our second guiding principle will show 
 how we ourselves can help to remedy its defects. 
 
 The obvious defect of a society or an organization 
 in the work of charity is that it wants personality. 
 Is not this partly because it wants persons ? An 
 overworked and insufficiently manned organization 
 is sure to become mechanical in its action. The 
 organization is nowhere adequate in size or 'personnel 
 to the work it has to do in any district. Reinforce- 
 ments of workers are wanted to make the machine more 
 complete, and to convert it into a living organism 
 instinct with the spirit of a full and vigorous life, 
 of an individual sympathy which need not be less 
 tender or less real, because it operates with the 
 conscious power of a corporate existence. Personal 
 help is needed in another way. Personal help must 
 be always at work, to feed and supplement the action 
 of these societies and organizations, local or general. 
 Your help, even if you help through a society, should 
 be your own. Your own sympathy, as well as your 
 own self-denial, should find vent in it. You yourself 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 235 
 
 should enjoy in it the personal privilege and the 
 personal pleasure of help. Your support of any insti- 
 tution for help should be stimulated by some personal 
 contact with those who need, and your personal work 
 should not be missed, in the absence of your contribu- 
 tion to the corporate work of knowledge which you 
 alone can give, and of the living sympathy which 
 helps to inform the organization with its true and 
 spiritual life. 
 
 Help, then, should be help, not to the passing 
 need only which excites your pity, but to the man 
 who needs — needs to be made himself a productive 
 and a helpful man. And it should be personal, giving 
 to you the personal pleasure of charity, the employ- 
 ment of your own spiritual faculty of mercy and 
 kindness, the use of the opportunities which you, and 
 you alone, can use. 
 
 2. The teaching of the Political Economists has 
 favoured the consumption of wealth in assist- 
 
 *■ 1. Consump- 
 
 ing further production. This tendency of the ^°"i°h in 
 
 11 . , , 1 . production. 
 
 science has been, m part, a natural outcome 
 of the philosophy with which it was commonly asso- 
 ciated, a philosophy which was apt to lose sight of 
 the reality of things and persons, in the analysis of 
 the relations by which they were constituted, to let 
 history not merely contribute to, but supplant defini- 
 
236 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 tion, and which was accordingly content to view the 
 economic system of human life as a system of means 
 without any end. If we attempt to follow this 
 tendency in our view of economic life, we feel as if 
 we were gradually getting lost amidst the whirling 
 wheels of some vast and complicated piece of 
 machinery, started we know not why, working we 
 know not for what end, subordinating the spiritual 
 energy and interest of life to a blind and all-absorbing 
 mechanical routine. Wealth is to be devoted to pro- 
 duction, and the wealth so produced to production 
 again, and so on for ever and for ever, in an endless, 
 weary round. If this is all, we feel inclined to ask, 
 why produce at all ? Who is the gainer by the whole 
 proceeding ? That there is a truth whose perception 
 prompts this rebellion, is implied in the view of 
 economic life and of consumption which we have 
 taken. Production is an end in itself, not as produc- 
 tion, but as an essential feature in a system of mutual 
 help. The spirit of mutual help, or of love, is the end 
 in itself of human life, economic or otherwise. In 
 so far, therefore, as these two can be considered as 
 separate from one another, production and help, 
 production is subordinate to help. And it is quite 
 possible to lose sight of this subordination, to pursue 
 production as though it were an end in itself, and not 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 237 
 
 to consider whether its purpose may not be best 
 answered by what does not seem to forward its 
 progress. There are uses of wealth, both for the help 
 of need and for the satisfaction of personal desires, 
 which, while they seem to rob production of resources, 
 do really and finally aid, more than any direct pro- 
 duction, the production of that which is best worth 
 producing, the mutual help which all production is 
 intended to forward and secure. 
 
 But it remains true, nevertheless, that production, 
 as an end, plays its part in all the uses of wealth, and 
 that a directly productive purpose should assign its 
 destination to some considerable proportion of any 
 resources that a man has at his command. The safe- 
 guards, against an abuse of the recognition of this 
 productive purpose, are the acknowledgment that 
 beyond production there is always the final purpose of 
 help, and that, accordingly, the aim of maintaining pro- 
 duction must not be allowed to defeat in detail that 
 which is its general end ; and, beyond this, the percep- 
 tion that the production which any man forwards, 
 is a part of the life in which he has to live out his 
 own soul and realize his own desires. No man must 
 allow himself to be degraded into a mere productive 
 machine ; no man must be driven into actions which 
 his better nature disavows, or drawn away from 
 
238 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 the fulfilment of desires which his better nature 
 prompts, by the supposed necessity of increasing 
 or maintaining a certain rate of production. The 
 whole nature, the self whose desires are the motive 
 power of life, sets to the processes of production 
 a limit and a standard. They must rise to the 
 standard and observe the limit which are involved 
 in this moral necessity, that the productive machinery, 
 which is moved or aided by the will, should take 
 its place as part of the life of an eternal being 
 with eternal ends. The individual will and mind, 
 the individual presence and sympathy should make 
 itself felt, so far as may be, throughout the range of 
 the industry it feeds, and the character and extent 
 of the industry should be such as to make this a 
 possibility. 
 
 3. Lastly, we have to consider that kind of con- 
 3. Consump- sumptiou of Wealth to which the term con- 
 
 tion of 
 
 tITsSisfac- sumption properly belongs — the use of it to 
 sonai desires. Satisfy the pcrsonal desires of a man. Pro- 
 duction has its end in consumption to meet individual 
 needs. Help is help to individual lives. In being 
 consumed, wealth loses itself in the personality whose 
 life it feeds, to emerge again in productive and helpful 
 activities. Here is the end, the existence of lives 
 which labour in production for helpful ends — the 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 239 
 
 laborious life lived in love and help for other men. 
 In the support of this, wealth finds its true destina- 
 tion. And it is here that the distinction comes in 
 between productive and unproductive, helpful and 
 unhelpful consumption. The test by which every 
 man has to try his own consumption of wealth is 
 the question, whether it makes him a more useful, 
 a more helpful person. There are many ways of 
 consuming wealth that we should be sorry to see 
 banished from the world, which this principle seems 
 to condemn. It is scarcely necessary to set aside the 
 idea that brain labourers are less productive con- 
 sumers than hand labourers, or that lawyers or 
 schoolmasters or clergymen do not reproduce, if they 
 do their work rightly, in visible and tangible results^ 
 the worth of what they consume. Perhaps the arts 
 which minister to the beauty and the grace of life 
 are in more danger from a superficial misapplication 
 of the principle. We must take life in its highest 
 and fullest meaning, as that which consumption has 
 to feed. Life includes enjoyment and leisure, as well 
 as work. Work, with no intervals but those of 
 torpor, is not life. Joy is a part of the very meaning 
 of life. And yet it will remain a severe test by 
 which to try our expenditure upon our personal 
 pleasures, to set against the services they enable us 
 
