LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 \ 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
SOCIALISM IN 
 CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 CONRAD NOEL 
 
 The question which ought to hold a pre-eminent place in 
 the interests of Churchmen is, how we are to return to a 
 condition of things nearer to the intention of Christ if it 
 may be. without violence or revolution : but if not, then 
 anyhow to return." Dr. GORE, Bishop of Birmingham, 
 Barrow-in-Furness Church Congress Sermon, 1906 
 
 THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO., 
 
 MILWAUKEE, WIS. 
 I9II 
 
TO 
 MY WIFE 
 
 215023 
 
THE ARGUMENT 
 
 MANY members of the Church of England are 
 socialists, and would establish a commonwealth whose 
 people should own the land and -the industrial capital 
 and administer them co-operatively for the good of 
 all. Such public ownership they regard as urgent, 
 and as a necessary deduction from the teachings of 
 the Church. They are not communists but socialists. 
 Far from seeking the abolition of private property or 
 the curtailment of personal freedom, they desire such 
 an industrial rearrangement of society as shall not 
 only increase the national output but shall secure to 
 the majority the wealth they produce and the liberty 
 they have hitherto been denied. 
 
 The Christian Faith cannot be summed up in the 
 word socialism, nor should it be finally identified 
 with any political or economic system. For all this, 
 Churchmen are convinced that the principles which 
 underlie socialism are, so far as they go, the principles 
 of the Christian religion as applied to political, 
 commercial, and industrial problems. 
 
 Orthodox Church folk recognise the statement that 
 the Church should have nothing to do with politics 
 or with material life as a deadly and soul-destroying 
 
8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 heresy, contradicting the Christian doctrines of icrea- 
 tion,5ncarnation, and of the<Jesurrection of the body. 
 
 The kingdom of heaven, a kingdom not "of" 
 this world, but " in " this world, is thrust like leaven 
 into the ages, until every avenue of human activity 
 is leavened. The Church, established by God, as 
 the mouthpiece of the kingdom, must seize every 
 opportunity of interfering with the world, until it has 
 transformed its evil, warring, factious kingdoms into 
 the international commonwealth of God and of His 
 Christ. 
 
 To this end it must neither neglect nor confine 
 itself to the political sphere. It must be as ready to 
 make temporary alliances with political parties as it 
 is determined to entangle itself inextricably with no 
 political party soever. 
 
 The object of the present work is to justify the 
 foregoing position by an appeal to Christian history, 
 and to suggest that economic socialism provides the 
 practical and scientific form for our own day and in 
 one important human sphere for the realisation of 
 those very objects which the Church has always had 
 at heart. 
 
 It is not my purpose to identify Jewish legislation, 
 primitive Christian practice, Church law, with the 
 proposals of economic socialism, but rather to point 
 out that the eternal purposes of Holy Church, ex- 
 pressed from age to age in various more or less 
 ineffectual efforts, must now be expressed in the 
 eminently effectual system of socialism. 
 
 Socialism is no fixed and final scheme of perfec- 
 tion, but we claim it as the solution for our day of a 
 
THE ARGUMENT 9 
 
 multitude of evils. In the centuries to come socialism 
 will give place to some other system more applicable 
 to the needs of a now undreamt-of future. 
 
 Churchmen sometimes argue that, although eco- 
 nomic socialism does not necessarily involve " ration- 
 alist" positions, so many of its supporters are 
 unorthodox that they consider it dangerous to 
 identify themselves with the movement. But it is 
 precisely because the Church of to-day has so largely 
 failed us, that the construction of a socialist philo- 
 sophy has fallen into the hands of persons alienated 
 from the traditions of Christendom. All the more 
 necessary is it for that handful of Churchmen who 
 value not the dead letter but the living spirit of 
 tradition to come forward and make their own 
 intellectual contribution to the building of the 
 international commonwealth. 
 
 Previous writers have dealt with parts of the 
 subject. Amongst the authors to whom I am chiefly 
 indebted are Messrs Ashley, Rauschenbusch, A. J. 
 Carlyle, R. W. Carlyle, Stewart D. Headlam, Thomas 
 Hancock, and Charles Marson. So far as I know, no 
 existing work covers the whole ground, and I am 
 conscious how imperfectly what is a very large 
 subject is dealt with here. My hope in writing will 
 be realised if someone more competent than myself 
 should be tempted to deal with the subject at greater 
 length, and if meanwhile the present work directs 
 attention to a vital aspect of Church thought too 
 often neglected. 
 
 CONRAD NOEL. 
 Advent, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. SOCIALISM IS 
 
 2. THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES . . . -33 
 
 3. THE GOSPELS .... -57 
 
 4. THE EARLY CHURCH ... 9 1 
 
 5. THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL . . . 1 1/ 
 
 6. THE SACRAMENTS ... .14! 
 
 7. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE . . .163 
 
 8. THE REFORMATION 195 
 
 9. THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM . . . 233 
 IO. BEFORE THE DAWN 253 
 
I 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Socialism defined Its underlying assumptions Analysis of private 
 industrialism The nature of capital No absolute ownership in 
 fact The great pillage and enclosures The capitalist landlord 
 Extravagant claims of landlords Rent and interest analysed The 
 nature of modern interest Brains and Hands But interest at 
 present necessary How will it be abolished ? The practicability 
 of socialism Its root in history. 
 
I 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 "We see that it is not any form of ability, either in design or in 
 organisation (which is but design) or in manual effort, which secures 
 the largest rewards in industry. It is capital, as capital, which takes 
 the lion's share of the product of the mental and manual labour exer- 
 cised upon the small area of land which serves for the basis of our 
 industries. The landlord's share, although great, is relatively small." 
 L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY, M.P. 1 
 
 " Socialism is the principle according to which the community shall 
 own the land and industrial capital collectively and use them co- 
 operatively for the good of all." Church Socialist League. 
 
 SOCIALISTS of every varying shade of opinion accept 
 the above definition of socialism. Jevonian socialists, 
 Marxian socialists, Church socialists, anti-Church 
 socialists, free-trade socialists, fair-trade socialists, 
 feminist socialists, anti-feminist socialists, free-will 
 socialists, determinist socialists, puritan socialists, 
 anti-puritan socialists, in a word all socialists, how- 
 ever much they may differ on other points, are in 
 absolute agreement on one point, and that point 
 is their socialism. They are socialists, not because 
 
 1 Riches and Poverty , chap. viii. , ' ' Those who Work and those who 
 Wait," p. 97 (is. net ; Methuen). Mr Money's book should be used as 
 companion volume with my own. Mr J. A. Hobson's The Industrial 
 Revolution : An Inquiry into Earned and Unearned Income (73. 6d. net ; 
 Longmans, 1909) should also be carefully studied. 
 
 '5 
 
1 6 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 they are Theosophists or Jews, temperance men or 
 teetotalers, pro-peace or pro-war, but solely because 
 they accept the principle according to which the land 
 and industrial capital should be publicly owned and 
 publicly administered : wise or otherwise, just or un- 
 just, practicable or impracticable, socialism is one 
 and simple, and a man of ordinary intelligence could 
 grasp its main proposition in ten minutes. There are 
 many kinds of human beings, and therefore many kinds 
 of socialists, but there is only one kind of socialism. 
 
 These economic proposals for the transference of 
 land and industrial capital from private to public 
 hands are the expression of a certain conviction 
 about life. This conviction has been thus described 
 by Bishop Westcott of Durham, who, contrasting 
 socialism with individualism, writes : 
 
 It is by contrast with individualism that the true 
 character of socialism can best be discerned. Individualism 
 and socialism correspond with opposite views of humanity. 
 Individualism regards humanity as made up of disconnected 
 or warring atoms ; socialism regards it as an organic whole, 
 a vital unity formed by the combination of contributory 
 members mutually interdependent. It follows that socialism 
 differs from individualism both in method and in aim. The 
 method of socialism is co-operation ; the method of indi- 
 vidualism is competition. The one regards man as working 
 with man for a common end ; the other regards man as 
 working against man for private gain. 
 
 People of all classes are beginning to realise that 
 much poverty is preventible. The socialist movement 
 is, and will always be, largely artisan, but it draws 
 from all classes. The more thoughtful and generous 
 rich are beginning to regard it as intolerable that 
 they should, through rents and interest, be living idly 
 
SOCIALISM 17 
 
 upon the bounty of the poor. They are beginning to 
 understand that the overwork and underfeeding of 
 the worker are the direct consequence of the under- 
 work and overfeeding of the gentleman. They are 
 beginning to ask Cannot this system be slowly or 
 swiftly transmuted into some juster, more orderly, 
 more efficient, and more human type of civilisation ? 
 
 Present-day industrialism is rooted in the monopoly 
 of land and capital, as essential both of them to 
 human life as air, sunshine, or water. The monopolist, 
 rich by possession of these essentials, exacts a yearly 
 tribute from the masses in the shape of rent upon 
 land, paid out of wages and salaries, and rent upon 
 capital, stopped out of wages and salaries. For if, as 
 is universally agreed, all (economic) wealth is the 
 result of mental and manual labour productively 
 employed upon land, and the majority of the 
 monopolists labour neither with their minds nor 
 with their hands, whence comes their income ? Not, 
 assuredly, down like manna from on high, but up 
 from those classes who, landless and capitalless, have 
 only hands and brains to sell, and are forced to sell 
 them to the possessors on terms involving the over- 
 work and underfeeding of the many (their underpay 
 and overwork being further secured by the existence 
 of a convenient margin of the unemployed poor, 
 hungry to beat down the wages of the overemployed) 
 and the underwork and overfeeding of the few, 
 supported from the privations of the producers. 
 Wealth does not come down from heaven, but up 
 from those man-made hells to which we condemn our 
 slave population. 
 
 2 
 
1 8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 We only smile when the barrel-organs of plutocracy 
 grind out the maxim that capital must have its share, 
 for capital is inert machinery, railroads, factories, and 
 power over labour, every scrap of it being itself the 
 product of past labour. How can a railway have its 
 fair share ? We cannot do without capital ; we are 
 rapidly learning to do without the private capitalist. 
 
 Inanimate things have no rights, and the rights of 
 the private holders of certain inanimate essentials are 
 the very points in dispute. Most people now admit 
 that land, created by none and necessary to all, 
 should be the common property of all. In the past 
 it has been divided up, and the dividers have thriven 
 on the spoil. Socialism is a scheme by which the 
 dividing up of the people's land should finally cease. 
 
 But railways, mines, post-offices, factories, high- 
 roads, canals, and other forces of industrial capital 
 created by no single man but by the whole closely 
 woven industrial community should also be the 
 property of all. 
 
 For if in any community whatsoever there be 
 permitted the monopoly by private individuals of 
 sea, land, air, industries, sunlight, rivers, or mines 
 there will in that community be land lords, sea lords, 
 air lords, and share lords enforcing tribute for the 
 use of these essentials, and living unproductively 
 upon the fruits of this compulsion. 
 
 Landlordism and capitalism in their present form 
 are but a thing of yesterday. The theory of 
 absolute individual ownership developed rapidly with 
 the rapid growth of Christo-capitalism. With the 
 decadence of this particular form of religion we are 
 
SOCIALISM 19 
 
 witnessing the decadence of the accompanying eco- 
 nomic heresy. 
 
 The upholders of the absolute ownership theory 
 appeal in vain to pre- Reformation times, for even 
 feudalism allowed what was but a strictly limited 
 right of private ownership, absolute ownership be- 
 longing only to the Crown, and the Crown, at least 
 in theory, representing the whole nation. Even 
 throughout the dark ages of the eighteenth and nine- 
 teenth centuries, the nation's right, though obscured, 
 was in law acknowledged, for landlords were compelled 
 to sell at the national bidding ; while under feudalism 
 lands were granted conditionally on public services 
 annually rendered. If the landlord were forgetful of 
 the conditions, the land could be promptly confiscated. 
 Until the reign of Henry the Eighth, the power to 
 bequeath land was largely restricted. 
 
 If the nation had the right to confiscate without 
 compensation the millions of acres of monastic estates, 
 belonging for the most part to worthy resident land- 
 lords, and give the third part of the kingdom of 
 England to landlords, often unworthy and non- 
 resident ; by what conceivable theory of justice can 
 the inheritors of this wholesale confiscation deny the 
 right of the nation to resume its ownership with 
 compensation ? 
 
 Certain great families reigned supreme before the 
 days of the franchise, and used their public office 
 for private ends in such a manner as would have 
 brought them to the gallows in healthier times. From 
 the socially disastrous period of the Reformation 
 onwards, encroachment after encroachment was made 
 
20 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 upon the people's land, until we come to the period 
 of 1 20 years from 1760 to 1880, when a further ten 
 million acres were annexed, often without compensa- 
 tion. But the defenders of these old loot-bills of the 
 landlords use the following arguments: (i) The land, 
 in some cases, has changed hands by purchase ; 
 therefore the restoration of the land would be unfair. 
 But (a) some people formerly invested their honest 
 earnings in the legal purchase of slaves. Did this 
 warrant the indefinite postponement of slave-libera- 
 tion ? Why then should we indefinitely postpone 
 land liberation? (b) This argument would seem 
 tacitly to assume the nation's right to resume owner- 
 ship of all lands not so purchased. (2) Land is 
 nowadays practically worthless. Rents barely cover 
 the upkeep of estates. The landlord often gives 
 more than he takes. 
 
 We fully realise the inefficiencies of private enter- 
 prise, and grant that in some cases this argument 
 holds good ; but if any landlord chooses to plead as 
 above, we warn him that he is playing into the hands 
 of those who would confiscate his land without a 
 farthing of compensation. As a fact, all honourable 
 claimants will be duly compensated. 
 
 In reality this type of landlord is not landlord by 
 profession but an amateur. He is a capitalist who 
 acquires a country estate as a hobby, indulged in 
 by means of the proceeds derived from the serious 
 business of his life banking, the factory, the mine, 
 the railway. There are still thousands of squires 
 living solely from rent. And if we consider the 
 problem of the town, we find that a certain family 
 
SOCIALISM 21 
 
 bought the site of a northern town for a song, and 
 squeezes from the people of that town a yearly rental 
 of a hundred thousand. Nor do we forget that the 
 soil of London, worth an annual hundred thousand 
 agriculturally, now yields to the landlords an annual 
 twenty million. 
 
 Now, I will assume that you condemn the private 
 ownership of land. You have come to the conclusion 
 that, as land is necessary to all, to deprive men of 
 land is to deprive them of life. To deprive men of 
 land except on the landlord's terms, is to deprive 
 them of life except on the landlord's terms. But 
 there are many who will condemn private ownership 
 of land, air, 1 sea, and sunshine, who will defend 
 private ownership of factories, railways, and the like. 
 They condemn rent, while they defend interest or 
 usury. What harm is there in A, the saver of a sum 
 of money, obliging B with the loan of it, in return for 
 a small annual interest in respect of risks run ? 
 
 In the first place, it is questionable if A has really 
 justly saved the money. Money represents and is the 
 symbol of society's debt to the individual for service 
 rendered. Now the vast majority of present-day sums 
 invested represent no such debt. Is society really 
 and justly in the debt of A, the saver? Does his 
 " pile " represent what society owes him for his 
 services? Has he inherited his money? If so, the 
 original debt (where there was one) has often been 
 
 1 Landlords are claiming ownership of the air above as well as of the 
 mineral wealth below the surface of their estates. A landlord can sue 
 the owner of an aeroplane for trespass. Rights in the sea are claimed 
 by the Duke of Northumberland and other landlords with coast-bound 
 estates, who seek to impose a tax on fishermen on every catch they 
 make within so many hundred yards of the shore. 
 