240 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 to render with a brighter mind and a more vigorous 
 will, the good which might otherwise have been done 
 by a different use of the same resources. There is 
 such a thing as waste of wealth, and worse than 
 waste. If that which has cost labour is wantonly 
 destroyed, it is wasted. If it is absorbed in the 
 joyless pleasures of those who are weary of pleasure, 
 if it is spent on enjoyments that do not quicken or 
 gladden soul and body for their work, that contract 
 the heart and deaden the sympathies, it is wasted. 
 Even here it is more than wasted, but where it is 
 spent on sensual indulgence, on senseless dissipation, 
 and on vice, it produces indeed, for it ministers to 
 death and generates corruption — corruption which is 
 the slow process of a living death in the will whose 
 powers fail, in the mind whose judgment darkens, 
 in the heart, whose light is quenched by the mere 
 selfishness of sin — death in all the ghastl}^ horror 
 that overruns what was destined to be beautiful and 
 strong, in those who are the victims of luxury and 
 sin. Luxury as well as sin has its victims — lives, 
 souls, and bodies devoured by the mere selfish appetite, 
 which gluts itself with pleasures which it cannot 
 enjoy, and degrades to this vile use those who, in 
 being thus abused, are robbed of any human dignity, 
 shut out from any spiritual fellowship with those 
 
THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH. 241 
 
 whose lives they ought to serve, whose moral death 
 they do but disguise with semblances of joy, and 
 stamp with the condemnation of men who have made 
 men the ministers of sin. 
 
 Wealth should be consumed, and be consumed in 
 joy. Life, laborious and self-denying life, should be 
 graced with beauty and filled with many pleasures. 
 The highest is the pleasure of helpful life itself, the 
 pleasure of love. This can live even where the others 
 are denied. It can live a keener life for their denial, 
 as good can triumph over evil. But even in so living, 
 it will instinctively clothe itself with the lesser 
 pleasures which beset the path of purity and crowd 
 upon the heart of love. It will not scorn the beauty 
 of the home in which God has set it to work, the 
 marriage feast, or the lilies of the field, or the flowers 
 in the garden of the risen life. 
 
 ITITI7BRSirrl 
 
XIV. 
 COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION. 
 
 « Called to be saints."— 1 Cor. i. 2. 
 
 People often treat the religious or Christian view of 
 life, or of any practical question, as though 
 of theTalndy ^^ Were, not from the fault of the religious 
 person, but necessarily and in itself a partial 
 and one-sided view. There is the medical, and the 
 legal, and the scientific, and the political, and the 
 economic point of view; and there is also the religious 
 pqint of view. Each of them is partial and abstract, 
 that is to say, from each you look at a part of life, 
 or at one aspect only of the whole. The religious 
 point of view may be the most important, but it is 
 only one ; and to decide a practical question from the 
 religious point of view only, is like deciding whether 
 Scotland is a good country to live in from observation 
 of a single county, or from a study of one depart- 
 ment of its life — its agriculture, for instance, or its 
 local STovernment. 
 
COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION. 243 
 
 The ideal of saintliness brings before us a different 
 view of the relation of religion to the various depart- 
 ments of life, namely, that it is supreme — supreme, 
 not by excluding them all and claiming the whole 
 field for itself, but by including them within the 
 range of its own commanding principles. As Philo- 
 sophy among the sciences is the mistress and servant 
 of all, the source of their principles, the recipient of 
 their conclusions, weaving them all into the tissue of 
 the world's thought, in which, generation after gene- 
 ration, the feeling and experience of men takes 
 substantial spiritual shape, so is Religion among the 
 departments of practice and of life. The religious 
 motive is the only supreme motive, co-ordinating all 
 the rest, explaining their force and their variety, 
 solving their contradictions, fusing them into a har- 
 monious whole of perfect life. 
 
 And this has a bearing on the relation of Chris- 
 tianity to one class of questions, especially on what 
 may be called, in the widest sense of the term, social 
 questions — questions, i.e., which concern man's life as 
 a member of society. It is not merely that the Chris- 
 tian religion took shape in a society — a Church, and 
 that the principles laid down in the Bible about 
 that spiritual society apply, with necessary modifica- 
 tions, to any society ; it is not merely that the ideal 
 
244 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 Catholic Churcli is a model society, in which we 
 may learn the principles of social life for societies 
 which have not the same directly spiritual purpose. 
 There is more than this. The individual Christian 
 and Churchman is the subject of social duties, and if 
 Christ be in him of a truth, religion will pervade and 
 govern all his social life, and determine what his 
 social duties are^ and in what way they are to be 
 done. So that if — as I am assuming, and as S. Paul 
 states generall}' when he speaks of the Corinthians 
 or Romans as called to be saints— saintliness is a 
 thing of ovbT daily lives, and these daily lives include 
 social duties, there is, so to speak, a social aspect of 
 saintliness for us to study. And if among these social 
 duties there are, to take a narrower range, what we 
 call economic duties, then there is an economic side 
 to the saintly character. Christ comes to live and 
 energize in the soul of every Christian, and to show, 
 to manifest Himself in their fulfilment of the duties 
 of their lives. I am speaking to those who have their 
 share in the life of a great commercial city. In this 
 life, in our economic life, how is the saintly character 
 to be shown ? Do not think this is a paradoxical 
 question. A man who is a merchant, or a manu- 
 facturer, or a tradesman, or a mill hand, has got to be 
 a saint as a merchant, or a manufacturer, or a trades- 
 
COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION. 245 
 
 man, or a mill hand, or else not at all. You are not 
 going to exclude all these from the call to be saints. 
 You must ask, then, what effect does the call to be 
 saints have on the principles or practice of economic 
 life — a life in which we are all concerned, and either 
 do or neglect our duty, whatever our profession 
 may be. 
 
 Do we in this region do our duty ? Even if we 
 do, it will not be amiss to review some of the prin- 
 ciples on which we do it. A Christian's duty is to 
 " walk worthy of his vocation," and our vocation is 
 to be saints, and the most obvious social feature of 
 the saintly character is love. The saintly life is the 
 life that is governed by love — informed by love, 
 through the power of Christ Who dwells in us. Our 
 economic life exhibits two features, is governed by 
 two principles, one of which is on the face of it in 
 harmony, and the other on the face of it in conflict 
 with the Spirit of Love — co-operation and competition. 
 
 The system of our present economic life is a very 
 wonderful work of God — the system by which 
 
 •^ *' I. Economic 
 
 we men of every country and of every class systemof 
 
 T .1 ) 1 1 T • • 1 co-operation. 
 
 supply one another s needs, and administer 
 the resources of the earth. More than a hundred 
 years ago the study of it by a great Scotchman filled 
 his mind — and, as his ideas made way, the minds of all 
 
246 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 men — with wonder at the vast constructive power of the 
 motives which seem to be at work in it. Since Adam 
 Smith's time commercial life has grown more wonderful 
 almost every day. But is there anything in it more 
 wonderful than this, that whatever may be the motives 
 which have brought it into being, and which actuate 
 every member of the system, it is, as it stands, a vast 
 system of co-operation, a world-wide association for 
 mutual help of man by man, and that every detail in 
 it is, to every member of it, a channel, an occasion, an 
 opportunity of love. I am not saying — far from it — 
 that it is, as a matter of fact, entirely pervaded by a 
 spirit of good will ; but I do say that, throughout, its 
 machinery is fitted for the exercise of good will, because 
 it is, as it stands, a system of mutual help. 
 
 It is sufficiently obvious that, in so far as we all 
 contribute to a common stock of produce, we are 
 ''fellow-helpers one of another," each giving aid to 
 the rest in the struggle with the needs of life. When 
 men work together they can always do more than 
 when they work alone. Fellowship has a multiplying 
 power. And what is familiar to us under the name 
 of division of labour, as an agent in swelling incal- 
 culably the produce of human labour, is, in fact, the 
 principle of combination for the common end of in- 
 creasing the produce of labour, under one particular 
 
COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION 247 
 
 aspect of its working — under the aspect, namely, 
 of organization — building together vast multitudes 
 of individuals into an economic body, in which each 
 member has its own office for the promotion of the 
 life of the whole. What is in this system the condition 
 of the life of each individual ? He lives by feeding 
 the lives of others, by considering their needs, by 
 consulting their interests. He is dove-tailed into his 
 place in a spiritual fellowship. And he has before 
 him, at least as a possibility, to view himself as one 
 who lives for others, and works for others, and devotes 
 his thoughts, his energies, his life, every day to the 
 service of his fellows. It is not difficult for us to see, 
 though it may be difficult to feel, that, as members 
 of a vast society for joint production, we are devoted, 
 consecrated to the principle of mutual help. 
 
 Is it more difficult to see this if we look at our 
 place in the economic system as a system of exchange ? 
 What is the principle, the motive of exchange ? It is 
 that each party is the gainer by the process. Exchange 
 is the actual communication from man to man of the 
 fruit and result of that multiplied production which 
 comes of combination. According to the working of 
 this principle, each party in an exchange is giving a 
 benefit to the other. And if justice is the law of 
 exchange which assigns to each party his due, the 
 
248 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 question what is due is decided by a reference to a 
 common standard and a mutual understandinof, which 
 makes men conscious of a more intimate and more 
 spiritual fellowship than a common striving against 
 need, a common ministry to happiness and well-being, 
 a fellowship, namely, in right, a fellowship in con- 
 science, a fellowship with God in the knowledge of 
 what is just and good. 
 
 And if we look at our economic system as a system 
 of distribution of the produce of labour among those 
 who have had a share in producing it, by the foresight 
 and self-denial of past labour, by present labour of the 
 brain or of the hand, the conception of wages, of pay- 
 ment for service done, carries us into a region certainly 
 not more alien to the spirit of love. Of late here,^ 
 more than elsewhere, you have had to deal with those 
 kind of difficulties which bring out the fact that, in 
 the problem of distribution, man is dealing directly 
 with the vital needs of his fellow-man. Tenderness 
 and forbearance, charity and self-sacrifice, come into 
 play in these relations most of all, because they are 
 personal. And our present commercial troubles carry 
 at least one blessing with them, if they do away, in 
 some degree, with the evils incident to the large scale 
 system of industry which has come into vogue during 
 ^ In Dundee. 
 
COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION 249 
 
 the last hundred years^ by restoring a keener sense of 
 personal relation, a warmer kindness, a heartier fellow- 
 ship between those who have to divide the produce 
 of the labour, on which each has expended some portion 
 of that which goes to make up his life. Love is at 
 home wherever person has to do with person, living 
 soul with living soul, and that on which soul and body 
 live. 
 
 I have tried to draw out and to put forth how the 
 spirit of love and good will finds a natural sphere 
 for its activity in our present economic relations, under 
 the different aspects in which we commonly regard 
 them. I do not think you will be inclined to say that 
 I have gone beyond my record. 
 
 And yet you and I alike have surely been haunted 
 all along by the shadow of another thing that would 
 shape itself, in spite of us, out of the very materials 
 of which we were making our picture of love. Let 
 us look this ghost of facts in the face. 
 
 What we have been haunted by all along is a kind 
 of counter-statement of fact. At every turn 2. And yet, 
 
 . . . , at the iame 
 
 we have been inclined to interpose with time, a sys- 
 tem of com- 
 
 the fact of competition. Competition : the p«"^io"- 
 materials for the picture are so ample as to make it 
 difficult — it is fortunately needless — to draw it. We 
 know that our economic life is full of competition, we, 
 
250 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 and sometimes our consciences, are painfully conscious 
 of the fact. And yet this it is necessary to observe — 
 that competition is an essential part of our economic 
 life in every aspect of it which we have considered. 
 Competition is a productive power; it promotes 
 and stimulates every improvement in the productive 
 machinery. The rate of production w^ould not have 
 advanced, the quality of things produced would not 
 have risen in anything like the same degree without 
 it. Competition is of the very life of exchange ; it is 
 the very means by which that comparative utility of 
 products is gauged which gives each its value to the 
 buyer; it is the means by which the exact cost of pro- 
 duction is ascertained which is the limit of price to 
 the seller ; it is competition, again, which actually 
 does decide the rate of interest and the wages of brain 
 and hand labourers, which is the force at work in 
 distribution. There is far more than this that forms 
 part of the familiar picture. Strife, and reckless self- 
 interest, and the struggle for bare life between man 
 and man — these, too, follow like a shadow on the 
 common meaning of the word. There is false compe- 
 tition and true, good competition and bad, no doubt. 
 But I suppose our first and broad impression is, that 
 competition is an essential part of the economic 
 system, and that it will not bear much light ; that if 
 
COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION. 251 
 
 we set it, as a feature in life, face to face with the 
 saintly character, it would have reason to hide its 
 face and be ashamed. 
 