22 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 repaid over and over again. Is he a "self-made" 
 man ? If so, he is either (a) a speculator, or trans- 
 ferrer of other people's money to his own pocket, 
 or (b) a mere exploiter of productive labourers, 
 or (c) part genuine mental or manual producer 
 and part exploiter. In the first two cases society 
 owes him nothing but a prison. In the third case 
 his " savings " only in part represent a real claim 
 upon society, for he has almost invariably been 
 grossly overpaid for the part he has played in pro- 
 duction. There remain an infinitesimal number of 
 cases where a man's savings may represent an honest 
 claim upon the wealth of the world for work rendered. 
 Let us then ask, in the case of these few exceptions, 
 which do not account for one-hundredth of the investing 
 public, Have they a right to do what they like with 
 their money ? Suppose our friend A belongs to this 
 class : has he a right to invest it where he has a mind ? 
 Every sane person admits he has no such absolute 
 right of investment. Everybody admits he has no 
 right to invest his " savings " in buying babies for 
 purposes of vivisection. No one will allow him the 
 right of investment in the Angola slave trade. Not 
 even in law is any such absolute right admitted. If 
 investment in certain lands or in certain industries 
 can be proved to be equivalent to investment in 
 slaves, or to be obviously disastrous to the community, 
 the public conscience will inevitably come to regard 
 such investment as immoral. We have admitted 
 that, in strict justice, A should not be allowed to 
 invest in land. There is no immediate moral con- 
 demnation upon land investors to-day, but the public 
 
SOCIALISM 23 
 
 conscience which legalises such investments is coming 
 to be acknowledged as unhealthy and immoral. We 
 have come to this conclusion because we discovered 
 that if A, instead of consuming his claim upon society, 
 is permitted to exchange that claim for a plot of land 
 to be possessed, not for purposes of work, but for 
 extraction of rent, he has actually been permitted to 
 exchange his claim for shares in the white slave 
 market, and his family will thereby be enabled to live 
 idly, not for a few years by consumption of his claim, 
 and afterwards go back to work, but in all perpetuity 
 by laying a perpetual and compulsory private tax 
 (rent) upon the annual product of the workers. If all 
 the workers were in one way or another possessors of 
 land or capital, they would only make use of this 
 land and pay rent for it by choice and not by com- 
 pulsion. Land is limited in extent and essential to 
 all. Therefore landless folk are not free to bargain. 
 
 Well, then, if A may not invest in land, may he 
 not invest in capital ? may he exchange his " savings," 
 or " claim on society," for capital, i.e. shares in a 
 mine, factory, or railroad ? May not A forego his 
 just claim and lend it to B to start or carry on 
 a business ; B to pay A an annuity in respect of 
 risks run ? 
 
 But this case of A and B as equal bargainers does 
 not exist in fact. If A and B had started life equally 
 equipped, and A were the virtuous saver and B the 
 profligate spender, i.e. if B were, solely through his 
 own fault, without money that could be converted 
 into capital, the non-Christian man of the world 
 might say : Why should not A, the virtuous, take 
 
24 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 advantage of B, the formerly vicious ? Why should 
 not the elder brother start the converted prodigal in 
 business, and charge him considerable and perpetual 
 interest on the loan? The Christian religion, of 
 course, emphatically negatives this transaction ; but 
 the man of the world would certainly consider it just. 
 
 But in the vast majority of cases A and B are not 
 by any means equal bargainers ; for A, the individual^ 
 lends to B, the group exploiter. B does not set to 
 work alone and unaided, purchasing plant and 
 supporting himself by means of A's loan, and paying 
 him a small return plus the original sum out of 
 profits. B promises usury x or interest to the absentee 
 shareholder, because B represents a group of workers, 
 landless and capitalless, and therefore not free to 
 bargain. 2 He knows that these workers will be 
 forced to assent to his terms or starve, and that from 
 the profits of their joint labour is to come that interest 
 on shares, or compulsory annuity, on which our 
 widows and orphans all shareholders are supposed 
 by critics of socialism to come under one or other of 
 these definitions thrive so satisfactorily. 
 
 The attack of the socialist is not upon brain versus 
 hand work ; it is not aimed at the productive mental 
 labourers. All such workers would, under a socialist 
 reconstruction of industry, be adequately rewarded 
 for work rendered. Nor does the socialist attack all 
 forms of inheritance or of private property. It is 
 indeed because he believes in the rights of private 
 
 1 Usury until very lately meant interest in any shape or form. 
 This is its meaning in the English translation of the Bible. 
 
 2 Cf. Report of Bishops, etc. , forming a Committee of Convocation of 
 Canterbury on Economic Questions (2d. ; S.P.C.K.). 
 
SOCIALISM 25 
 
 property that he is a socialist, for he finds these rights 
 are violated by capitalism. He desires solely to 
 build up a system under which those forms of 
 property which are essentially common to all because 
 necessary to all shall in point of fact be owned by all. 
 He desires this, in order that those forms of property 
 which are essentially private and peculiar should be 
 secured to the mental and manual labouring members 
 of the community, i.e. to all members of the re- 
 organised community, for by socialism we establish 
 a commonwealth in which all able-bodied and able- 
 brained persons are workers ; the children, the aged, 
 and the sick alone being entitled to support without 
 rendering productive service in return. 
 
 Now, although many people have come to believe 
 usury-bearing investments in land and industries to 
 be in the long run immoral and unjustifiable, it is 
 obvious that these investments perform an indispens- 
 able function in the immoral and unjustifiable anarchy 
 we are pleased to call the society of the present. It 
 would be as difficult as it would be futile to condemn 
 the individual landlord or capitalist under existing 
 conditions. If one were to ask him to abandon his 
 land or his shares, he would point to his wife and 
 children, and remark that after all one must live. Do 
 we want him to join the ranks of the millions com- 
 peting fiercely one against another for work ? 
 
 In spite, therefore, of the ultimate unwisdom and 
 injustice of such investments, they will not cease 
 until for the present industrial anarchy is substituted 
 such an ordered society as shall (a) make it possible 
 for one-time investors, if able-bodied and able-brained, 
 
26 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 to become productive labourers, in the general interest, 
 or, if disabled, to find some source of support other 
 than investments ; and (U) create such collective wealth 
 as shall supplant private capital or the necessity of 
 financial appeal to private capitalists. It is such a 
 social readjustment that socialism proposes. 
 
 Reference has been made to collective wealth 
 supplanting private capital. The following instances 
 are to the point. The city of Leeds manages its 
 tramways. Under private enterprise the mileage of 
 lines was twenty-two. Under the first few years of 
 public enterprise the mileage has increased to one 
 hundred. Fares are lower, wages higher, hours 
 shorter. The service is comfortable and efficient. 
 Municipalities can borrow at cheaper rates than 
 private individuals. The interest on borrowed capital 
 is therefore low. Far from coming on the rates, an 
 annual 62,000 is paid out of profits in relief of rates. 
 Due amount is allowed for depreciation, and a sinking 
 fund is established for the paying up of capital in- 
 vested. In twenty years' time the whole of the 
 capital subscribed will be paid off, and the tramway 
 system will belong to the city, with no claims on the 
 part of shareholders to be met. 
 
 Prussia manages its railways. They were acquired 
 by issuing Government bonds in lieu of the former 
 share certificates. Although a low and uniform rate 
 of freightage has been adopted, which has given an 
 intense impetus to industry, such immense profits are 
 made that the railways alone contribute annually 
 millions of pounds towards the extinction of the 
 national debt. Capital is being paid off annually as 
 
SOCIALISM 27 
 
 well as interest duly met. In fifty years the railway 
 system will belong to the nation absolutely. No 
 more interest will need to be paid. Borrowed capital 
 will have been entirely repaid. 
 
 Is it not evident, therefore, that with every 
 extension of the field of public enterprise, and with 
 every increase in the public capital, there will be a 
 narrowing of the field for private investors ? In a few 
 years they can no longer invest in Prussian railways, 
 or municipal stock. As the area of public enterprise 
 widens, the area of private enterprise must shrink. 
 People who formerly held stock in municipal and 
 national undertakings have not only been paid their 
 interest but have been paid back their capital out 
 of social profits. They have only to reinvest ? But 
 every day, with the increase of public effort and the 
 upbuilding of a public wealth, it is less and less 
 necessary to rely upon the private investor. Mean- 
 while nationalities and municipalities will be 
 reorganising labour, shortening hours, increasing 
 wages, offering more and more berths to competent 
 men and women. The private investor will give his 
 sons and daughters a business education. The 
 second generation, or at least the third, will no 
 longer be able to rely on usury or rent for a living. 
 They will begin to be educated in order that they 
 may learn and labour truly to get their own living in 
 that divine commonwealth to which it shall please 
 God to call them. 
 
 If Prussia is successful in organising transit, why 
 should she not organise agriculture? If Leeds can 
 manage its tramcars, why not its mills? If New 
 
28 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Zealand can run a sawmill, why not Manchester a 
 cotton-factory ? 
 
 Granted, then, that socialism is just, there seems 
 evidence in favour of its practicability. Anti- 
 socialists point in vain to Athens, Sparta, Rome, to 
 Peru and other countries, for evidence against the 
 system they hate ; for in none of these places did the 
 people own the land and the industrial capital, and in 
 none of them, therefore, was socialism even attempted. 
 
 Neither would the success or failure of groups of 
 communist cranks existing in the midst of the hostile 
 environment of the present industrialism prove any- 
 thing either for or against the practicability of the 
 socialist proposal. 
 
 There are not wanting indications, however, that 
 socialism would prove an efficient solution of our 
 present difficulties. The Spencerian theory that a 
 multitude of small competitors are more efficient than 
 companies, trusts, municipalities, or nations working 
 by means of salaried managers has been shattered by 
 a fusillade of facts. Collective production is driving 
 competition out of the field. Not only does the 
 growth of the Trust illustrate the point, but the 
 success of public trading still further emphasises it. 
 Every effort is being made in the plutocratic press, 
 and in the writings of such authors as Mr St Loe 
 Strachey and Lord Avebury, to minimise the 
 significance of these successes ; but those who will 
 pursue the subject will find their contentions contra- 
 dicted by the official year-books of our colonies, the 
 Board of Trade returns, and by recent books on 
 Prussian and Belgian railway management. Mr St 
 
SOCIALISM 29 
 
 Loe Strachey and Lord Avebury are answered very 
 completely in (i) The Economics of Direct Employ- 
 ment ; (2) Municipal Trading (3) Machinery (all three 
 penny pamphlets of the Fabian Society, 3 Clement's 
 Inn, Strand, W.C.) ; (4) Emil Davies, Railway 
 Nationalisation, price one shilling ; (5) The Common 
 Sense of Municipal Trading^ by G. Bernard Shaw, 
 price sixpence ; (6) Mind Your Own Business, by 
 R. B. Suthers (on municipal capital), price sixpence ; 
 (7) Behind German Dreadnoughts (on German public 
 experiments), price one penny (these two latter pub- 
 lished by the Clarion Press, 44 Worship Street, E.C.). 1 
 Behind the economic proposals of socialism, the 
 anti-private rent and interest programme and the col- 
 lectivist theory of industry, there lies a fundamental 
 conception of society. The philosophy of socialism 
 is fellowship, justice among men, the value of the 
 whole of life, material, mental, spiritual. In the fol- 
 lowing pages we shall compare the Christian with the 
 socialist conception of life, noting the singular likeness 
 between the two, and trace the various attempts to 
 put these fundamental conceptions into practice. Our 
 inquiry leads to the conviction that this modern 
 experiment of socialism and those older experiments 
 have the same root. Their ojigin may be found in 
 that fundamental attitude towards life which is both 
 Catholic and Socialist. 
 
 1 Readers would do well to make themselves familiar with Mr George 
 Bernard Shaw's reply to Mr W. H. Mallock's argument concerning 
 ability. It will be found in Socialism and Brains (Fabian Society, 
 3 Clement's Inn, Strand, W.C. id.). 
 
II 
 
 THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 
 
 Religion and socialism The universal Spirit The roots of our 
 tradition Jewish and socialist philosophy in some respects 
 identical Jewish origins Moses as revolutionary The conquest 
 of Canaan The Judges The demand for a king Solomon as 
 Oriental despot The rebellion No divorce between spiritual, 
 mental, and material The test of spiritual reality Modern 
 critical theories irrelevant to our subject The Book of the 
 Covenant Naboth's vineyard The reigns of Uzziah and 
 Jeroboam II. compared with the early Victorian era The 
 prophet-politicians The national poetry Josiah the reformer 
 God's jealousy and its economic implications More social 
 legislation Social message of Nehemiah and Ezekiel Condemna- 
 tion of interest Ezra and reform The last layer of the Law 
 Land legislation The Old Testament attitude summed up in the 
 earlier chapters of Isaiah. 
 
II 
 
 THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 
 
 " Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid. Wed it 
 to patriotism, it lives in the open air, and its blood is pure." GEORGE 
 ADAM SMITH, Expositor's Bible : Book of the Twelve Prophets^ vol. i. 
 p. 25, 1886. 
 
 WHAT has the Christian religion to do with 
 socialism? We, whose spiritual ancestors claimed 
 Plato as a Christian, worship the God from whom 
 all good things do come, who giveth to all life and 
 breath and all good things, and hath made of one 
 every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the 
 earth, having determined their appointed seasons 
 and the bounds of their habitation ; that they should 
 seek God, if haply they might feel after Him and 
 find Him, though He is not far from each one of us, 
 for in Him we live and move and have our being. 
 Our theologians have incorporated Greek and Arabian 
 philosophy into the structure of the Christian faith. 
 Our thought and ceremonial are to some extent 
 assimilated from non-Christian sources. Our religion, 
 stifled and deflected in Palestine, expanded and 
 flourished in the wide room of the Graeco-Roman 
 world. Of all this we boast, for we have not 
 
 33 3 
 
34 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 borrowed from alien sources, but from the Holy 
 Spirit whose reign is universal and whose inspira- 
 tion world-wide. But although trees are nourished 
 not only from the root, but from their hundred 
 thousand leaves, the root is after all of vast import- 
 ance, and the root of the Christian faith is to be 
 found in the Jewish religion. By a true instinct the 
 Christians adopted and adapted the Jewish scrip- 
 tures to their requirements, when they had no 
 accredited scripture of their own. Our literature 
 and our traditions are saturated with Hebraic con- 
 ceptions. To the Old Testament we must go, if we 
 are to understand the New ; to the national Kingdom 
 and Church of God as understood by the Jew, if we 
 would understand the international Kingdom and 
 Church of God as proclaimed by the Christians. 
 
 What, then, has the Jewish religion to say to that 
 economic socialism whose philosophy is fellowship, 
 justice between man and man, the value of the whole 
 life, material as well as spiritual, and whose pro- 
 gramme is the common ownership of the means of 
 national life? What, if anything, can the Jewish 
 religion tell us about private rent and interest, which 
 we believe are the destruction of fellowship, an out- 
 rage on justice, and a hindrance to the life of man, 
 body, mind, and spirit ? When we turn to the Jewish 
 sacred literature, we are struck with its variety 
 songs, myths, history, parables, legal codes, and 
 drama: yet these varying notes are grouped more 
 or less into chords, and even the discords are finally 
 resolved into harmony ; for through all the wide 
 range of their literature there runs the binding con- 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 35 
 
 ception of God and His kingdom here on earth, the 
 sense of fellowship and of justice, the sense also of 
 the value of the whole life, material as well as 
 spiritual. As Israel grows towards unity, these 
 fundamental conceptions of ancient Hebrew and 
 modern socialist translate themselves into a social 
 and political system whose laws against rent and 
 interest are examples of their strenuous attempt to 
 set up a commonwealth founded in Divine justice 
 between man and man. 
 
 The Hebrews, a Semitic people, originally dwelt 
 in the Arabian highlands, a country of bracing 
 climate, rich soil, and abundant corn crops, coffee, 
 vineyards, vegetable gardens, and orchards. 
 
 As the population increased, the Hebrews, more 
 adventurous than their kinsmen the Syrians, Edomites, 
 and Moabites, wandered forth with their flocks and 
 herds, semi-communistic groups of alert and hardy 
 people; and after many vicissitudes we find them 
 settled in Egypt under the Hyksos dynasty, at first 
 in favour with the kings, but afterwards sorely 
 oppressed. Scourged and bullied by their masters, 
 their cry came up to God by reason of their bonds. 
 In the very palace of the Pharaohs the Hebrew 
 Moses was being trained in all the learning of Egypt. 
 The cry of his people might easily have been stifled 
 by the allurements of the court, but the brilliance 
 of a political future counted as nothing with him 
 when the Spirit of God had fired him with indignation 
 against the bondage of his people. The difficulties 
 were stupendous all the force of Egypt and the 
 suspicions of his own kinsmen. Cursed by those 
 
36 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 whom he would have delivered, the immediate result 
 of interference was a more terrible bondage. It was 
 as difficult to put heart into these spiritless creatures 
 numbed by oppression, as it is for the revolutionaries 
 of our day to fire the slums with the spirit of revolt. 
 " They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of 
 spirit and for cruel bondage." He drew back dis- 
 couraged, but again was driven forward by the energy 
 of God until the work was accomplished and his 
 people had escaped into the deserts beyond the 
 Red Sea. 
 