 Well, then, here stand these two broad, surface, 
 economic facts, features of our whole eco- xhe ideal 
 
 . r" J /• ii -\' f ' 1 of saintliness 
 
 nomic system, leatures 01 the liie m and says, at least. 
 
 Subordinate 
 
 by which we live — it is a system of co- competition 
 *' "^ to co-opera- 
 
 operation, it is a system of competition. "°"' 
 
 What does Christianity say to them ? Does it say, 
 " Of course, you must compete, but don't forget to 
 co-operate"? Does it say, "Don't carry competition 
 too far," or, " Let co-operation modify co-operation " ? 
 I don't think it says any of these things. If com- 
 petition is, as I believe it is, a real and useful, that 
 is, a helpful part of our economic life, Christianity 
 has not got to blink it, or to put it in a corner. 
 What I think Christian principle does say, is this : 
 Co-operation, fellow-help, is the dominant, competition 
 the subordinate principle. Mutual help for life is the 
 end and guiding principle of conduct in economic as 
 well as in all other matters. If, and in so far as 
 competition takes its place in a system of mutual 
 help, it is good. Wherever it runs counter to the law 
 of help, it is bad. This is the general — it may seem a 
 very general — principle ; but it is worth something. 
 These are things which have to do with the lives 
 
252 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 of every one of us every day. It is not for me to 
 say how far, or in what proportion, or in what rela- 
 tion these two motives, the instinct to co-operate, 
 and the instinct to compete, are mingled in your lives. 
 That is for you to say. All that I have laid down 
 is this : If all this region of your life has been 
 governed by the working of Christ in you, for the 
 love and help of men, thank God for His grace, and 
 for the consecration of your life, to-day, with a full 
 heart. If competition, or what comes of it, has been 
 either a region of your life left outside the influence 
 of religion, or if the word represents difficulties of 
 conscience, scruples, a sort of inarticulate remorse, 
 I believe that a guiding thread is to be found in 
 even so general a principle as this, that competition 
 is always a means, never an end, always a means to 
 more vigorous, more effectual, mutual help of man 
 by man, and never justifies a single violation of the 
 law of love. 
 
 This will mean, at least, that we must never shrug 
 our shoulders at the results of competition, or treat 
 them as though the working of this sacred principle 
 must not be interfered with. It is a means to an 
 end. If it is failing to attain the end, let us see 
 why our machine does not work, and try to make it 
 work better. 
 
COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION. 253 
 
 Again, does not this view of competition draw a 
 fairly clear distinction between the very ideas of true 
 and false competition ? Does not the true link itself 
 rather with the meaning of emulation, of rivalry in 
 good works, or, if you like, in good work, and the 
 false with strife and unregarded pain ; and cannot we 
 ourselves — at least, in our own sphere — draw the line 
 between the two ? If so, we must do it. 
 
 And, lastly, if you yourselves are at any time in any 
 degree sufferers by the working of this principle of 
 competition, does not this view of competition elevate 
 and dignify your loss ? You were paid for what you 
 did well at a fair price ; now others do it better, or at 
 a lower cost, and your suffering loss is an incident of 
 this gain to those you serve. It is your part, then, 
 to show the patience and humility of those who are 
 " called to be saints," to look how you may do better 
 work, or other work, which shall deserve its reward. 
 And if the days of prosperity have made it hard 
 to come down, hard to begin afresh, the lesson of 
 patience and humility is not less needed. It is not 
 less true in this region than others, that " those whom 
 God loveth He chasteneth." Let it be said of you as 
 it was said of the saints of old, "Though they be 
 punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full 
 of immortality. And having been a little chastised. 
 
254 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 they shall be greatly rewarded : for God proved them, 
 and found them worthy for Himself. As gold in the 
 furnace hath He tried them, and received them as a 
 burnt offering. And in the time of their visitation 
 they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among 
 the stubble." 
 
XV 
 
 THE PRACTICABILITY OF THE PRIN- 
 CIPLES OF RIGHT. 
 
 " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass 
 away." — S. Matt. xxiv. 35. 
 
 If we look at life as it is pictured in the New 
 Testament, and then at life as it is, the Contrast of 
 
 Christian 
 
 view must leave upon our minds the impres- and chris- 
 sion of an almost appalling contrast. tSe.^'^'''^" 
 
 On the one side is a system for the ordering of life, 
 a law, a code, a body of cogent and imperious prin- 
 ciples ; and on the other, a tangled and broken web, 
 disordered, and disdaining order, governed, or govern- 
 ing itself on lines that run counter to almost every 
 detail of that diviner plan. 
 
 On the one side we have such ideas as these, " It 
 is more blessed to give than to receive," " Bear ye 
 one another's burdens," " Submit yourselves one to 
 another," " I came into the world not to do My own 
 
256 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 will," and the example of Him "Who went about 
 doing good," and died upon the Cross; and on the 
 other, the spirit of competition, the ideal of indepen- 
 dence, and the worship of comfort and success. 
 
 The contrast may easily be heightened; neither 
 picture can be easily overdrawn. If you look first at 
 the ideal, then at the reality, it would almost seem 
 as though some mighty fiend had been at work, 
 ' trying how best he could produce a parody, a carica- 
 ture, a ghastly lampoon on Christianity. 
 
 Look closer at the belief and life of those who 
 profess the Faith, and we have the same contrast in 
 a smaller compass. Take the principles laid down 
 in the Sermon on the Mount, and see how many of 
 them are shelved and set aside. They are classed in 
 our minds as unpractical, because impracticable. We 
 do not trouble ourselves to give them a meaning; 
 they are so far away from the life we live. " Give to 
 him that asketh thee," " Love your enemies," " Lay 
 not up for yourselves treasure upon earth," " No man 
 can serve two masters," "Take no thought for your 
 life, what ye shall eat," "Judge not," "Enter ye in 
 at the strait gate." Who can say that his life is, 
 in theory even, governed by these ? At most, they 
 have some practical influence on what we are pleased 
 to call the spirit of our lives — as though His spirit 
 
PRACTICABILITY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT. 257 
 
 were not meant to take bodily and substantial shape. 
 Who was Himself '* the Word made flesh." The 
 teaching, the theory, the system, the principles of 
 Christianity, we leave to sound in our ears in the 
 parentheses of life ; to listen to them is the luxury 
 of our leisure, to make their music familiar, that it 
 may soothe our souls in death. But life, practical 
 life, the business and work of it, and the governing, 
 dominant, inexorable, authoritative principles of Christ 
 — Christianity and life — they are incompatible, they 
 must exist side by side, and modify each other, and 
 rub along as they may ; there can be no close union 
 between them, no submission of either to the other. 
 We do not say all this; but does the justification 
 of our practice come to less? Do not we who are 
 religious show, like the world at large, a glaring 
 contrast between life as it is and the morality of 
 Christ ? Do we not in effect turn upon God, and say, 
 " You made a mistake ; you sent Christianity into the 
 wrong world. In some other world, in some far 
 distant star, these laws of love will hold and rule, 
 and their eyes will ' see the King in His beauty.' 
 But here, in the stress and throng of struggling 
 life, love can only flourish like some exotic, nursed 
 through life in the warm and sheltered places of the 
 world " ? 
 
258 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 But is it true ? If the thing formed dared say to 
 practSihe Him that formed it, " Why hast Thou made 
 of liferasTt" me thus ? " and man lift up his voice against 
 
 is, necessi- 
 
 Indoffers'Se ^^^ Maker, could we make this our plea ? 
 ofwmtngor Look closer at the life that is about you, 
 
 reluctant _ 
 
 service. and SGC. 
 
 Science has had opened before it wonderful and 
 endless vistas in the realm of system and law, cor- 
 relation of force with force, interdependence of one 
 law with a thousand more, all world-wide in their 
 scope and unswerving in their operation. As little as 
 we can dream of a limit of space, or an end to the 
 possible perception of parts and movement within the 
 walls of the minutest atom, so little can we imagine 
 any limit to the endless analysis of law within law, 
 to the complexity of the play of interdependent forces 
 which penetrate the matter of the world. And yet 
 the wonder of this world of law is as nothing if we 
 set it side by side with that other world in which 
 we — we who analyze, and perceive, and wonder, and 
 adore — in which we more truly and more nearly 
 live. It is to this world that we must look, the 
 world of motives which sway the will and move 
 the heart, which animate and develop the society 
 in which we live, if we would judge how far life 
 admits the free operation of Christian principles. 
 
PRACTICABILITY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT 259 
 
 And these motives are as infinitely complex as the 
 society is which results from and embodies them. 
 What, for instance, are the forces which set any one 
 man in his place in society, and which keep him 
 th-ere ? How varied, how incalculable a mixture of 
 love and hate, of desire, and interest, and prejudice, 
 and fear, and hope, is brought to bear upon his life 
 as on a single point ! How wide is the range of 
 the motives which have put him where he is ! The 
 home affections which nurtured and coloured his 
 childhood and youth, the influences of fellowship 
 and friendship, the chance associations of place and 
 time, the self-interest of others which has advanced 
 him or kept him back, their generosity, their fancies, 
 their weaknesses, even their vices — all these are so 
 many attractive and repellent forces, which fix him 
 in his place in the moral universe, and set him his 
 work, and give him his fortune for life. They have 
 formed his character and determined his opportu- 
 nities. The life and personality of any single man 
 are example enough of the complexity of the motive 
 forces which play through that life of society which 
 we share. In this maze of conflicting motives, how 
 are Christian principles to be brought to bear ? 
 
 Well, take him as he stands, the individual man, 
 in the midst of this world, and, through all the con- 
 
26o CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 fusing variety of impulses which affect his position, 
 we can discern these two simple truths. He is there 
 to do some work for society, and his position is, as 
 it were, the payment which society gives him for his 
 work. He has work to do, and, in one form or 
 another, wages to receive. It follows from this, that 
 he has two alternative motives for his work — the 
 good of others, and his own gain. And though the 
 difference in the moral value of a life animated by 
 the one or the other be infinite, these two motives 
 will, as regards a great portion of his life, dictate 
 the same course of action. Generalize this statement, 
 and the conclusion is, that society as it is, is held 
 together by the joint or alternative action of two 
 motives — on the one hand a desire to do good work 
 for others, on the other hand by self-interest. Small 
 doubt the two produce different results in many ways ; 
 still less doubt that where they produce the same 
 result, it is externally, not morally the same. But, 
 externally, it is very largely the same result that 
 these two opposite forces of selfish and unselfish desire 
 are working out. 
 
 It may be said that, taking the life of society as 
 a whole, selfish motives have by far the larger share 
 in its organization, or it may be denied. Whether 
 it is so or not, as society stands, a man's selfish- 
 
PRACTICABILITY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT. 261 
 
 ness, if he is fortunate enough to have any work at 
 all, cannot easily make his life altogether n offers, at 
 
 1 TT • • 1 J. • ^^^^'^1 the 
 
 useless. He must ffive m order to receive, occasion of 
 
 " unselfish 
 
 The usefulness of the work done increases ^^^"'• 
 with the unselfishness of the motive that prompts it. 
 For instance, the love of work itself, apart from its 
 results, produces, as a matter of fact, better results 
 than the love of gain, and so on through the various 
 gradations of motive up to the highest. But even 
 at the lowest point, the collective selfishness, if it be 
 nothing more, secures that though a man may only 
 desire his own good, he cannot get it without doing 
 some good to others. Thus, not only is there a 
 general level secured of good done, from whatever 
 motive; but the result is this, that almost ever^^ 
 man, by the very necessities of his life, finds him- 
 self in a position in which he has immediate occa- 
 sion for the exercise of unselfishness. It is a small 
 matter that he has the occasion, no doubt ; he must 
 have the will to make a change in himself; but, 
 at least, he cannot plead that the life in which he 
 finds himself involved is at war with the principles 
 on which he is called to act ; that the world in 
 which he lives is no field for their operation. No 
 doubt the incoming of a higher spirit will make 
 great and visible changes in his outward practice ; 
 
262 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 but there is a practical body of work which he 
 has always been required to do, which offers itself 
 at once as the congenial and appropriate organism 
 for the new spirit to enter and to animate. There 
 are channels, ready made, through which the new 
 blood may flow ; there is the skeleton and frame- 
 work which may be clothed with the loveliness of 
 life. All is ready for the new spirit; as of old, 
 it may be said, "A body hast Thou prepared for 
 me." 
 