 Coming from a land where the rights of sepulture were 
 regarded as all-important, and the preservation of the body 
 after death was the passion of life ; among a people who 
 were even then carrying the remains of their great ancestor 
 Joseph to rest with his fathers, he yet conquered the last 
 natural yearning and withdrew from the sight and sympathy 
 of men to die alone and unattended, lest the idolatrous 
 feeling, always ready to break forth, should in death accord 
 him the superstitious reverence he had refused in life. No 
 man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. But while 
 the despoiled tombs of the Pharaohs mock the vanity that 
 reared them, the name of the Hebrew who, revolting from 
 their tyranny, strove for the elevation of his fellow- men is 
 yet a beacon light to the world. 1 
 
 The day of their deliverance was to be annually 
 observed, and when their children should ask them 
 the meaning of this festival, they should say : " It is 
 the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, who passed 
 over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, 
 when He smote the Egyptians and delivered our 
 houses." God would give them great and goodly 
 cities which they builded not, and houses full of all 
 
 1 Moses, by Henry George. 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 37 
 
 good things which they filled not, cisterns hewn out 
 which they had not hewn, vineyards and oliveyards 
 and fields of plenty, and they should eat and be full. 
 So there came to them the idea of conquest and the 
 lust for that goodly land of brooks of water, of 
 fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and 
 hills; a land of wheat and barley, of oil and olives 
 and honey, of vines and pomegranates, a land wherein 
 they should eat bread without scarceness. 
 
 Moab said unto the elders of Midian, " Now shall 
 this multitude lick up that is round about us, as the ox 
 licketh up the grass of the field." Baalam, bribed to 
 foretell their downfall, is compelled to prophesy their 
 success : 
 
 How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy tabernacles, 
 O Israel ! As valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by 
 the river side, as aloes which the Lord hath planted. 
 Water shall flow from his buckets, and his seed shall be in 
 many waters, and his king shall be higher than Agag, and 
 'his kingdom shall be exalted. God bringeth him forth out 
 of Egypt ; he hath as it were the strength of the wild-ox ; 
 he shall eat up the nations, and shall break their bones in 
 pieces. 
 
 The conquest of Canaan was slow, and the diffi- 
 culty great ; certain tribes were not loyal, preferring 
 to mix with the enemy and adopt their customs ; 
 many considered too swift and complete a victory 
 would not be wise : they must not annex more land 
 than they could till. To this transitional period 
 belong those natural leaders of the people whom we 
 know as the Judges. They arose in time of need ; 
 they came from the people and were acceptable to 
 them. These leaders were sometimes women. At 
 
38 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 this time there were few social inequalities and no 
 abject poverty ; these evils belonged to the later 
 period of commerce and despotism. For the present, 
 the Jews were cut off from the sea-board and the 
 great trade routes by the presence of still uncon- 
 quered tribes. The ruthless nature of their warfare 
 is illustrated in the case of the Daneite tribe who 
 descend upon Laish, a people inoffensive and secure, 
 seizing their fertile lands and showing no quarter. 
 The whole of Canaan had been marked out among 
 the tribes for conquest, and on its annexation was 
 divided portion by portion by each tribe according to 
 the number of its families. The basis of their land 
 system would seem to have been not an absolute 
 but a relative peasant-proprietorship, with ultimate 
 ownership vested in the tribe. 
 
 It was only very gradually that the tribes were 
 welded together into a nation ; the people were 
 beginning to feel that they could never complete 
 their conquest under these spasmodic leaderships ; 
 they wanted a more permanent leader who should be 
 their general in war time and their law-giver in times 
 of peace. Their demand is resisted by the prophet 
 Samuel, who warns them of the dangers of kingship. 
 
 And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice 
 of the people in all that they say unto thee : for they have 
 not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should 
 not reign over them. According to all the works which 
 they have done since the day that I brought them up out 
 of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken 
 me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. Now 
 therefore hearken unto their voice : howbeit yet protest 
 solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 39 
 
 king that shall reign over them. And Samuel told all the 
 words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a 
 king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king 
 that shall reign over you : He will take your sons, and 
 appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his 
 horsemen ; and some shall run before his chariots. And 
 he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains 
 over fifties ; and will set them to ear his ground, and 
 to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, 
 and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your 
 daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be 
 bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, 
 and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them 
 to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, 
 and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his 
 servants. And he will take your menservants, and your 
 maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your 
 asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of 
 your sheep : and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall 
 cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall 
 have chosen you : and the Lord will not hear you in that 
 day. Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of 
 Samuel : and they said, Nay ; but we will have a king over 
 us ; that we also may be like all the nations ; and that our 
 king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our 
 battles. And Samuel heard all the words of the people, 
 and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord. And the 
 Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make 
 them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, 
 Go ye every man unto his city. 
 
 We find some reflection of this warning in an early 
 written law, wherein the king is forbidden to possess 
 much silver or gold, or to multiply to himself horses 
 or wives. And indeed their first king remained a 
 simple farmer to the day of his death. David marks 
 the transition from simplicity to wealth. This great 
 warrior-politician, who did so much towards the uni- 
 fication of Israel, had begun his life as a shepherd 
 
40 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 But with Solomon, Samuel's forebodings are fully 
 justified and the old law disregarded. Solomon is a 
 good example of the Oriental despot. He made 
 slaves of the conquered peoples, and although he 
 did not actually enslave his fellow-countrymen, he 
 gathered together chariots and horsemen, made silver 
 to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to 
 be as the sycamore tree in the lowlands for abundance ; 
 his harem was immense, and the demands of these 
 luxurious foreign women, who had turned away his 
 heart from the simple customs of his ancestors, must 
 have constituted a colossal drain upon the resources 
 of the country. The fact that he was able to stave 
 off a popular revolt is a tribute to the wisdom of his 
 statesmanship ; the entente that he was able to make 
 with Egypt was of great value to Israel, and the poor 
 would, no doubt, be fascinated by the glitter and 
 lavishness of the court and the army, and, heavy as 
 was the taxation, would for the time acquiesce in a 
 huge expenditure made possible by foreign levies. 
 
 With the mention of this despotism and its large 
 revenues comes a significant mention of excessive 
 poverty, for at the king's death the people, led by 
 Jeroboam, come to Solomon's legitimate successor and 
 issue their ultimatum : " Thy father made our yoke 
 grievous ; now therefore make the grievous service of 
 thy father, and the heavy yoke that he put upon us, 
 lighter, and we will serve thee." 
 
 At first he is inclined to yield, but ultimately he 
 refuses the democratic counsel of the more conservative 
 advisers and replies : " As my father did lade you 
 with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke : my 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 41 
 
 father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise 
 you with scorpions." 
 
 But he had forgotten the power of the revolu- 
 tionary prophet. Ahijah drives Jeroboam to con- 
 spiracy; the revolution is ablaze, and the answer 
 comes swiftly : " What portion have we in David ? 
 what inheritance have we in the son of Jesse? to 
 your tents, O Israel." So the orthodox succession 
 loses ten out of the twelve tribes, and civil war is 
 only averted through the instrumentality of another 
 prophet. 
 
 The Hebrews are now practically in possession of 
 the whole of Palestine, but are split up into two 
 sections under rival kings, each accepting the same 
 law, and each professing to be the kingdom of God 
 on earth. 
 
 It will now be fairly evident that the Old Testa- 
 ment conception of religion recognised no divorce 
 between things spiritual and things material. Hebrew 
 spirituality was concerned with the bodies, minds, and 
 spirits of men, and translated itself immediately, as 
 all healthy spirituality at all times must, into political 
 action. Their kingdom was not of this world that 
 is, was not to be modelled on the worldly customs 
 of the surrounding imperialism; it was to be the 
 commonwealth of God, founded in justice between 
 man and man. The reign of Solomon had been a 
 departure from the simple ideal of justice. The 
 earth is the Lord's, together with its products. Their 
 prophets and law-givers believed that the earth had 
 been given for the use of a peasant nation of workers, 
 and not for the profit of a rent-extracting minority. 
 
42 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Capital, such as there was, must not enslave men by 
 means of interest ; the needs of the poor must not be 
 made the opportunity of the powerful. Landlordism 
 and capitalism are of this world ; now is God's earthly 
 kingdom not from hence. But as these spiritual beliefs 
 were real beliefs, and not modern Sunday platitudes, 
 they were immediately translated into national action 
 in the shape of laws. 
 
 It used to be the custom to group the Old Testa- 
 ment laws together and claim for all of them Mosaic 
 authorship. Modern critics challenge this claim, and 
 are inclined to regard the bulk of so-called Mosaic 
 legislation as being the outcome of the prophetic 
 period. There is, however, no reason why we should 
 doubt that Moses had some vision of a theocracy 
 founded on justice, in which there should be plenty 
 and to spare for all, of a people uncontaminated 
 with the customs of their neighbours, of a people 
 planted and rooted evenly and wisely in the land. 
 Moses would have seen the evils of landlordism, 
 capitalism, and usury in Egypt; they would be 
 vividly contrasted in his mind with the democratic 
 and communistic traditions of his own people. It 
 may well be that the Jewish law is essentially Mosaic, 
 although its actual committal to writing may have 
 been but gradual, and legislation would develop along 
 the lines of national experience. While not com- 
 mitting oneself entirely to the theories of modern 
 critics, it will be interesting provisionally to accept 
 certain of their conclusions and to trace the economic 
 history of Israel along the chronological lines that 
 they have suggested. 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 43 
 
 In accordance with this plan, we must here consider 
 the Book of the Covenant, which is supposed to em- 
 body the earliest form of the written law. The code 
 shows us that slavery still exists among the Jews, but 
 in a comparatively harmless form. Every seventh 
 year the Jewish slave goes free, unless he prefers 
 servitude. If a father sells his daughter into slavery, 
 he must not sell her to foreigners. Such a slave 
 could even marry into the family she served, and must 
 in that case be treated as one of the family, and could 
 claim food and raiment and her marriage rights if her 
 husband took another wife. If the claim was refused 
 she could go home. Man-stealing and taking interest 
 are punishable with death. If a person's clothing 
 was taken as security for a loan, it was to be returned 
 to him the same night. The existence of poor people 
 was contemplated,, but they were to be relieved in 
 various ways, every seventh year, for instance, being 
 a fallow year, when fields, vineyards, and oliveyards 
 were to be common to all. 
 
 An early form of the Decalogue seems to have 
 been included in this code. The Sabbath rest was 
 based on humanitarian considerations. The people's 
 ownership of the land is taken for granted in the 
 fifth commandment; the removing of one's neigh- 
 bour's land-mark would be the most glaring in- 
 stance of the breaking of the sixth, while the tenth 
 would secure the peasantry their ancient economic 
 rights. Health and strength would be the result of 
 national obedience to these laws ; national disaster 
 and individual disease would be the penalty of 
 disobedience. 
 
44 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 The story of Naboth's vineyard is an example 
 of the clash between the lusts of an Orientalised 
 despotism and the rights of the Jewish democracy. 
 
 Ahab knew the tenacity with which the Israelite clung 
 to his freehold, and the sanctity which attached to the 
 ancestral inheritance, and hence, when Naboth refused to 
 sell, the king could only fume helplessly at the failure of his 
 petty plans for a private park. His wife was from Tyre, 
 where royal power was older and accustomed to move 
 rough-shod over the fancied rights of the common herd. 
 She sneered at his feeble grip and gave him a lesson in 
 handling the judiciary. But the judicial murder of Naboth 
 brought Elijah out to face the king, a grim incarnation of 
 justice and of the divine rights of the people. Ahab had 
 collided with the primitive land-system of Israel and the 
 prophetic sense of justice, and it cost his dynasty the 
 throne and Jezebel her life. 1 
 
 The most significant period from our point of view, 
 as regards both the Northern and the Southern 
 Kingdoms, corresponds with the reigns of Uzziah and 
 Jeroboam II. It was a period of unparalleled pro- 
 sperity ; wealth was increasing by leaps and bounds. 
 It may not unfittingly be compared with the 
 beginnings of the nineteenth century in England, 
 for, in spite of this prolific increase, the poor were 
 becoming poorer in inverse ratio to the growth in the 
 fortunes of the rich. We read of idle lives given up 
 entirely to pleasure, of inlaid ivory houses, of town 
 and country residences, of costly wines and scent, of 
 the ever-growing claims of capitalism and landlordism. 
 Poverty increased, for the people were no longer 
 masters of the situation. " Capital controlled the 
 food-supply, and the landed estates displaced the 
 
 1 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis. 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 45 
 
 peasantry." A sudden war, a famine, an illness, 
 would push the poor man over the border-line into 
 slavery. The people, robbed of their lands, were 
 obliged to borrow at enormous rates of interest to 
 pay the taxes, and often sold their children to slavery 
 to meet their obligations. The revival of husbandry 
 was eclipsed by the growth of trade and of the city. 
 For the poor man there was no redress, for the law and 
 the official religion had alike passed into the hands of 
 the classes. Up to this period the land has been 
 covered by a sturdy warrior peasantry; now there 
 is no place for the poor man, and with the growth 
 of civilisation we note the inevitable appearance of 
 the landless proletariat. Internally, there was misery 
 and dissension : externally, the empire of Assyria 
 was rising on the eastern horizon "like a cyclone 
 cloud." " It moved down on the cluster of little 
 kingdoms in Syria and Palestine with irresistible 
 force," for it was " destined to grind up the tribal 
 nationality of the ancient Orient, and to begin the 
 work which Chaldea and the Greeks continued and 
 the Romans completed." 1 
 
 The dark ages of Israel called forth the Prophets. 
 George Adam Smith has said that no prophet 
 ever worked on the basis of principles only. He 
 came always in alliance with facts. As Maurice and 
 Kingsley are to some extent the creation of the nine- 
 teenth century, so Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah are 
 created by the needs of their time. It is remarkable 
 that men who suffer from some intimate and individual 
 trouble will find themselves turning to the pages of 
 
 1 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis. 
 
46 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 these most spiritual of religious leaders ; yet these 
 leaders whose spirituality has endured were essentially 
 politicians, and would have stared in blank amazement 
 at the silly question, "Has religion anything to do with 
 politics ? " They were revolutionaries whose audacity 
 would have staggered Messrs Hyndman and Blatchford. 
 There is again illustrated in their lives the nature of 
 Jewish religion, its recognition of justice and the 
 needs of men's bodies, its denial that there can be 
 any spirituality apart from fellowship. The Spirit is 
 not given to the separate believer, but to the nation. 
 The very Psalms are, for the most part, national 
 songs. The "I" of the Psalmist is Israel in its 
 totality. Modern critics suggest that even the fifty- 
 first Psalm, so long supposed to be a Davidic poem 
 of personal repentance, is the wail of the nation in 
 captivity, with the walls of its city razed to the 
 ground. Where individuals are gathered together in 
 national fellowship, there is God in the midst of them. 
 Hence the tent or the temple becomes the trysting- 
 place, the symbol of unity and therefore of salvation. 
 Jerusalem is the Holy City, for it is at unity in 
 itself, and thither the tribes go up to worship the 
 national God. 
 
 Nathan and Gad had been David's political advisers, 
 Ahijah had stirred Jeroboam to revolt, Elijah had 
 resisted Ahab, Elisha had fanned the rebellion of 
 Jehu, Amos thunders against the misrule of the king 
 of Israel, Isaiah denounces the landlords and the 
 usurers, Micah charges them with blood-guiltiness ; 
 Jeremiah and the later prophets, though they strike 
 a more intimate note of personal repentance, strike it 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 47 
 
 as the prelude to that national restoration for which 
 they hunger as exiles. 
 
 The first chapters of Isaiah are typical of the Old 
 Testament point of view. Just as the prophets of the 
 nineteenth century thundered against the " Christian " 
 employers of Lancashire, and told them their houses 
 were cemented with the blood of little children, 1 so 
 Isaiah cries against his generation : Your govern- 
 ing classes companion with thieves ; behold, you 
 build up Sion with blood. Their ceremonial and 
 their Sabbath-keeping are an abomination to God. 
 " When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine 
 eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood." The 
 poor man is robbed. The rich exact usury. " Woe 
 unto you that lay house to house and field to field, 
 that you may dwell alone in the midst of the land." 
 u Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of 
 your doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do 
 evil : learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the 
 oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. 
 Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord. 
 Though your sins be blood-coloured, they shall be as 
 white as snow ; though they be red like crimson, they 
 shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye 
 shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and 
 rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword." 
 
 And now the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom 
 have been carried into captivity. The Southern 
 kingdom is nearing its end. In this kingdom the 
 reign of Josiah, a genuine reformer, is marked by the 
 
 1 See Chapter IX. of the present book for condition of factory workers 
 and increase of wealth under Christo-capitalism. 
 
48 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 discovery of the Book of the Law. Jeremiah and 
 Ezekiel are the prophets of this period. The code of 
 Josiah incorporates the earlier Book of the Covenant 
 and possibly some custom law, and applies the older 
 legislation to the needs of the time in the spirit of the 
 prophetic period that has intervened. The promise 
 of health and prosperity is reiterated. The laws are 
 to be taught to the children as part of their religious 
 education. All sickness shall vanish from the nation, 
 if men will remember God and the requirements of 
 His justice. The strict legislation against interest in 
 any shape or form is repeated. Its transgression is to 
 be punished by death. 
 
 It is the fashion to sneer at law-givers and prophets 
 on account of their religious bigotry and exclusiveness. 
 Why should they be so concerned to keep Israel from 
 contact with the gods and ideals of other nations? 
 It does not matter what a man believes so long as 
 his actions are in the right. The prophets would 
 have answered promptly, the economic action of the 
 nation is in the wrong, because the nation has lusted 
 after other gods. And, in point of fact, history is on 
 the side of the prophets. For we have seen that 
 when Solomon worshipped other divinities the nation 
 groaned under an economic burden too grievous to be 
 borne. The period of landlordism and capitalism 
 was the period of faithlessness to the jealous God of 
 Israel. Just as Palestinian theology has its expression 
 in something not unlike modern socialism, so Assyrian 
 and Babylonian theology has its expression in some- 
 thing not unlike modern commercialism. When the 
 Book of the Covenant is insisting on loyalty to the 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 49 
 
 national God, and nothing per cent., and the rights of 
 the people to their land, imperialism, landlordism, and 
 usury flourish in the countries all around them. The 
 rate of legal interest throughout the Babylonish 
 empire is twenty per cent, the laws of Menu permit 
 twenty-four per cent, and Egyptian legislation only 
 interferes to forbid more than a hundred per cent. 
 
 The fresh notes in the newly discovered legislation 
 are the land-mark law, which sternly forbids en- 
 croachment upon peasant rights ; consideration for 
 the foreigner ; additional sanitary and food laws ; 
 tithe regulations on behalf of widows, orphans, 
 foreigners, etc. ; that those who have no economic 
 independence should eat and be satisfied ; that loans 
 should be given cheerfully, not only without any 
 interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. 
 To withhold a loan because the year of release is at 
 hand, in which the principal is no longer recoverable, 
 is described as a grave sin. When you are compelled 
 to free your slaves, you must give them sufficient 
 capital to embark upon some industry which shall 
 prevent their falling back into slavery. A number of 
 holidays are insisted upon. There must be no more 
 crushing of the poor out of existence, for God cares 
 for those people who have been driven to poverty, 
 and they shall never cease out of the land. Howbeit 
 there shall be no poor with you, for the Lord will 
 bless you, if you will obey these laws. 
 
 We do not know how far the nation responded 
 to these social ideals, but the year 606 B.C. marks 
 the overthrow of the Southern Kingdom, and a 
 few years later the destruction of the Temple. In 
 
 4 
 
50 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 586 B.C. the peasant population is deported, and a 
 proletariat is left. In 536 B.C. a few return, but 
 this remnant becomes enslaved to the Persian king. 
 Usury and rapacity are everywhere rampant. 
 Drought and crop failures increase the misery. 
 The richer Jews, instead of learning compassion, 
 prey upon the miseries of the poor. In Malachi 
 and Ezekiel we read of fields mortgaged, usurious 
 loans, and child-slavery. 
 
 Nehemiah seems to have been the instrument of 
 national repentance. 
 
 Many had mortgaged their lands and vineyards to 
 pay exorbitant taxes to the king. They had even 
 sold their children to meet their debts. Nehemiah 
 angrily rebukes the rich oppressors, and commands 
 them to restore the land to the people, and to give 
 them back a hundredth part of the money, corn, 
 wine, and oil that they exact of them. Nehemiah's 
 demands are listened to, and restoration is made. 1 
 
 For examples of the outspokenness of the prophets, 
 the book of Amos should be studied, as also the 
 words of Ezekiel and of the later Isaiah. Ezekiel 
 takes his stand against pessimism and fatalism (chaps, 
 xviii. and xix.). Each generation is responsible for 
 its own deeds. However evil the father's life, the son 
 may turn and act justly. He will not be punished 
 for his father's transgressions. He that 
 
 hath not oppressed any, but hath restored to the 
 debtor his pledge, hath spoiled none by violence, hath 
 given his bread to the hungry, and hath covered the naked 
 with a garment ; he that hath not given forth upon usury, 
 
 1 Neh. v. 4-13. 
 
THE JE WISH SCRIPTURES 5 1 
 
 neither hath taken any increase, that hath withdrawn his 
 hand from iniquity, hath executed true judgment between 
 man and man, hath walked in my statutes, and hath kept 
 my judgments, to deal truly ; he is just, he shall surely 
 live, saith the Lord God. 
 
 With this should be compared a passage in 
 chapter xxii. : 
 
 Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening 
 the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get 
 dishonest gain. And her prophets have daubed them with 
 untempered mortar, seeing vanity, and divining lies unto 
 them, saying, Thus saith the Lord God, when the Lord hath 
 not spoken. The people of the land have used oppression, 
 and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy : 
 yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. And I 
 sought for a man among them, that should make up the 
 hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I 
 should not destroy it : but I found none. Therefore have 
 I poured out mine indignation upon them ; I have con- 
 sumed them with the fire of my wrath : their own way 
 have I recompensed upon their heads, saith the Lord God. 
 
 It is to be noted that just as the sentence in Isaiah 
 about our sins being as scarlet, so dear to the hearts 
 of revivalists, is wrenched from its moorings, which 
 are social and revolutionary, so also the Prayer Book 
 sentence, " when the wicked man turneth away from 
 his wickedness," is taken from this social passage, in 
 which the wickedness is defined as taking increase, 
 and in other ways oppressing the poor. 
 
 The second Isaiah (chap. Iviii.), in the passage 
 commencing, " Cry aloud and spare not," lifts up his 
 voice like a trumpet against the rich man's injustice, 
 thieving, and hypocrisy : 
 
 Is it such a fast that I have chosen ? a day for a man to 
 afflict his soul ? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, 
 
52 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou 
 call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord ? Is not 
 this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of 
 wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the 
 oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke ? Is it not 
 to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the 
 poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the 
 naked, that thou cover him ; and that thou hide not thy- 
 self from thine own flesh ? And if thou draw out thy soul 
 to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul ; then shall thy 
 light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day : 
 and the Lord shall eoride thee continually, and satisfy thy 
 soul in drought, and make fat thy bones : and thou shalt 
 be like a walled garden, and like a spring of water, whose 
 waters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build 
 the old waste places : thou shalt raise up the foundations 
 of many generations ; and thou shalt be called, The repairer 
 of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. 
 
 The result of this revival was that the people 
 promised to observe the seventh year of release and 
 to forego the exaction of all debts. This leads on 
 to the reforming legislation of the time of Ezra, which 
 is now considered to be the third and last layer of 
 the Law, and corresponds to much of our book 
 of Leviticus. 
 
 One notes particularly in this legislation that the 
 corners of the field are to be left for the poor, as also 
 the gleaning of harvests ; the poor have a right to 
 pick up the fallen fruits in the orchards ; oppression 
 and robbery, especially of land, are strictly prohibited ; 
 workmen are to be paid by the day at sundown ; 
 men are not to be worked on the holidays ; the 
 fallow year is to be observed for the sake of the 
 hired servants ; actual slavery has now disappeared ; 
 there is to be no favouritism nor unjust judgment, 
 
THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES 53 
 
 nor nourishing of secret enmities against one's 
 neighbour, for you are to remember to "love your 
 neighbour as yourself." Every fiftieth year is the 
 year of liberty. In that year all Hebrew servants 
 and their families are to be unconditionally freed, and 
 to return to their peasant holdings. For the freehold 
 of agricultural land and cottages is never to be sold. 
 Only leasehold sales are permissible, and the price 
 of these is to be determined by the average value of 
 the crops till the next year of release. House pro- 
 perty in the towns can, under certain conditions, be 
 sold outright. This code marks the total abolition 
 of Hebrew slavery. 
 
 There would seem to have been a genuine attempt 
 on the part of the nation to observe this legislation, 
 but with the development of commerce and of credit 
 operations, the strain of obedience to laws whose 
 observance would have been more possible in simpler 
 and more primitive times is greatly increased. No 
 doubt this economic development would lead to all 
 kinds of evasions, with which we may compare the 
 evasions permitted in Christ's time by even such 
 rigorists as Hillel. 1 We have no evidence of the 
 material conditions of the people under the later 
 Persian and Greek dominions. Josephus, who is the 
 authority for the Greek period, was unfortunately a 
 snob, and showed no interest in social matters. 
 Wealth was increasing with the increase of the 
 population ; perhaps we may infer that, along with 
 commercial development and contact with other 
 civilisations, poverty was also on the increase. 
 
 1 And also the modifications of the later canon law ; cf. Chapter VI. 
 
54 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 The Maccabean period sees a temporary improve- 
 ment. There is a recovery of national independence 
 under the loose suzerainty of Rome. The Jews 
 acquire a valuable sea-board and a consequent 
 over-sea commerce. 
 
 Then did they till their ground in peace, and the earth 
 gave her increase, and the trees of the field their fruit. The 
 ancient men sat all in the streets, communing together of 
 good things, and the young men put on glorious and war- 
 like apparel. He provided victuals for the cities, and set in 
 them all manner of munition, so that his honourable name 
 was renowned unto the end of the world. He made peace 
 in the land, and Israel rejoiced with great joy, for every man 
 sat under his vine and his fig-tree, and there was none to 
 fray them. 1 
 
 1 i Mac. xiv. 8-14. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GOSPELS 
 
 Goodness as preparation for the Kingdom National expectancy 
 Various views of the Kingdom John the Baptizer His revolu- 
 tionary message St John and our Lord contrasted The Gospel 
 of the Kingdom A Kingdom of body, mind, and spirit Christ's 
 followers His popularity The children of the Kingdom to be 
 cast out His reception at Nazareth An " unpatriotic " sermon 
 The Peter Gospel emphasising His unconventionality Luke's 
 account of the kernel of His teaching Blessed are ye poor The 
 poor understand the Sermon on the Mount The Sermon explained 
 Inward conversion and outward change Not to destroy but to 
 complete the old material-spiritual conception The things that 
 are Caesar's General principles and their varying application 
 Can the present system claim to be in any sense an application ? 
 The question of compulsion and Count Tolstoy's interpretation 
 The use of the parable From nationalist to internationalist 
 Kingdom Parables of the Kingdom Was the Kingdom to be 
 cataclysmic ? The evolutionary theory The seed growing 
 secretly The sower, the net, and the tree The pearl beyond price 
 The unjust judge Eagerness, persistency, and alertness essential 
 Parable of the talents and of the steward of injustice Attitude 
 of the Pharisees Dives and Lazarus The rich young landlord 
 and Zaccheus Judge or divider Parable of the labourers in the 
 vineyard The alabaster box The poor always with you The 
 last judgment God's Utopia and overmastering life The rich 
 young man again A general and not particular application A 
 domesticated Christ. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GOSPELS 
 
 "Whatever aspect (of the Kingdom of God) any man emphasized, 
 it was still a national and collective idea. It involved the restoration 
 of Israel as a nation to outward independence, security, and power, 
 such as it had under the Davidic kings. It involved that social justice, 
 prosperity, and happiness for which the Law and the Prophets called, 
 and for which the common people always longed. It involved that 
 religious purity and holiness of which the nation had always fallen 
 short. And all this was to come in an ideal degree, such as God alone 
 by direct intervention could bestow. When Jesus used the phrase 
 'the Kingdom of God,' it inevitably evoked that whole sphere of 
 thought in the minds of His hearers. If He did not mean by it the 
 substance of what they meant by it, it was a mistake to use the term. 
 If He did not mean the consummation of the theocratic hope, but 
 merely an internal blessedness for individuals with the hope of getting 
 to Heaven, why did He use the words around which all the collective 
 hopes clustered? In that case it was not only misleading, but a 
 dangerous phrase. It unfettered the political hopes of the crowd : it 
 drew down upon Him the suspicion of the government : it actually led 
 to His death." RAUSCHENBUSCH, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 
 PP. 57, 58. 
 
 SINCE the days of the Jewish Captivity, religion 
 had become more intimate and introspective. Oppor- 
 tunity was lacking for political expression, and its 
 absence drove the people in upon themselves, and 
 the aspect of the individual soul and its God was 
 developed. During the period of the Maccabees the 
 
58 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 normal expression was regained, but even then the 
 nation was not free of the suzerainty of Rome. But 
 goodness, though individualised, was always treated 
 as a preparation for the national restoration, No 
 man by individual righteousness could live the life 
 God had intended for him ; that life could alone be 
 lived in the Golden Age of deliverance and of cor- 
 porate national independence. Such a restoration 
 of God's Kingdom was expected on all sides. The 
 kingdom of the Maccabees had broken in pieces 
 through force of external opposition and internal 
 discord. So far as human foresight went, it looked 
 as though no recovery of the nation would ever 
 again be possible. And yet the general expectancy 
 grew stronger every day. Now and again crude 
 revolutionary leaders arose who, after futile resist- 
 ance to the Roman power, were executed along with 
 their followers. Some thought the Kingdom would 
 be restored by means of one of these mad Mullahs 
 or Messiahs. Others, despairing of a general restora- 
 tion, were ready to retire into country places and 
 set up ascetic communities withdrawn from com- 
 merce and from sensuous enjoyment. Meanwhile 
 the Sadducees and Herodians, the Erastians of that 
 day, shrugged their shoulders and scoffed at the 
 turbulent enthusiasm of the crowds. The Roman 
 dominion suited them well enough. The scribes 
 and Pharisees looked forward, but with none of the 
 enthusiasm of the revolutionaries, to the coming of 
 the Kingdom. Meanwhile the law must be rigor- 
 ously observed not indeed the whole law, but the 
 law as expurgated by the rigid Puritan mind. Self- 
 
THE GOSPELS 59 
 
 exalted, complacent, despising others, they were a 
 party of fussy, trivial literalists regarding the common 
 people, who knew not the law, as accursed. 
 
 Above the clamour of these contending parties is 
 raised the voice of one crying in the wilderness. 
 John the Baptizer begins his mission in the wild 
 country of South Jordan, not far from the Dead Sea. 
 His religion is not so much a gospel as a call to 
 repentance in preparation for a gospel. Do good 
 works, and show your change of heart and mind by 
 the usual method of immersion in the Jordan. He 
 was here as a herald to clear away the jungle under- 
 growth and make straight the Messiah's path. A 
 total abstainer, he lived the simple life, clothing him- 
 self in coarse stuff and eating just what came to hand 
 in the wilderness. The Kingdom was close upon 
 them ; it was essential that they should return to the 
 old paths to walk in them. This repentance, this 
 internal change of front, though essential, was not the 
 Kingdom of God any more than a little girl's frock 
 is the party to which she is going. Repentance will 
 involve the levelling doctrine of the ancient Law and 
 Prophets. 
 
 Every valley shall be filled, 
 
 Every mountain and hill brought low ; 
 
 And the crooked shall be made straight, 
 
 And the rough ways made smooth ; 
 
 And all flesh shall see the salvation of God. 
 