 I have supposed the case of a life of work in the 
 world, but governed by wholly selfish motives, to 
 exemplify, merely in an extreme case, the truth that 
 life affords a ready and open field for the exercise of 
 those higher principles which, at first sight, seem alien 
 from its general practice. Most of us have lived and 
 done our work, partly, at least, under more unselfish 
 impulses. Again, I have taken, as an instance of a 
 principle seemingly unworkable in the life of the 
 world, the one great leading Christian principle of 
 unselfishness, But what is true of one, may be shown 
 to be true of all. And my appeal is this : Do not 
 fear to let the highest principles of the teaching of 
 Christ rule in the common world of daily life. It is 
 a field in which they will be at home. 
 
 I do not say it will be easy to work them out 
 
PRACTICABILITY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT. 263 
 
 into practice ; it will not. But it is our plain duty 
 to do it ; it is a duty which we very largely neglect. 
 And we neglect it, to a great extent, because in our 
 hearts we believe it to be hopeless. If it is hope- 
 less, no doubt it becomes more and more so every 
 year ; and every fresh step in the complex organiza- 
 tion of society, every enlargement of the boundaries 
 of a city or an empire, every advance in trade, in 
 invention, in division of labour, makes the idea of 
 living a Christian life in the world more chime- 
 rical and absurd — if it is hopeless; but it is not. 
 It is not hopeless, because, by no mere fortunate 
 accident, but by the very law by which society lives, 
 its increasing organization only multiplies oppor- 
 tunities for the best and noblest life. As this or- 
 ganization advances, it becomes not less, but more 
 and more evidently true that no man lives by him- 
 self, or for himself, but takes his place in a vast and 
 intricate system of mutual help, in which he has his 
 own marked and peculiar office, not to win what he 
 can for himself, or to take what comes to him, and 
 then to make the best use of it he may, but to do 
 that which is given him to do, as a work for man 
 and for God. And if this view of life will fit itself, 
 as it assuredly will, to our present society, then here 
 is the field where Christian principles ought to be 
 
264 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 shown forth. Christ came Himself to live among 
 men ; His teaching affects profoundly all our relations 
 to our fellow-men ; it is in the life we live among 
 our fellow-men that we should be Christians, if any- 
 where. 
 
 But if it is plainly true that Christian principles 
 The occasion find their true field in modern life, with its 
 
 implies the ... . i r» 
 
 obligation, complcx Organization, its world-wide web of 
 thronging, anxious life, then here, not less than else- 
 where, the very highest Christian principles must be 
 authoritative and absolute. They cannot be occa- 
 sionally, or vaguely, or thoughtlessly followed. Our 
 adoption of them must be fearless, absolute, universal. 
 They must be governing principles, regardless of all 
 consequences but those which affect themselves and 
 their own working. We must follow them distinctly, 
 and with understanding of what they mean, and what 
 they involve, with that deliberate, careful discernment 
 which comes of a study of the principles of Christ, 
 and a desire to make them real hard facts to our- 
 selves and to others. Nothing less is the life of a 
 Christian, nothing less than the real desire, at all 
 costs, to understand and know the Mind of Christ for 
 lis, to follow the law and live the life of Christ, here 
 and now, where He has set our life, and given us our 
 work to do. " By their fruits ye shall know them." 
 
PRACTICABILITY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT. 26^ 
 
 This is the issue. "Show me thy faith by thy 
 works." Are you made a new creature ? Where is 
 the new growth ? Are you a member of the Body of 
 Christ ? Every movement of the limbs is governed 
 by the head. Have you received of His grace and of 
 His Spirit? They are the gift to you, in life and 
 reality, of His righteousness. 
 
 The gift to you — to every one alone. Yes ; Chris- 
 tianity is, above all things, a social religion which is 
 
 personal and 
 
 — it treats us as members of the larger absolute. 
 society of the world, it is embodied in the society 
 of the Church — but it always speaks to individuals. 
 Alone your life began, alone you knew the dawning 
 in your heart of a Divine Presence, and the light 
 of holiness; alone is your converse with God, your 
 incommunicable knowledge of His Law. Sole and 
 indivisible is your responsibility. Alone you die ; 
 alone you shall be judged ; nay, alone you are judged 
 now. You stand alone.. Your position no other can 
 fill. Others may do the like, but not the same ; your 
 duty is your own. Your circumstances, the details 
 of your life and work — all these are peculiar to you ; 
 they are for you to do with them what you will. 
 You may turn them either way ; they are your own 
 — the field which God has given to you, in which to 
 work out His Law, with careful thought, to see that 
 
266 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS, 
 
 no stone be left unturned, no action left ungovemed, 
 unconsidered, uncontrolled, free from the sway of that 
 Eternal Law. Heaven and earth shall pass away, 
 but His Word shall not pass aw^ay. 
 
XVI. 
 ECONOMIC FREEDOM. 
 
 It is a practical question to ask, in conclusion, at 
 what e^eneral end we aim in any chansres 
 
 ° -^ ^ Freedom the 
 
 of practice which would be produced if ^hJeconomic 
 economic conduct were considered, as we 
 contend it should be, as a matter of Christian morals. 
 In general terms, it may be answered that we aim at 
 the free attainment of the economic ideal 
 
 Freedom was the keynote of the gospel of Political 
 Economy as preached by Adam Smith. This freedom 
 was the freedom of production, industry, and trade 
 from the artificial restraints of law, from those 
 restraints, especially, which were dictated by the 
 false idea that money, the means of the exchange 
 of wealth, was wealth itself, and which, under this 
 idea, enriched a certain number of traders at the 
 expense of the general prosperity of the community. 
 What was demanded was, that law should leave the 
 economic machine to work by itself: the result was 
 
268 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 anticipated that there would be a great increase in 
 the amount of wealth produced, and in the prosperity 
 of the community at large. 
 