 His preaching causes a great sensation ; everybody 
 makes the excursion into the wilderness to hear him. 
 When the religious leaders come to his baptism, he 
 cries : O generation of snakes, who hath warned you 
 
60 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 to flee from the coming wrath? Bring forth fruits 
 meet for repentance. Don't cheat yourselves into a 
 false security by thinking that you have Abraham 
 to your father. Man is not redeemed by the blood 
 of his ancestors, but by his own works. God is able 
 of these very stones to raise up children to Abraham. 
 The axe is even now laid to the root of the tree ; 
 every fruitless tree shall be destroyed. All worthless 
 things are to be burnt with unquenchable fire. And 
 the people themselves ask him what they are to do, 
 and he answers, they must equalise their property ; 
 the man with two coats must share with the man who 
 has none ; so likewise with money. The soldiers 
 ask what are they to do, and he tells them not to 
 add to their wages by robbing the peasantry, on 
 whom they are quartered. The tax-gatherers are not 
 to cheat, and not to squeeze the last farthing of 
 profit out of the people. As to the nature of the 
 Kingdom itself he has no clear vision, but he knows 
 that such social works as these are essential if they 
 are to enjoy it, if its coming is not to grind them as 
 powder. The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is im- 
 minent ; there is One coming immediately who will 
 not baptize with water, but with fire. The terrible 
 Messiah is even now at the doors. 
 
 John and Jesus are worlds asunder, yet a fulgent 
 sincerity rafts them together in the midst of the 
 slush and drift of that turbulent age. The last of the 
 prophets rebukes the upstart king for immorality, 
 and the rebuke costs him his life. 
 
 " Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came 
 into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, 
 
THE GOSPELS 61 
 
 The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at 
 hand ; repent ye, and believe in the gospel." His 
 coming is described as the scattering of the proud, 
 the dethroning of princes, the raising of the humble, 
 the filling of the hungry, and the rich sent empty 
 away. Before His mission, in the loneliness of the 
 country, He is besieged with temptations. Was He 
 after all the Messiah chosen to redeem His country ? 
 What was to be the nature of His mission ? Had He 
 the power to carry it through ? But He proved Him- 
 self the conqueror of these doubts, and came again 
 into Galilee with the good news of the impending 
 Kingdom. The time is ripe, the Kingdom near ; turn 
 and believe the glorious news. John in his prison 
 heard and wondered. Was this really the Deliverer ? 
 The reply was swift and decisive. Disease was being 
 defeated, ignorance dispersed, evil crushed. Body, 
 mind, and spirit were being redeemed. Such were the 
 signs of the Kingdom of God. At once Christ 
 begins to gather round Him a society of men and 
 women, alert and true, who have eyes to see and ears 
 to hear, and begins to train them into an adequate 
 conception of the Kingdom and the King. It is a 
 band, for the most part, of fishermen and peasants. 
 A tax-gatherer and a harlot, both belonging to classes 
 ostracised from organised religion and society for 
 disreputability, are members of that band. 
 
 He goes about the commercial centres and villages 
 of Galilee, and the people are amazed at His cures 
 and His preaching. Everywhere He rebukes disease, 
 restores men's minds, strengthens their bodies, and 
 preaches the Golden Age. He cannot escape the 
 
62 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 crowds. They throng Him, not only from Galilee, 
 but from the remotest parts of Palestine. Among 
 those healed is the slave of a foreign soldier, who is a 
 half convert to Judaism and popular with the religious 
 leaders. The soldier's faith leads Christ to exclaim, 
 to the astonishment of the people, Many shall come 
 from the East and West, and shall be on an equality 
 with Abraham and the Jewish heroes in God's 
 Kingdom, and the children of the Kingdom shall be 
 expelled. He gives no elaborate definition of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, but only insists that this 
 Kingdom which was familiar to them, about which 
 they could read in their law and their prophets, was 
 to burst asunder the Jewish barriers and let all men 
 in. Hints there had been of such an universalism in 
 the Old Covenant, but for the most part that Covenant 
 had been nationalist, and the Jews of Christ's day 
 were narrowly exclusive. The people of Galilee 
 believe in Him, although it is doubtful how far they 
 understand His message. His native village is an 
 exception. He has become something of a celebrity, 
 and comes to Nazareth, and is allowed to expound 
 the Scriptures in the local meeting-house. He reads 
 the passage about the year of liberty, when the land 
 returns to the people and the oppressed are set free : 
 
 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
 
 Therefore he has anointed me to preach glad tidings 
 
 to the poor ; 
 
 He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, 
 And recovery of sight to the blind, 
 To set the oppressed at liberty, 
 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. 
 
 He hands the Scripture to an attendant and sits 
 
THE GOSPELS 63 
 
 down; the eyes of all are fixed on Him and He 
 begins to say to them, " To-day has this Scripture been 
 fulfilled in your ears." They are puzzled, and ask 
 each other, " Is not this Joseph's son ? " He had made 
 an astounding claim, but He does not back it up 
 with the cures and other mighty works which have 
 made His reputation in other places. He answers 
 their doubt with the words, " No prophet is acceptable 
 in his own country." In truth, Elijah was not sent to 
 the widows of his own people, but to a foreigner in 
 the land of Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel 
 in Elijah's time, but only the foreigner Naaman was 
 healed. This unpatriotic teaching infuriates them, 
 and they hustle Him up the brow of the hill, and 
 would have hurled Him down. 
 
 These early days of His brief ministry were often 
 retold to the multitudes by St Peter after Christ's 
 death, and the Apostle would dwell upon His uncon- 
 ventionality and His audacity. St Peter grouped 
 together in his teaching five instances 1 of this, and 
 each one of the five was a separate offence against 
 accepted religious standards. Sometimes He kept 
 the letter of the Scriptures ; more often He broke it. 
 But whether breaking or keeping it, Christ would 
 always bring His hearers down below the letter to 
 the spirit and motive which had inspired it. The old 
 morality had been made for man, not man for 
 morality. Human needs were above the letter of 
 the law. 
 
 Another account of His teaching summarises it 
 
 1 In the Gospel according to St Mark, the scribe of the Peter 
 teaching. 
 
64 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 as follows : " Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the 
 Kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now, 
 for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, 
 for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye when men shall 
 hate you, and separate you from their company, and 
 revile you : rejoice and be glad, your reward is great in 
 heaven ; for in the same manner did their fathers unto 
 the prophets. Woe unto you that are rich, for you 
 have received your consolation. Woe unto you that 
 are full now, for ye shall hunger. Love your enemies. 
 Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that sneer 
 at you. Offer the cheek to the smiter, Withhold 
 not your coat from him that takes your cloak. Give 
 to everyone that asks; and of him that takes away 
 your goods ask them not again. And as ye would 
 that men should do to you, do ye also to them. . . . 
 And if you lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, 
 what thank have ye ? Even sinners lend to sinners to 
 receive as much. But love your enemies and do them 
 good, and lend hoping for nothing again." These 
 passages are generally interpreted as an appendage to 
 normal everyday commercial life ; but without doubt 
 our Lord meant them as the basis of all life. 
 
 Nowhere did He bless poverty ; but to those poor 
 men of Galilee, who had ears to hear and eyes to see, 
 He says, Blessed are ye poor men, for yours is the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. You understand it ; you have 
 made it your own ; you believe in it. They may 
 persecute you and revile you, but they cannot take the 
 Kingdom out of your heart, or shake your determina- 
 tion that it shall be established on the earth. It was 
 these people who could most becomingly pray, " Thy 
 
THE GOSPELS 65 
 
 Kingdom come on earth as in heaven ; give us 
 day by day bread sufficient for the day." It was 
 these men who would best understand that the heavy 
 labour they had to undergo was the result of the 
 system of rent and usury and oppressive taxation 
 which was ruining their country, a system which was 
 the outcome of the ethics of the kingdoms of this 
 world. They would understand that in the establish- 
 ment of the commonwealth of God based on Divine 
 justice they would find a lighter yoke and an easier 
 burden. His teaching is again summarised in 
 another account as follows : Store not up individual 
 private fortunes. You cannot serve God and greed. 
 Don't be over anxious for your life, for food or drink 
 or clothing. The birds do not sow or reap, nor 
 gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feedeth 
 them : are you not of much more value than they ? 
 The lilies of the field toil not, neither do they spin, 
 and yet they are beautifully clad. If God clothes 
 them, shall He not much more clothe you ? He is 
 your Father. He knows you need these necessities. 
 Seek ye first His kingdom and His justice, and all 
 these things shall be added to you. 
 
 If one compares this summary with the teaching of 
 the Old Testament on the subject of the Kingdom 
 namely, that a commonwealth based on Divine 
 justice must exclude all non-producers, that is, all 
 possibility of living upon others by means of rent or 
 interest, that the earth and its product is to be the 
 property of all the subjects of the Kingdom, that God 
 has provided bountifully for the needs of all, that 
 they have only to obey these just laws of anti-rent 
 
 5 
 
66 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 and anti-interest to discover that God's earth and its 
 product is sufficient for their needs it is easy to see 
 with certainty and without shadow of doubt that our 
 Lord is referring to no mere inward change of soul 
 on the part of separate individuals, but to an inward 
 conversion of the said individuals regarding them- 
 selves as a united people, a change in view-point, 
 which will immediately express itself in collective 
 action. People who do not think, but clothe them- 
 selves in second-hand thoughts, object to modern 
 socialist legislation because of its outwardness. When 
 they begin to think, they will understand that no 
 revolutionary legislation is ever carried through 
 Parliament without first a tremendous agitation 
 throughout the country, with its appeal to the heart 
 and mind of the nation, and that in social reform 
 a change of heart does actually precede a change of 
 law. Lord Shaftesbury's Factory Acts were pre- 
 ceded by the conversion of thousands to a more 
 human view of life. The legislation for the feeding of 
 school-children is the immediate effect of a socialist 
 agitation of some twenty years, which has at last con- 
 verted the people of England to a sense of pity, and 
 that sense of pity has been embodied in a law ; the 
 result of that law is to heal the bodies of little children 
 and to bring hope to their souls. I four Lord had 
 meant to contradict the Old Testament idea of the 
 Kingdom, the idea of a people embodying its inward 
 belief in justice and mercy in outward and material 
 laws, He would have been very careful to say so, but 
 He deliberately denies this, saying : " Think not that 
 I came to destroy the law, or the prophets : I came 
 
THE GOSPELS 67 
 
 not to destroy, but to complete. For verily I say 
 unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or 
 one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law 
 till all things be accomplished. Whosoever shall 
 break one of these least commandments, and shall 
 teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom 
 of heaven. . . . Except your justice shall exceed 
 that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise 
 enter the kingdom of heaven." And yet He Himself 
 broke the letter of the law, and defended His followers 
 when they broke it. Taking His teaching as a 
 whole, we come to the conclusion that the outward 
 law meant always for Him the expression or the 
 safeguarding of some human need, that He wanted 
 to bring His people back to the living principles of 
 law and prophet. The principle underlying the tribal 
 peasant-proprietorship and anti-usury law of the Old 
 Testament was that in a kingdom of righteousness 
 no one should be heavy-burdened in order that others 
 should escape the burden of work altogether. This 
 principle is reasserted in early Christian times in the 
 Church's economic motto: "If any man will not ! 
 work, neither shall he eat." We are told that Christ 
 came to lay down general principles : this is one of 
 the principles which He laid down. He laid it down 
 that it might be carried into effect by a collective 
 people who had become convinced of its truth. He 
 did not say to them, You shall carry it into effect 
 by means of peasant-proprietorship, or by means of 
 feudal ownership, or by means of economic socialism. 
 He did say, You shall carry it into effect, and pro- 
 mised the spirit of wisdom and of life to the Christian 
 
68 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 fellowship throughout the ages, which should guide 
 them so long as they were loyal to the ideals of the 
 Kingdom in the economic application of those ideals 
 best suited to the actual day and generation. The 
 letter of a law divorced from its spirit and intention 
 killeth ; the spirit or intention of law gives it life ; 
 the intention of the old law was that none should 
 idle, that all should be producers, that none should 
 live by means of tribute levied on the production of 
 others. We should be glad if our critics would tell 
 us in what sense the economic system of the present 
 day is an expression of the living spirit and intention 
 of the law of the Jews, which was not abrogated, but 
 extended and universally applied, by Jesus Christ. 
 It is not necessary here to discuss the further question 
 of whether Christ was an anarchist or a socialist that 
 is, as to whether He was uncompromisingly against 
 every kind of enforcement of law by aristocracies, 
 plutocracies, monarchies, or democracies, for our 
 modern Christian critics are cheating themselves or 
 us, and merely playing the hypocrite, when they 
 object to social legislation on this particular ground. 
 They have no intention of taking the bars and bolts 
 from their front doors, or abolishing the police or 
 any of those legal and compulsory safeguards which 
 secure to them their ill-gotten gains ; they are merely 
 joking with us, and their joke is in very bad taste. 
 The only serious and consistent opponent of social- 
 ism on the ground that it involves compulsion, and 
 that compulsion is intrinsically antichristian, is the 
 passive anarchist Count Tolstoy, who, although he 
 opposes legal socialism, more strenuously opposes 
 
THE GOSPELS 69 
 
 the compulsory commercial individualism (which 
 comfortable middle-class Christians complacently 
 support) as being the most unutterably unchristian 
 thing the world has ever seen. 
 
 Now, Tolstoy's contention is that any physical 
 expression of an inward idea is unchristian, or rather, 
 such physical expression as should curtail the liberty" 
 of others ; all government, therefore, prisons, police, 
 armies, physical resistance or compulsion on the part 
 of individuals or communities, is antichrist. The 
 bomb-thrower and the government that hangs him, 
 the thief and his gaoler, the aristocracy who have 
 stolen the land by compulsion and the democracy 
 who would regain the land by compulsion, are equally 
 condemned. Now, Tolstoy's criticisms are suspect for 
 two reasons. First, he black-brushes out every in- 
 cident in the Gospels which does not square with his 
 preconceived notion of what a Saviour ought to be ; 
 he singles out a couple of texts and asserts that these 
 are the essentials of the Gospel. Other passages 
 contradict his interpretation of that couple of texts ; 
 they are therefore interpolations of a later date. 
 Secondly, his particular interpretation in this matter 
 contradicts the unanimous interpretation of the un- 
 divided Church. This does not trouble him, but it 
 troubles us, for the Christian Bible was not written by 
 Christ, but by members of His Church, and it was the 
 Church that finally selected certain writings of its 
 members and rejected others, and bound its selections 
 together under one cover which we call the New 
 Testament. If the unanimous interpretation of its 
 members be rejected with contempt as being the 
 
70 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 outcome of a corrupt and incapable body, why should 
 not the action of members of this same corrupt and 
 incapable body be suspect, when it chose certain 
 writings and rejected the rest? Why should not 
 Tolstoy, and, indeed, all those modern interpreters 
 who profess to love the book while they despise its 
 authors and selectors, go to the rejected gospels as 
 their standard of what Christ really said, assured in 
 their minds that whatever this degraded and apostate 
 Church selects must be false, and whatever it rejects 
 must be true ? We cannot, therefore, regard with any 
 great degree of seriousness a critic who fixes an 
 absolute gulf between the human tradition labelled 
 " Gospels" and the human tradition labelled " Epistles 
 and Early Writings," and who is quite capricious and 
 irresponsible in his use of the sacred text. 
 
 He isolates a single sentence from the Sermon on 
 the Mount : " Resist not him that is evil," and inter- 
 prets it as meaning that no physical resistance, force, 
 or compulsion is permissible to Christian governments 
 or individuals. He can find no passage which in the 
 least modifies this conclusion, and he points in 
 triumph to a passage which confirms it : " He that 
 takes the sword shall perish by the sword." Jesus 
 was the meek and gentle persuader of the souls of 
 men. His Kingdom would indeed have its outward 
 expression ; it would involve a change in material 
 conditions ; the rich would get off the backs of the 
 poor ; there would be a universal but voluntary com- 
 munism, after the pattern of the communism of the 
 first days in Jerusalem. Probably the Kingdom would 
 be established very gradually by a slow evolution- 
 
THE GOSPELS 71 
 
 ary process; but if the government should imprison 
 a man, or even fine him, for appropriating a 
 piece of the common land, it would be equally 
 guilty with the individual who prevents monstrous 
 cruelty to a child by knocking down its tormentor. 
 Tolstoy here has fallen into the trap that is laid for 
 all literalists ; he has ceased to be literal. For if we are 
 to isolate this particular text and interpret it literally, 
 it is equally hostile to passive and argumentative 
 resistance as to active and corporal resistance. It 
 does not say, " Resist the evil man with your brain, but 
 do not resist him with your arm " ; it says, " Do not 
 resist him at all." The fact is, we must take Christ's 
 teaching as a whole, and from it discover the intention 
 that underlies the whole. He found men much too 
 eager to revenge private wrongs. People refused to 
 regard themselves as a holy family, but were always 
 standing on their mean and miserable little individual 
 rights or fancied rights. He says in effect, " Be more 
 generous, be in charity one with the other, do not be 
 suspicious one of the other ; be large-hearted enough 
 to turn the other cheek ; life is short and the battle is 
 long, the battle against mammon and his allies, the 
 battle for the Kingdom of God." Now, such an in- 
 terpretation has not only the advantage of being in 
 accord with common sense and universal tradition, 
 but does not contradict the rest of Christ's teaching, 
 for the Prince of Peace was no peace-at-any-price 
 prince. On one occasion He uses physical violence, 
 upsetting the tables of the money-changers, and 
 driving them, together with the oxen, out of His 
 Father's courts. His language is not mild and con- 
 
72 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 ciliatory like that of Tolstoy, but fierce and terrible. 
 He calls His king a fox, His disciple Satan, the 
 religious leaders vipers, hypocrites, and whited 
 sepulchres. His Kingdom is for the violent ; men 
 of violence are storming it. He comes to cast fire 
 upon the earth, and wishes it were already ablaze. 
 He brings not peace, but a sword ; He divides families, 
 the father from the son, the daughter from the mother. 
 John baptized with water, but He with fire. His 
 Kingdom will grind the unbeliever to powder, will 
 burn the tares with unquenchable fire. It shall be 
 more tolerable for Sodom in the day of judgment 
 than for the villages that refuse hospitality to His 
 followers. Now, whatever may be the interpretation 
 of these passages, they are simply irreconcilable with 
 the picture of the passive Tolstoyan Messiah, and 
 they suggest an answer to both the consistent and 
 inconsistent moderns who claim Christ as a non- 
 resister. Tolstoy says Christ was never angry ; St 
 Mark says Christ looked about Him with anger. The 
 fact is, the " Resist not evil " passage has absolutely 
 nothing to do with the question of compulsion. I 
 should be opposing Christ's teaching in that particular 
 passage, if I wrote a venomous attack on a personal 
 enemy in a newspaper as if I ran him through with a 
 sword. If Christ had said, " Do not physically resist 
 an evil man," we should have quite as much right to 
 urge another isolated text : " He that hath no sword, 
 let him sell his garment and buy one," but of course 
 such playing with texts is altogether useless. 
 
 Christ illustrated the nature of the Kingdom of 
 God by a series of stories drawn from the life and 
 
THE GOSPELS 73 
 
 customs of His day. These stones served the double 
 purpose of attracting and enticing those who were 
 on the alert for truth, and repelling the hard-hearted 
 and wooden-minded ; the prejudiced could make 
 nothing of them. The parables not only brought 
 the people up to the high-water mark of prophetic 
 tradition, but increased and developed the meaning 
 of the Kingdom. The best that had been done in 
 the past had been to conceive of a kingdom of the 
 Jews expanding into a just empire which should rule 
 in righteousness over all the earth. The old con- 
 ception, whether of a little Palestine or an imperial 
 Palestine, had always remained nationalist ; now the 
 nationalist must give way before an internationalist 
 conception. Again, many thought the Kingdom 
 would instantly appear. Now, although I cannot 
 find any justification of the theory of a very slow 
 and gradual evolution of the Kingdom through 
 centuries after centuries, and although both parables 
 and apocalypses and scattered sayings all seem to 
 point to a sudden and cataclysmic appearance of the 
 Kingdom, yet such a consummation might not be 
 immediate, might be so long delayed as to discourage 
 shallow and impatient natures. Such a coming of 
 the Kingdom there would indeed be before that 
 generation had passed, but, though abrupt and terrible 
 and apparent to every eye, it would only be the 
 sudden consummation and fulfilment of the old 
 familiar commonwealth of the prophets, the coming 
 of a Kingdom not utterly strange and foreign, but 
 of one that had been from the very beginning within 
 their midst. They must not be disappointed by the 
 
74 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 apparent rejection of the Gospel by the world. The 
 growth of a seed once sown is secret. It comes up 
 unexpectedly, one knows not how. Once planted, 
 one must leave it to nature's secret workings. When 
 the end comes it will be as vivid and universal as 
 the lightning: be alert, lest it come suddenly as a 
 thief at night and take you unawares ; How can I 
 explain all this to you? What illustration can I 
 use? The Son of Man is like a sower. He sows 
 His followers up and down the field of this age, but 
 the Evil One sows also evil men. Don't be too 
 anxious to root up the weeds, when weeds and wheat 
 are both young. You may mistake the one for the 
 other. The age is drawing to a close; the harvest 
 is its end, and the Son of Man and His angels will 
 come as reapers, rooting up from the Kingdom all 
 things and all people that are an offence, and casting 
 them into the furnace of fire. Then shall just men 
 shine forth like the sun in the Golden Age. The 
 Gospel of the Kingdom will fall on all kinds of soil, 
 on deaf ears sometimes, on shallow natures quick to 
 accept and quick to reject, upon people who are 
 inclined to receive its ideals, but who are finally 
 choked with worldliness and over much property, 
 upon people who cannot stand persecution ; but some 
 will understand their minds are bright, their hearts 
 alert and these will be prolifically fruitful. Its social 
 gospel will attract all kinds of people, the good and 
 the bad; it is a net gathering every kind of fish. It 
 is sown in this little corner of the world ; it breaks 
 national boundaries and becomes a tree whose 
 branches overspread the earth. It works secretly 
 
THE GOSPELS 75 
 
 and in various ways in men's hearts, but it is very 
 thorough and wide-spread, like leaven hidden in the 
 meal till all is leavened. It is worth everything else 
 in the world ; there is nothing like it ; it is the pearl 
 beyond all price ; it is the buried unexpected treasure 
 for which one sells all beside. Seize upon the idea 
 of the commonwealth, or let yourself be seized and 
 fired by it, and your dull existence will blaze up into 
 overmastering life. The past will be lit up by the 
 flames of the Kingdom, the future will be secure. 
 
 It is only those who hunger and thirst after justice 
 who can be filled, only those who keep their lamps 
 trimmed that will be ready for its coming. The pity 
 of it is that the sons of this age, the children of this 
 evil, competitive, suspicious world, are in their genera- 
 tion wiser than the disciples of the Kingdom. The 
 Golden Age must be carried by storm. If the people 
 of this age, by sheer persistency in their requests, 
 draw from an unjust and ungenerous judge their 
 particular demands, how much more shall the 
 supporters of the Golden Era win from the generous 
 Father of mankind that consummation of their hopes 
 which is in accordance with His own deepest longings ! 
 But the sons of mammon are more alert and whole- 
 hearted in their pursuit of private wealth, than are 
 the sons of the Kingdom in their pursuit of common 
 wealth. Yet it is only those who are eager to hear 
 who shall hear, only those who have learnt to be 
 hungry who can be filled. To him that hath shall 
 be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken 
 away even that which he seemeth to have. That is 
 the law even in the affairs of this world. The 
 
SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Deliverer seems a long time coming, the Golden Age 
 seems so very far removed. Meanwhile, you must 
 zealously increase your powers of service and forward 
 the interest of that commonwealth. The slaves of 
 the absent merchant prince understand that. To 
 one he has given ten talents. By making the best 
 use of them according to the code that exists in 
 trading circles he doubles them ; to another he has 
 given five talents, with a like result ; a third is slack 
 and indolent, and does nothing with the one talent 
 entrusted to him. Suddenly the merchant returns, 
 and the indolent slave excuses himself on the ground 
 that his master is a harsh and unscrupulous man who 
 is quite ready to reap where he has not sown, that is, 
 to cheat and rob. But, replies the merchant, if I 
 am an unscrupulous rascal, you as my slave were 
 bound to behave as the loyal servant of an unscrupulous 
 rascal ; in other words, you should have taken my 
 money to the bank, so that I should have received 
 mine own along with that interest which rascals do 
 not scruple to take. If we are as indolent in our use 
 of the powers God gives us for the advancement of 
 the commonwealth as the slave was indolent in serving 
 the merchant of mammon, his fate will be ours. 
 
 A manager is accused of wastefulness. His 
 master resolves to dismiss him ; he is compelled to 
 render his account, as the steward of injustice or of 
 the unjust mammon, that is, of private property. 
 Sharing property, or making it common, is called by 
 Jesus justice: "Do not your justice before men." 
 This manager finds himself in a fix ; he is without 
 friends, he has offended his master ; he has probably 
 
THE GOSPELS 77 
 
 offended the merchants who do business with his 
 master by adding to the amount of their accounts 
 an additional sum as commission for himself; he 
 determines to put the matter straight with them, so 
 that when he is dismissed, all doors shall not be shut 
 against him ; he does the smart, business-like thing, 
 for which his master commends him. Should we not 
 be at least as alert we, the children of light on behalf 
 of the commonwealth, as are the children of this 
 dark commercial age on behalf of mammon ? Should 
 we not be as whole-heartedly communistic as the 
 commercial fools (cf. Luke xii. 20) are whole- 
 heartedly individualistic. Make to yourselves friends 
 by means of the property you unjustly possess ; sell 
 that ye have and give alms, so that, when the system 
 of mammon shall be at an end, the poor to whom 
 you have given may receive you into the eternal 
 tabernacles of the international Kingdom. What is 
 appropriate to you is the common property, in which 
 you will have your share in the Golden Age. Ex- 
 cessive private property is not your own, but belongs 
 to the poor from whom it has been robbed. If you 
 have not been faithful by distributing to those others 
 that which is theirs, how can you expect in the 
 Xingdom to come to receive that which is your own ? 
 You cannot serve God and greed. It is intensely 
 significant that there immediately follows this 
 comment : " The Pharisees, who were lovers of 
 money, scoffed at him." As a further comment 
 there is here inserted the story of Dives and Lazarus, 
 the story of the rich man who refused justice to the 
 poor man at his door ; and very soon after is related 
 
78 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the incident of the enormously rich young man, who 
 refused to disburse his property, and the generous 
 rich man who did the best he could under the system, 
 giving half his income to the poor, and restoring four- 
 fold when he exacted more than his due. As to 
 laws of private property and squabbles about in- 
 heritance, Christ will have nothing to do with them. 
 He will be no party to settling private disputes 
 among capitalists : " Who made me a judge or divider 
 among you ? " Such people must beware of avarice, 
 the desire of private gain in contradiction to public 
 service. They must remember the fate of the 
 successful farmer, who thinks that life consists in 
 an abundance of private property, and who hoards 
 his gains in warehouses. To the man of the world 
 he may appear a clever fellow : God calls him a fool. 
 So is he that builds a private fortune, instead of 
 sharing with the poor. 
 
 To those Jewish converts, who will be inclined to 
 draw back when they see what is involved in the inter- 
 national ideal, and who will complain that they have 
 borne the burden and heat of the day, Christ replies 
 that the foreigners were eager and alert to work for 
 the same ideal, but had no opportunity, and that 
 therefore it was right and just that their reward 
 should be the same as that of the Jews ; for in God's 
 Kingdom men are to be paid, not by results, but 
 according to their needs. 
 
 His Kingdom is not of this world ; it does not 
 belong to the pushing, bullying, grasping spirit of 
 this epoch ; if it did, it might be established by push- 
 ing and grasping and fighting. It will be established 
 
THE GOSPELS 79 
 
 on earth as in heaven by the conversion of the people 
 to the ideal of common wealth. The life of the 
 Kingdom is to be no mean, niggardly, ungenerous 
 existence. It is compatible with prodigal generosity. 
 The Christ who thundered against plutocracy (Mt. 
 vi. 24), who urged the re-establishment of God's just 
 commonwealth, now no longer on a national but on 
 an international basis, who absolutely forbade private 
 fortune - building (Mt. vi. 19), having driven the 
 money-grubbers out of His Father's Temple, is in 
 immediate peril of arrest and of death. He foresees 
 that His opposition to the plutocracy-loving Pharisees 
 and His teaching of the inner laws of the Kingdom 
 means the end. His disciples are afraid, but they 
 cannot understand that He will be defeated and 
 destroyed. He dines in the house of Simon the 
 Leper. No one seems to realise the immediate 
 danger, that in a few short hours He will be 
 snatched from them, and that the Cause will be, as 
 they would think, for ever lost. No one realised 
 the situation, excepting a woman. There came a 
 woman having a very costly cruse of ointment, and 
 she brake the cruse and poured it over His head 
 (Mk. xiv. 3 ; so also Mt. xxvi.). The ointment may 
 have been worth a price which would have kept an 
 artisan's family in comfort for a whole year. The 
 act was lavish, spontaneous, immense ; the prodigal 
 expression of a breaking heart that understood that 
 this was the end (Mt. xxvi. 12) ; those who stood by, 
 and among them disciples, were honestly indignant. 
 Their thrifty peasant minds were staggered at such 
 abandoned generosity. The thing was as silly and 
 
8o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 as thoughtless as the folly of the widow who cast 
 her mite into the treasury, abandoning all that she 
 had. The creed of the Charity Organisation Society 
 had its adherents then as now ; but Jesus perceives 
 their obtuseness, and understands. 
 
 To their murmurings against the woman, " To 
 what purpose is this waste of ointment, for it might 
 have been sold and given to the poor," He replies: 
 Let her alone ; why annoy her ? she hath wrought 
 a good work on Me. You talk about the poor, but 
 the poor are always with you, and if you really so 
 chose you could at any time do them good ; but for 
 Me the end is very near. She hath done what she 
 could ; she hath anointed My body aforehand for 
 the burying, and verily I say unto you, that whereso- 
 ever this Gospel shall be preached throughout the 
 whole world, that also which this woman hath done 
 shall be spoken of for a memorial of her, In a later 
 account of the incident, Judas, the treasurer of the 
 party, is the grumbler, and cants about the poor, not 
 because he has any intention of distributing the 
 money among them, but because he is a thief and 
 wants the money for himself. 
 
 In our Lord's picture of the final judgment of 
 men it is not individuals as individuals, but indi- 
 viduals as nations who are arraigned. There are many 
 " religious " peoples who will call Him " Lord, Lord," 
 and whom He will repudiate as strangers. The last 
 shall be first, and the first last. Coming in contact 
 with Him will constitute no claim on His Kingdom ; 
 the fact that one is related to Him by kinship or 
 nationality is nothing. The fact that He preached 
 
THE GOSPELS 81 
 
 in their streets will increase their damnation. There 
 are many who will claim to have prophesied in His 
 name, to have been virtuous and orthodox, to whom 
 He will reply, " I was naked and you did not clothe 
 Me, hungry and you did not feed Me, in gaol and 
 you did not visit Me." These respectable claimants 
 will be shocked beyond measure : they have been 
 worshipping a gentlemanly God on a jasper throne, 
 and forgetting the demands of the poor and the out- 
 cast and the prisoners, in the throne of whose heart 
 God dwells. To these He says, " Depart from Me, ye 
 accursed, into the overwhelming fire prepared for the 
 Devil and his angels." There will be others, who 
 perhaps have been driven away from religion by the 
 hypocrisy of the unctuous, or who have never heard 
 His name, but who have been hungering for a 
 kingdom of justice, and who have been the cham- 
 pions of the desolate and the oppressed, to whom 
 He will say, " Come, ye blessed of My Father ; possess 
 the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning 
 of the world " ; so persistently does He urge His 
 preference for those who say, " I go not," but go, over 
 those who say, " I go, sir," but go not. 
 
 The Kingdom prepared from the beginning of all 
 things is the dream Kingdom of God's will and mind 
 the Heavenly Utopia, which has existed always as 
 God's dream for the world, as the pattern after 
 which He wanted men to live, as the ideal for 
 which He brought them into being, the heavenly 
 city of friends which they are to grasp and appro- 
 priate and drag down out of the skies, planting it 
 firmly on this earth, fulfilling it in their commerce, 
 
 6 
 
82 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 ,- 
 
 their politics, in all their activities and in every 
 human institution. 
 