 We have to set forth a new demand, that the 
 economic motive should be set free from 
 
 A positive 
 
 freedom' to''^ auy rcstraluts which are imposed upon it 
 enjoy. .^ ^^ working of the economic machinerj^, 
 
 free to attain the result at which it really aims, 
 happiness in the enjoyment of wealth. Wealth is 
 its end — not the production of wealth only, but its 
 just use, and its right enjoyment — wealth, as it 
 contributes to the well-being of those who produce 
 it. This freedom differs from the other in two 
 respects. It is not merely negative — the removal of 
 restraints; it is freedom to do something — to enjoy. 
 Again, it is human; it is freedom, not for a system 
 only, but for men. This freedom of enjoyment it is 
 the aim of economic morals to secure. A man's duty 
 in regard to wealth may be said to be so to act as to 
 forward its highest enjoyment. Wealth reaches its 
 end in being enjoyed. What is the moral condition 
 of its enjoyment ? What are the forces which should 
 be at work in its production and its use, with activity 
 unhampered by false motives, undiverted by moral 
 fallacy, unhindered by sin and wrong ? What is 
 economic freedom ? 
 
ECONOMIC FREEDOM. 269 
 
 The enjoyment of wealth means, first, the freedom 
 
 of energy, a system of life in which all (i) the free- 
 dom of 
 objects of desire fulfil their function in energy; 
 
 evoking energy, and in giving the pleasure which 
 attends its exercise, in which the energies of all 
 are called forth to their fullest extent. The exist- 
 ence, then, of an idle class at the top or at the 
 bottom of the scale, is against the law of our ideal. 
 There is no apparent enjoyment in idleness, except 
 in the freedom to carry out every chance caprice, 
 to exercise the energy which may be active at the 
 moment, or at least to enjoy the condition in which 
 there is an energy of enjoyment even in repose. 
 But idleness deadens energy. The want of an 
 habitual purpose allows the power of concentration 
 to die. There is no occasion or motive for self-denial. 
 A difficulty becomes a bar, even to the execution 
 of a whim. In the ideal economic life there will be 
 no energies unemployed, and the man who uses the 
 opportunities of a leisured life, not to select his work 
 with care and to pursue it with deliberation, but to 
 avoid the exertion of a definite purpose and the pains 
 of a deliberate pursuit, will be seen, not only to throw 
 away his own life, but to commit a crime against the 
 society whose resources it is his pleasure to waste. 
 He is a mere moneyed vagrant; he will not work, 
 
270 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 neither should he eat. The ideal economic life would 
 offer to the energies of all opportunity for exercise, 
 such as they could resist only by a very deliberate 
 rejection of what would be obviously seen to be a 
 right and desirable life. 
 
 The life which the existing economic system too 
 often does offer to the energies of youth, is a life of 
 deadening routine. In early years the routine is 
 enforced, in later years it becomes voluntary, for the 
 sake of what experience teaches that the machine 
 may be expected to produce. But the work, the 
 employment of the energies, remains in many cases 
 routine work still, unintelligent, unfeeling. Educa- 
 tion in these cases has a great deal to answer for ; 
 education which has failed in its main object of 
 setting before the boy the life which the man must 
 lead, as a life dignified by its purpose and by the 
 spirit in which it should be undertaken ; education 
 which has failed to make those, who do work that 
 must be dull, sharers in other interests and other 
 pursuits, since it has not developed in them the 
 tastes and capacities which these interests and 
 pursuits employ ; which has left them capable of 
 being converted into useful machines, incapable of 
 ennobling or finding pleasure in the sacrifice which 
 their life calls upon them to make. 
 
ECONOMIC FREEDOM. 271 
 
 Our present economic life affords instances enough 
 of another kind of employment of energy, busy, 
 restless, unceasing, absorbed, in those who care for 
 their business and care for nothing else. They 
 represent the existing economic system at its best, 
 but they are very far indeed from being instances of 
 the true enjoyment of energy. The energy which is 
 incapable of rest is incapable of enjoyment. The 
 man has become a slave to his work. Every man 
 must give himself up to his particular pursuit; he 
 must devote to it the best of his time and of his 
 strength; but it should leave him with time and 
 force enough to enter into and enjoy some other 
 processes or results of human activity. His time 
 should not be so absorbed that his life is an alterna- 
 tive of work and sleep, nor his powers so possessed 
 by one pursuit, that he cannot share in any other 
 part of the general life to which he contributes. 
 Restless energy is the energy of a partially developed 
 nature, in which all faculties but one are dwarfed, 
 and the exercise of that is unenjoyed, because there 
 is no "man left to enjoy it. In the ideal economic 
 life, then, every man would have such conditions as 
 to enable him to find recreation, after the exercise of 
 one set of faculties, in the development of others, and 
 Tvould so not only supplement his work with amuse- 
 
272 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 ment, but transfuse life and pleasure into the work 
 itself 
 
 The enjoyment of wealth means, secondly, freedom 
 , . freedom ^^ fellowship and sympathy. Fellowship is 
 of sympathy; ^ coudition of happiuess in the enjoyment 
 of wealth. Happiness we have already construed in 
 a sense, which excludes from the meaning of the 
 word the mere lazy enjoyment of resources. Happi- 
 ness, in the sense in which we speak of it, is an 
 energetic life, and it is a life of intensely social energy. 
 There should be fellowship between fellow-workers 
 in the same industry, there should be fellowship 
 between different industries, and industrial fellowship 
 between different nations. There should be fellow- 
 ship between the different social grades in the in- 
 dustrial system, between masters and men, employers 
 and employed, the brain and the hand of labour. 
 There should be nothing approaching to caste distinc- 
 tions, no hard and fast divisions. The first condition 
 of this practical union of S3"mpathy is fellowship in 
 industry. 
 
 The obligation to work at any sacrifice of ease and 
 comfort required by the efficiency of the work, should 
 be equally and visibly felt from the bottom to the 
 top of the industrial scale. The mere sense that 
 the labour of production is shared will go a long 
 
ECONOMIC FREEDOM. 273 
 
 way to break down the barriers, which our modern 
 system of large-scale industry has built up, between 
 those who, under the domestic system, used to work 
 side by side, though none the less they were master 
 and man. 
 