 In such a fellowship alone could they attain to 
 fulness of life, to that overmastering or overwhelm- 
 ing life which Christ promises to men when they 
 shall have established the Golden Age. Even in 
 this age they will experience something of that life. 
 To be filled with the socialistic ideal, though it mean 
 the breaking of old bonds, the division of families, 
 and the uprooting of old friendships, means also 
 closer comradeships, more living relationships with 
 persecution, and in the good time coming over- 
 mastering life. 
 
 Already a new vigour had come into the lives of 
 His peasant followers, a new purpose into their 
 minds, a new gladness into their eyes. When at 
 last their leader had understood that Jesus was 
 indeed the Deliverer, whose mission was the bring- 
 ing of the Golden Age, Christ begins the march 
 upon Jerusalem, the city of His final adventure and 
 His death. When they are getting near to that city 
 which has slain the prophets and rejected God's 
 messengers, a rich young man comes running to 
 them along the road. He was probably a landed 
 proprietor of Judaea. Christ is going before ; His 
 disciples, a little afraid, follow after. The rich man 
 has heard of the vigour of their mission and the 
 wonderful life that has come to them, and he asks 
 Jesus on what terms he too may possess this life. 
 It is significant that our Lord replies by reminding 
 him of the social precepts of his own religion. He 
 answers airily enough, " All these have I kept from 
 
THE GOSPELS 83 
 
 my youth up : what lack I yet ? " According to one 
 of the early MSS., Jesus replies that he has not kept 
 them, for the poor are hungry at his doors. But 
 in any case, our Lord says, " if thou wilt be perfect, 
 go, sell what thou hast, give to the poor ; follow Me, 
 and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven." And he 
 went away sorrowful, because he was enormously 
 rich. Our Lord realised that the march upon 
 Jerusalem was somehow necessary for the establish- 
 ment of His commonwealth, and yet that it would 
 involve His death, and that through His death 
 would come the ultimate triumph. This adventure 
 therefore involved the burning of their boats, the 
 complete detachment of the soldier engaged in a 
 desperate campaign. Just as there are many who 
 are compelled by the fierce requirements of the 
 battle to refrain from marriage and the cares of a 
 family, so there are many to whom property is 
 a deadly encumbrance. Many agnostics, as also 
 Christian commentators, miss the point of the 
 incident. Agnostics often say, " Selling your pro- 
 perty and sharing out with the poor is no solution 
 of the social question." Christ never said it was. 
 He was not solving the social question ; He was 
 solving the question of the rich man's soul. He 
 saw that this man was being kept back from the 
 life-giving adventure of establishing God's Kingdom 
 by the entanglement of great possessions. His 
 business, then, was to get rid of them, to give them 
 to the poor. Thus only would he be free to follow 
 Christ and to be a soldier of the commonwealth. 
 And Christ's comment on all rich men was, " How 
 
84 SOCIALISM IJN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 hardly shall they that have riches enter into the 
 Kingdom of God ! It is easier for a camel to go 
 through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to 
 enter into the Kingdom of Heaven " ; just as we 
 might say, " It is easier for a camel to go through 
 a needle's eye, than for a proud man to enter into a 
 child's game of marbles." Some commentators have, 
 I believe, enlarged the needle's eye to the size of a 
 darning needle; others, in their anxiety to get the 
 rich man through, assert that our Lord meant a cer- 
 tain porch of the Temple that went under the name 
 of the Needle's Eye. But apparently the baggage 
 camels of the East could squeeze through that porch 
 on one condition only, namely, if they unloaded. 
 
 Modern criticism seems conclusively to have proved 
 that the claim to Messiahship was not at that time 
 considered to involve any theological claim to Divinity. 
 The idea, therefore, that the Jews combined with the 
 Romans to execute Christ because He asserted that 
 He was identical with God is not established. If one 
 has suffered much of modern preachers, one gets the 
 impression that they regard Christ as merely a preacher 
 of the domestic virtues. But supposing our Lord's 
 mission was merely domestic, supposing He had 
 asserted with vehemence merely the duty of being 
 kind to one's grandmother or considerate to one's aunt, 
 what Pharisee or scribe was there who would not have 
 hailed Him as a heaven-born leader? The conclu- 
 sion is forced upon one that the Pharisees, who were 
 lovers of money, scoffed at His communistic ideals, 
 which is exactly what St Luke tells us, and that the 
 Sadducees opposed His political claims, and that 
 
THE GOSPELS 85 
 
 everybody came to consider Him as a much more 
 dangerous and revolutionary claimant to power than 
 any of the cruder and merely nationalist rebels against 
 the Roman dominion. He asserted at the Last 
 Supper among His followers, that He would drink no m 
 more of the fruit of the vine until He drank it in that 
 feast of triumph which should so soon celebrate the 
 ushering in of His Kingdom. The accusation at His 
 trial before Herod and before Pilate was the political 
 accusation that He claimed to be a King, who was to 
 establish a Kingdom not of this world, but in this 
 world : this accusation He did not deny. Hence the 
 superscription in various languages over the Cross, 
 " This is the King of the Jews." 
 
 Finally, a more serious objection is sometimes 
 brought in connection with the question put to Christ 
 about the tribute- money. It is an objection not 
 against socialism, but against Christian people taking 
 part or interest in any sort of secular government. In 
 their eagerness to prove the socialistic clergy wrong, 
 our opponents land themselves in the position of 
 anarchists, i.e. that we have nothing to do with 
 politics, and that things secular and sacred are abso- 
 lutely divorced. They really prove too much, for such 
 a position not only condemns the whole work of the 
 C.S.U., but the work of the Quakeress, Elizabeth Fry, 
 of the Evangelical Shaftesburys and Wilberforces, of 
 all statesmen who have believed that the Christian 
 Faith ought in some way or other to influence public 
 affairs. Of course, by the way, it would be an 
 absolute and final condemnation of an Established 
 Church. 
 
86 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Now the objection may be valid, but it is certainly 
 rather stupendous and revolutionary, and for their 
 sakes as well as ours a careful examination is of 
 supreme importance. 
 
 In so far as the people accepted the Messiah, they 
 did so because they thought He would overturn the 
 Roman power and set up an immediate nationalist 
 kingdom. The Pharisees did not trouble to under- 
 stand exactly what He did stand for but they were 
 money-lovers and scoffed at Him, for they perceived 
 that He did not want to overthrow Rome but mammon, 
 and to establish a commonwealth which would in- 
 clude the people they despised the foreigner and the 
 outcasts. Very well, they would set a trap for Him, 
 by which He would either lose favour with the demo- 
 cracy by announcing the Tightness of the Roman 
 dominion, or would betray Himself into the hands of 
 the authorities by denying the Roman right to levy 
 taxes. They were not earnest inquirers on a point 
 that really troubled them (Luke xi. 54). He invari- 
 ably took infinite trouble with such questioners. But 
 the fool He answered according to his folly : the crafty 
 according to his craftiness. As we say now, He 
 proved a match for them all. He escaped the trap 
 and pushed them into it. To Him God's rights and 
 the ideals of the Kingdom were not besmirched by 
 paying taxes to the Romans. They were violated by 
 Jews or Romans who were dominated by the com- 
 mercial-individualistic spirit of mammon. 
 
 As to the right or wrong of this subordinate 
 question of Roman dominion that dominated their 
 thought, into that He would not enter. They had 
 
THE GOSPELS 87 
 
 really settled that themselves by using the Roman 
 coinage. There was a saying among the Jews that a 
 people had not accepted its position as the conquered 
 until they accepted the coinage of the conquerors. 
 He slips out of the net by leaving them to settle 
 whether or no in fact they did acknowledge the 
 Roman dominion. What coinage do you in fact use ? 
 Let Me see. Bring Me a denarius. But it has 
 Caesar's stamp on it. So you've already settled the 
 question. You wanted to prove Me an anti-patriot 
 before these people ; but yourselves according to your 
 own story are anti-patriots, Render therefore unto 
 Caesar the things which you by your usage acknow- 
 ledge to be Caesar's, and unto God the things that 
 are God's. 
 
 What then are these things of God? What is His 
 Property? According to our Lord, as interpreted 
 by His Church, His is " the Kingdom, the power, and 
 the glory." And therefore, if we would render to 
 God the things that are God's, we must devote our- \ 
 selves to bringing His Kingdom into men's hearts, so \ 
 that they may express it in their laws and lives. 
 
IV 
 THE EARLY CHURCH 
 
 The Church and the Book The Church and the Resurrection Ex- 
 pectancy and Pentecost The first preaching The "communistic" 
 experiment Ananias and Sapphira The Apocalypse of St John 
 Kingdom and city Where is the heavenly city? The meaning 
 of " in heaven " The Kingdom coming with power The 
 criticism of apostates The appeal to the Fathers New Testament 
 interpretation Economics and theology cannot be divorced 
 Dogma and its political implications St Chrysostom on com- 
 munism Justin Martyr, The Didache, St Barnabas, Cyprian, 
 The Shepherd, St Clement, St Austin, St Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, 
 Lactantius, St Basil, St Zeno, Clement of Alexandria, St 
 Gregory, Tertullian The right to live The Church and the 
 manual labourer Rich and poor in the Epistle of St James- 
 Democratic election Labour bishops and labour conferences. 
 
IV 
 THE EARLY CHURCH 
 
 " They found themselves in these cities of the Roman Empire as bands 
 of brothers, and they hit upon maxims which are now the basis of the 
 hopes of social reformers such maxims as that you must find a man 
 work, and that you must find him wages, and you must find him 
 resource and support when he can no longer work. The three short 
 maxims which come out of an early Christian book are precisely the 
 maxims that we want to-day to revolutionise our society : ' For him 
 who can work, work ; for him who will not work, nothing ; for him 
 who can no longer work, support.' Those are very simple maxims, 
 and they came into their minds and practice because they believed that 
 God was their Father ; and so it was they created their social revolu- 
 tion for their time. And, if we will believe with the same simplicity of 
 faith to-day, we shall create a like revolution." BISHOP OF BIRMING- 
 HAM (Dr GORE), Manchester Cathedral, 4th October 1908. 
 
 JESUS Christ did not bind writings together into a 
 book, but men together into a fellowship. He did 
 not say, " Upon this rock I will build My library," but, 
 " Upon this rock I will build My Church." One watches 
 with some curiosity the struggles of those critics who 
 would depreciate the Church at the expense of its 
 literature, the Bible, to prove this particular passage 
 unauthentic ; but it is at least as integral a part of the 
 sacred text as the passage in which they profess to 
 find the kernel of the Christian religion, namely, " The 
 Kingdom of God is within you." It is now generally 
 
 91 
 
92 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 admitted that this particular saying should be more 
 accurately translated, " The Kingdom of God is among 
 you." But even if these critics were able to rid them- 
 selves of the saying they consider objectionable, it 
 would still remain unquestionably true that Jesus 
 Christ gathered round Him a band of followers and 
 trained them in the principles of the Kingdom of 
 God, so that they might become the mouthpiece of 
 that Kingdom throughout the civilised world. 
 
 In the time of His defeat and crucifixion as a 
 malefactor, we find them broken, defeated, and 
 scattered. All His promises had failed. The King- 
 dom is at an end. In an incredibly short time these 
 same men and women are together in Jerusalem, 
 filled with quiet yet exultant expectancy, welded 
 together in the certainty that the Messiah had risen, 
 had broken the bonds of death, had been among them 
 and spoken to them, and had at last ascended into 
 God's presence and power, that He might more effectu- 
 ally fill all things with His presence, and inspire the 
 disciples of the Kingdom with a life and enthusiasm 
 which, in their terrific force, could not be compared 
 with water, but with storm and fire. 
 
 They elect a disciple in the place of Judas to be 
 one of the twelve leaders of the democratic band. 
 For the rest, they continue in prayer and alert 
 expectancy. Suddenly they are filled with a spirit 
 like the rushing of a mighty wind, or like tongues of 
 flame, which drives them to speak to the multitudes. 
 There were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews of the disper- 
 sion from every nation under heaven, who were 
 amazed because every one of them understood that 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 93 
 
 which was spoken as if it had been given in the 
 language of his own country. Some were greatly 
 impressed ; others, laughing, charged them with 
 drunkenness ; but Peter that same Peter who had 
 denied Christ, the once narrow nationalist peasant, 
 the now internationalist apostle by the power of 
 the revolutionary Spirit implored them to give ear 
 unto their words, saying, " This is that which hath been 
 spoken by the prophet Joel." 
 
 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, 
 I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh : and your sons 
 and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men 
 shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams : 
 and on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour 
 out in those days of my Spirit ; and they shall prophesy : 
 and I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the 
 earth beneath ; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke : the 
 sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, 
 before that great and notable day of the Lord come : and 
 it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name 
 of the Lord shall be saved. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth, whom they, by the hand of 
 lawless men, did crucify and slay, God hath raised up, 
 having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not 
 possible that He should be holden of it. Let all the 
 House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God 
 hath made Him both Lord and Messiah of the 
 Kingdom, this Jesus whom ye crucified. 
 
 They were pricked to the heart, and demanded 
 what they should do. They were to turn and be 
 baptized in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remis- 
 sion of their sins, so that they might receive this 
 wonderful spirit which animated the sons of the 
 Kingdom. For to you is the promise, and to your 
 
94 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 children, and to all that are afar off. They were 
 exhorted to save themselves from this crooked 
 generation. About three thousand were convinced, 
 and these continued steadfastly in this teaching and 
 in fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread, and in 
 the prayers. The method of their salvation from 
 that crooked, commercial, unbrotherly age, is now 
 given in detail : 
 
 Then they that gladly received his word were baptized : 
 and the same day there were added unto them about three 
 thousand souls. And they continued stedfastly in the 
 apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, 
 and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul : and 
 many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And 
 all that believed were together, and had all things common ; 
 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to 
 all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing 
 daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread 
 from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and 
 singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with 
 all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily 
 such as should be saved. 
 
 At the end of Acts iv. occurs another description 
 of their life : 
 
 And the multitude of them that believed were of one 
 heart and of one soul : neither said any of them that ought 
 of the things which he possessed was his own ; but they 
 had all things common. And with great power gave the 
 apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus : and 
 great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any 
 among them that lacked : for as many as were possessors 
 of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the 
 things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' 
 feet : and distribution was made unto every man according 
 as he had need. And Joses, who by the apostles was sur- 
 named Barnabas (which is, being interpreted, The son of 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 95 
 
 consolation), a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, having 
 land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the 
 apostles' feet. 
 
 This communistic expression of their faith in the 
 Kingdom was voluntary and spontaneous. A man 
 and his wife sold a certain property and kept back 
 part of the price, bringing only a certain part and 
 laying it at the Apostles' feet. These people had 
 pretended to be whole-hearted disciples of the 
 Kingdom and the fellowship. They wished to have 
 the credit of that assumption ; but this half-hearted 
 service, this niggardly keeping back part of the price, 
 was considered by Peter to be a Satanic cheating of 
 the spirit of brotherhood. No compulsion had been 
 brought to bear. They could have sold the land for 
 their own purposes. They need never have joined 
 the fellowship, nor pretended to care about the 
 Kingdom. They had lied, not unto men, but unto 
 God. It is said that their death followed so immedi- 
 ately on this rebuke that it was regarded as a judg- 
 ment on this niggardly deceit. 
 
 In an early writing, known as the Revelation of 
 St John, and so highly esteemed by the Church as 
 to find a place in the sacred Canon, the author sees 
 God's dream of fellowship taking flesh and being 
 realised upon the earth. This swift triumph of God's 
 commonwealth, superseding the kingdoms of this 
 world, and especially the Empire of Rome, which he 
 attacks with bitterness, is his great hope in the midst 
 of a corrupt age. 
 
 The symbol for this commonwealth changes from 
 family and kingdom to one of citizenship, for soon we 
 
96 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 find ourselves on Greek soil and among Greek ideals. 
 To Ephesian citizens St Paul writes, " Fellow citizens 
 with the saints," and again, " I have lived the life of 
 a citizen " ; and again to the Philippians, " Behave as 
 citizens "; and from his prison in Rome, " Our citizen- 
 ship is in Heaven, from whence also we expect a 
 Deliverer." This passage, of course, can no more be 
 interpreted, " Our citizenship lies in a land beyond the 
 grave," than can the passages concerning the Kingdom 
 be referred to such a land. The City in Heaven, or 
 the Kingdom in Heaven, will be actualised when God's 
 will is done on earth as in Heaven. 
 