 But, beyond this, the ideal economic system would 
 give a fellowship in conditions between the different 
 members of the economic body. In the actual 
 economic system the conditions are very different for 
 different grades of work, and for the work of master 
 and of man. It would be visionary to expect to 
 create a system in which this inequality of conditions 
 should not exist. But it is no dispraise of a moral 
 ideal to call it visionary. The relative risk in success 
 or failure in a higher and lower grade of work may 
 be equalized, where the sense of fellowship in those 
 in the higher grade is strong enough. The just and 
 proportionate share of produce which cannot be 
 exacted may be given. The scope for individual 
 energy, enterprise, and skill, which is the prerogative 
 of the master, may be voluntarily shared with those 
 whom he employs. Much may be done towards 
 realizing the ideal of fellowship, not only in labour, 
 but in the stake in its success, in the sphere it ofiers 
 for intelligence and adventure, in the aim, which 
 should be set to all alike, of thorough work, the 
 
274 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 outcome of a life wholesome in its surroundings and 
 secure in its basis, producing sound and useful results 
 for the benefit of the community at large. It would 
 be an enormous stimulus to the full employment of 
 the energies of all the workers in an industry, that 
 all should be made to feel themselves fellow-workers 
 in a common concern, in which all have, in proportion 
 to their powers, common risks and a common sphere 
 of life, and with whose success each can identify the 
 realization of his own best personal ambition. 
 
 Lastly, we should move towards the ideal of a 
 fellowship in enjoyments. Here, again, education has 
 the greatest part to play, and education has yet to 
 realize the mission of developing the powers of enjoy- 
 ment. But a gi^at deal is done, when we see that 
 we ought not to acquiesce, as a matter of course, 
 in a wholly different moral standard of enjoyment 
 in different classes of society, and that the obligation 
 of diffusing a taste for higher and more refined 
 enjoyment rests on those who possess it. No one 
 would underrate the value of the sympathy, which 
 stretches out a hand across the gulf that separates 
 employers and employed, to give help in times of 
 sickness or trouble. This sympathy does make a 
 real bond of fellowship. But this fellowship discloses 
 the want of a more constant sympathy, a more per- 
 
ECONOMIC FREEDOM. 275 
 
 vading similarity of tastes, for literature, for art, for 
 every kind of physical and mental exercise, for whole- 
 some and graceful ways of life. The best prized 
 wages of success are not the ones to be enjoyed in 
 selfish contentment with social superiority. 
 
 But, thirdly, we must say that the ideal economic 
 system will, above all things, have this for its (3) freedom 
 
 of enjoy- 
 
 characteristic, that wealth, the commodities ^^n^- 
 produced, are really enjoyed to the full. And the 
 enjoyment of wealth means the real, living use of com- 
 modities. The power of things, produced by human 
 industry and art, to delight the human mind and heart 
 needs to be freed from whatever bonds now imprison 
 in material things their spiritual efficacy upon the 
 souls of men. It is the men who must be freed, in 
 whom the powers of enjoyment must be liberated from 
 the oppression of ignorance and habit 
 
 The living use of commodities is, first, an under- 
 standing use of them. We should know the world to 
 which they belong, their material and spiritual con- 
 text ; we should know and see in them the labour it 
 has cost to produce them, the labour which lives 
 embodied in them; we should know the uses to 
 which they may be rightly put. We are all familiar 
 with the savages who were delighted with the acqui- 
 sition of the European trousers, and wore them round 
 
276 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 their necks; but we are unconscious how often a 
 similar farce is enacted before our eyes, perhaps even 
 by ourselves, with things made for use and pleasure, 
 perverted to misuse in which there is neither sense 
 nor enjoyment. 
 
 And there should be feeling, as well as understand- 
 ing, in the use even of the meanest kind of wealth. 
 The pleasure of the maker in his work — if his power 
 of taking pleasure in the inaking has not been seared 
 and killed — will express itself in some touch of grace 
 or beauty in the product. The vulgar mind is dead 
 to this and disregards it, and vulgarity is an economic 
 sin. In the moral ideal of economic life is included 
 the training of a taste which shall take pleasure in 
 an ordered life, where things are in their true places 
 and are put to their true uses, and where the pleasure 
 in order and fitness finds expression in beauty and in 
 grace. 
 
 And, further, the living use of things is real and 
 purposeful, not wanton, wasteful, or misguided. There 
 is a deliberate abuse of wealth to be excluded, 
 besides the misuse of ignorance. The abuse of wealth 
 to purposes of vice, of intemperance, or luxury, or 
 sloth, is an economic sin — apart from its essentially 
 vicious character, whatever that may be. It is the 
 burial of human efforts, which have afforded the 
 
ECONOMIC FREEDOM. 277 
 
 produce, in shame and evil ; it is the destruction of 
 possibilities of good which are latent in what we 
 abuse ; it is the waste of human power and human 
 
 joy- 
 
 We have spoken here of the economic ideal of the 
 enjoyment of wealth from the point of view of the 
 consumer. At every turn we have been reminded, 
 how the absence of understanding and feeling and 
 purpose in those Avho use it has bred the incapacity 
 to put mind, or heart, or will into his work in the 
 worker. But we are drawing the ideal in the spirit 
 of whose aim we must set about our economic duty, 
 and we must not be checked by the distance to which 
 our own fault has removed the ideal at which we 
 aim. 
 
 Would the realization of such an ideal tend to give 
 material wealth and its enjoyment too strong a hold 
 on the affections of men ? Sloth and selfishness and 
 an irrational and unfeeling use of wealth surely makes 
 men worse slaves of material things ! A spiritual 
 enjoyment makes men conscious that the spirit is 
 more than the matter which embodies it. Certainly 
 it is the greatest need in the economic ideal, to hold 
 by the indifference of all material things, in com- 
 parison with the spirit of life and love, which we 
 have seen may be realized in their production and 
 
278 CHRISTIAN ECONOMICS. 
 
 their use. The last feature in the moral ideal of 
 
 economic life is the power to sacrifice the lower 
 
 wealth always to the higher, material wealth to 
 
 moral and spiritual well-being, all comfort, and ease, 
 
 and labour, and life i tself. \q th e love of men and 
 
 of God. vjJ^^^^R^S^ 
 
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