 To say a polity is "in Heaven" is to assert its 
 inviolability, its eternity, its assured victory on the 
 outward stage of practical affairs, because it is no 
 arbitrary, irresponsible, artificial commonwealth, but 
 the inner spiritual, unconquerable citizenship of the 
 heavens. So St Paul, the prisoner, could afford to 
 wait, for " our citizenship is celestial " and therefore 
 assured. Rooted in eternal realities, in the innermost 
 constitution of the world, it must some day blossom 
 in the visible cities of the earth. In Babylon we are 
 truly "captives and pilgrims, led astray by sin and 
 concupiscence." We are " to shake off this yoke, to 
 find in Jerusalem and in the city of our God true 
 liberty and a house of sanctuary not made with 
 hands, eternal in the heavens." l But when men have 
 entered into this city with foundations whose Builder 
 is God, it comes down from Heaven and is builded 
 upon the earth. 
 
 It is when we realise this burning enthusiasm for 
 
 1 Bossuet, Sermons. 
 
fellowsr. 
 
 THE EARLY CHURCH 97 
 
 fellowship, for what St Jude calls "the common 
 salvation," expressing itself in such communistic 
 experiments as these, that we begin to understand 
 the CJhrist's assurance : " Verily there be some of you 
 standing here which shall not taste of death until 
 they see the Kingdom of God come with power." The 
 writer of the Revelation had seen his fellow-disciples 
 stretch up their hands to the heavenly Utopia and 
 grasp it firmly, and bring it down with power into 
 human institutions. 
 
 Modern commentators have exercised every in- 
 genuity in attempting to prove that this experiment 
 at Jerusalem was not only an absolute failure, but 
 a quite exceptional and isolated adventure, having 
 no integral connection whatever with the Christian 
 religion. These men hate all such practical ex- 
 pressions of the Kingdom. A sound rule of criticism 
 is to inquire, in the case of the moderns, where and 
 how they live, what club they belong to, and what 
 are their everyday political ideals. Apostates do 
 not make particularly sound critics of the religion of 
 Jesus Christ. Men of great learning, who stand 
 outside the Church of Christ and who have no 
 ecclesiastical axe to grind, are in no doubt about 
 the communistic tendency of Christendom. For 
 instance, the late Henry Sidgwick, himself an 
 agnostic and an anti-socialist, was convinced that the 
 Church has all along preached a gospel which is most 
 becomingly translated into communism ; and it is 
 difficult to see the point of those early attacks 
 on Christ's religion by Lucian, and other pagan 
 opponents, on the ground that His followers were 
 
 7 
 
98 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 for the most part artisans, who lived together in 
 common, and the jeers of these same critics against 
 the Christian doctrine of equality, if there had been 
 no such doctrine, and no such tendency to com- 
 munism. 
 
 Our curiosity becomes amazement when the modern 
 anti-socialist critic turns out to be a High Church- 
 man, who is continually appealing to tradition on 
 questions of scents and vestments, and on every kind 
 of doctrinal issue. He has appealed to the Fathers to 
 the Fathers he shall go. As an Anglican he is bound 
 to make this appeal, for the Church of England lays 
 down not the Bible and the Bible only as our 
 guide, but the Bible as interpreted by universal 
 consent of the Church. And surely this position 
 is incontrovertibly right, for the New Testament 
 is so truly the offspring of the Church that we may 
 say, " No Church, no Bible." The " Bible only " was 
 certainly not the religion of the Christians of the 
 first two hundred years, for the New Testament, as 
 we now have it, was not in existence. The good 
 news about the Kingdom and its King had, from the 
 first, been given verbally by members of the fellow- 
 ship which the Messiah had founded. It was only as 
 an after-thought that certain members began to 
 make jottings of the more salient points in the 
 teaching of the Apostles. These notes and jottings, 
 which came to be known as gospels, were very 
 numerous. They were not written to convert any- 
 body ; they were written to refresh the memories of 
 men and women already converted by the oral 
 teaching of the Church. Composed by members of 
 
the Fell 
 
 THE EARLY CHURCH 99 
 
 the Fellowship from the teaching of other members 
 of the Fellowship, and finally revised and selected by 
 the Fellowship itself, they, together with a few letters 
 and one or two other writings, at last become the 
 Christian Bible. Meanwhile, the Church had been 
 using the Jewish Bible, along with its verbal teaching, 
 to explain to its hearers the nature of the Kingdom it 
 proclaimed. The significance of this fact will be 
 appreciated by those who have studied my second 
 chapter. 
 
 Now, if the Church is the author of the Christian 
 Bible, it is surely reasonable to appeal to the Church 
 for interpretation of doubtful passages. It is hardly 
 necessary to remind my readers that I do not mean 
 by the Church this or that individual clergyman or 
 layman, but the universally acknowledged leaders and 
 saints and doctors of theology and morality. A list 
 of these authorities is given us in the English Calendar 
 of Saints at the beginning of the Prayer Book. We 
 are not bound to accept the fanciful interpretation of 
 this or that early Father, where it is individual and 
 out of harmony with the rest ; but where we have a 
 practically universal consent among those whom the 
 Church delights to honour as wise and heroic men, 
 and especially in that period when Christendom was 
 undivided and Christians had not broken up into 
 enfeebled and warring schisms, more busily engaged 
 in fighting each other than in destroying the kingdom 
 of mammon, there probably is to be found the truth. 
 
 It is sometimes objected that it is ridiculous to 
 appeal to the saints and doctors of the Church on 
 ethical or economic matters. In that case it is 
 
ioo SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 difficult to see why they should be considered such 
 final authorities on the shape of ecclesiastical clothes. 
 But in fact this argument arises from that heretical 
 type of mind that divorces doctrine from practice, 
 theology from ethics, in a way which would have 
 staggered the orthodox Fathers. The Creed -makers 
 were no mere theorists. They valued dogma as a 
 talisman of life ; doctrines were immediately translat- 
 able into individual and political action. For instance, 
 the heretics who asserted the divinity of Christ denied 
 His humanity, for they held man to be essentially 
 vile, and without dignity or divinity. But the Church 
 pronounced man, in spite of original sin, to be 
 essentially good ; human nature, though marred and 
 distorted, was at heart sound : so argued the great 
 St Athanasius and St Hilary, and their reasoning was 
 endorsed by the Church and elevated into a dogma. 
 In consequence of this dogma, common men were 
 heartened to claim their privileges as a divine demo- 
 cracy. If the bodily appetites of man were not the vile 
 things that Oriental Buddhists, Tertullianists,and other 
 heretics asserted them to be ; if they were so capable 
 of purification as to be the perpetual channels for 
 man's expression for this is what the dogma of the 
 resurrection of the body means, then it followed 
 that justice, in apportioning material necessities in 
 accordance with even the meanest of man's bodily 
 requirements, was an essential element in the new 
 religion. While brilliant philosophers of the Church 
 were contending for the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 because they saw in it the highest unity the human 
 mind is able to perceive not the Arian meagre, 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 101 
 
 isolated unit of the single note, but the rich, collected 
 unity of the chord, the people at the forge, in the 
 factory, and in the market-place were contending 
 violently for the same doctrine, with more material 
 weapons. For somehow or other they perceived that 
 the Arian dogma of God as solitary, unsympathetic 
 tyrant in a far-off Heaven, who could not or would 
 not bridge the gulf between God and man, worked 
 out quite immediately and quite practically in the 
 political dogma of a solitary and unsympathetic 
 tyrant here on earth, known to that period as the 
 Emperor of Rome, who would ruthlessly crush a 
 common man and his social-democratic aspirations. 
 But if we children of men were the offspring and 
 expression of a power in the heavens, Whose being 
 was best expressed by collective unity, that particular 
 theological belief expressed itself quite immediately 
 and quite practically in social-democratic ideas of 
 government among the Catholic artisans of that time. 
 The Arians were imperialists ; the orthodox Christians 
 were the democratic party. 
 
 To argue, therefore, that early Church opinion is 
 of weight in matters of theology, and worthless in 
 matters of economics, is to misunderstand entirely 
 the orthodox Christian religion, and to put asunder 
 what God hath joined together. Such argument, 
 tracked down to its source, involves a denial of God's 
 incarnation. An essayist who speaks of this early 
 period says: 
 
 Where the Catholic faith is merely latent, there the 
 socialism is also less explicit. When the writer is unsound 
 in his orthodoxy, then he is almost sure to favour some form 
 
102 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 of individualist law or possession. When the writer is sound 
 and saintly, then he is always entirely and unhesitatingly in 
 favour of the common holding of goods, of equality of 
 opportunity, of social freedom; and even when he is not 
 quite sound, he is always fiercely opposed to the covetous- 
 ness which calls itself enterprise, smartness, natural incentive 
 to exertion, thrift, and the like. 1 
 
 It is essential that the Church of to-day should 
 rediscover the sacramental faith in life, namely, that 
 inward and outward are alike necessary, that the 
 true Catholic is neither a mere materialist nor a mere 
 spiritualist, but is frankly spiritualist and frankly 
 materialist ; that true spiritual conceptions will 
 express themselves immediately in political and 
 economic conditions; that political and economic 
 conditions are the reflection of spiritual and mental 
 conceptions. If political theories are to be true and 
 political life clean, these must be the outcome of true 
 and living dogmas held in the minds and hearts of 
 the people, for " the people who have made the great 
 revolution in human life are the people who have 
 taken their purchase for reforming human life from 
 some high region outside it. If all you have to do 
 is to establish a business, it may be that you can 
 establish that business by thinking about nothing 
 else. But, if what you have to do is to reform 
 human life, then you must take your purchase for so 
 big a thing out of the consideration of nothing else 
 than the character of God who made it." 2 
 
 What, then, is the state of the evidence as regards 
 
 1 Charles Marson, Essay in The Voice of the People, p. 204 (Innes, 
 1894). 
 
 2 Dr Gore, Bishop of Birmingham ; Sermon, Manchester Cathedral, 
 October 1908. 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 103 
 
 the Church's belief that the establishment of God's 
 Kingdom on earth will necessarily express itself in 
 common ownership of the essential means of life. 
 The attempt at Jerusalem was not accidental but 
 essential. " The communism attempted in the 
 apostolic age was cherished in the traditions of 
 the early and mediaeval Church as the ideal form 
 of Christian society." l The Patristic writers do not 
 consider it a failure; for instance, in his eleventh 
 sermon on the Acts, St Chrysostom points out that 
 private bounty tends to vainglory, but the early 
 Christians gave in their corporate capacity, commun- 
 ising everything, and it was for this reason that they 
 had great grace. He thunders against social in- 
 equalities. He points out how all could be made 
 rich by renunciation of private property. He sketches 
 the effects of the apostolic communism applied to 
 his own city ; urges that if it were possible when the 
 leaders were few, much more is it possible now. 
 Lucian the satirist describes the Christians as a 
 people whose first law-giver had persuaded them that 
 they should all be brothers of one another, and hold 
 such property as they have got in common. 2 
 
 Justin Martyr says that Christians brought what 
 they possessed into a common stock and shared with 
 everyone in need. 
 
 Thou shalt not turn away from him that hath need, but 
 shalt share all things with thy brother, and shalt not say 
 that they are thine own. 3 
 
 1 Sidgwick, History of Ethics. 
 
 2 Cf. Marson's articles in Vox Clamantium and The New Party. 
 
 3 Teaching of the Twelve, iv. 8 ; cf. Ep. of Barnabas. 
 
io 4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Such conduct is that of the true sons and imitators of 
 God ; God's gifts are given to all mankind, the day en- 
 lightens all, the sun shines upon all, the rain falls and the 
 wind blows upon all. To all men comes sleep, the splendour 
 of the stars and the moon are common to all. Man is 
 truly imitator of God when he follows the common benefi- 
 cence of God by imparting to all the brotherhood the good 
 things which he possesses. 1 
 
 The second-century Shepherd of Hermas compares 
 the rich to round pebbles which cannot be fitted into 
 the building of God's Temple, until they are brought 
 to a more convenient shape by paring them of their 
 superfluous possessions. 
 
 The use of all that is in the world ought to be common 
 to all men. But by injustice one man has called this his 
 own, another that, and thus has come division among 
 mortals. 2 
 
 What injustice is there in my diligently preserving my 
 own, so long as I do not invade the property of another ? 
 Shameless saying ! My own, sayest thou ? What is it, and 
 from what secret places hast thou brought it into the world ? 
 When thou enteredst into the light, when thou earnest from 
 thy mother's womb, what wealth didst thou bring with thee ? 
 . . . That which is taken by thee, beyond what would 
 suffice to thee, is taken by violence. Is it that God is 
 unjust in not distributing to us the means of life equally, so 
 that thou shouldst have abundance while others are in 
 want ? Or is it not rather that He wished to confer upon 
 thee marks of His kindness, while He crowned thy fellow 
 with the virtue of patience. Thou, then, who hast received 
 the gift of God, thinkest thou committest no injustice by 
 keeping to thyself alone what would be the means of life to 
 many ? ... It is the bread of the hungry thou keepest, it 
 
 1 Cyprian, in the third century, commenting on the communism of 
 the Acts. 
 
 2 St Clement, quoted in Ashley's Economic History ', bk. i., cf. pp. 1-8. 
 Probably the epistle is spurious and belongs to the ninth century, but 
 it voices the usual view of medievalists. 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 105 
 
 is the clothing of the naked thou lockest up ; the money 
 thou buriest is the redemption of the wretched. 1 
 
 St Augustine insists that property is only a creation 
 of man-made laws : " Take away the laws of the 
 Emperor, and who can dare say, This is my villa, or 
 This is my slave, or This is my house ? " 2 He admits 
 certain rights of private property, but argues that 
 property is either an institution of the Divine or 
 the human law. If the first, then all is in God's 
 hands, and cannot belong to people who use it 
 unjustly ; for, he says, the earth is the Lord's and its 
 fulness, and all things belong to the just ; but if it is 
 created by merely government law, 
 
 What human law has given, 
 Human law can take away. 
 
 " God gives all things in common to all men," says 
 Ambrosiaster. He therefore argues that almsgiving 
 is the merest justice. 
 
 Lactantius, who is constantly quoted as an authority 
 in our English Church homilies, traces minutely the 
 rise of human society from the early simplicity of 
 semi-communism, which he contrasts with a frenzied 
 avarice which snaps up everything as its own. Justice 
 is ousted by rapacity ; community of life is lost, and 
 the tie of human society is unbound. Not only folk 
 gave no share to others of their own abundance, but 
 robbed others, making private plunder of everything. 
 What at one time had been for the use of all men, 
 was now consigned to the houses of the few. To 
 enslave others, they made a point of mastering and 
 
 1 St Ambrose ; Ashley's Economic History r , bk. i. pp. 126 and 127. 
 
 2 St Austin, Sixth Tract, John i. 
 
106 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 collecting the necessaries of life, keeping them 
 thoroughly in their clutches. Under the name of 
 justice they sanctioned the most unjust of laws, to 
 protect their own greed against the violence of the 
 many. They got the upper hand by authority, by 
 wealth, by stealth. Honours were now invented, and 
 state uniforms and high positions to frighten people 
 with swords and halters, and to give some show of 
 lordly right to an obedience exacted from the stricken 
 and the terrorised. But this golden age of simplicity 
 had come back to us as a sacrament and earnest 
 in Christ. 
 
 St Basil answers the question about what is one's 
 own in the same way as St Ambrose, adding : 
 
 If some person were to take possession of one of the 
 seats in the State Theatre, and thenceforth turn out all who 
 went into it, deciding that what has been provided for the 
 common use of the public was his private property, that 
 would be exactly like that which the rich people do. They 
 claim prior possession of the common property, and make 
 it private by anticipation. 1 
 
 While we try to amass wealth, make piles of money, get 
 hold of the land as our real property, overtop one another 
 in riches, we have palpably cast off justice, and lost 
 benefidam communcm, social righteousness. I should like 
 to know how any man can be just, who is deliberately 
 aiming to get out of someone else what he wants for 
 himself. 2 
 
 St Zeno of Verona, late in the fourth century, is 
 communistic in the extreme in commenting on the 
 experiment in Acts. 
 
 These are merely examples of the universal theory 
 of the first centuries, summed up in the seventh 
 
 i and 2 Translated by Charles Mar son, ibid. 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 107 
 
 century by St Isidore of Seville, when he says, " By 
 natural law all things are common." 
 
 " Thou shalt have all things in common with thy 
 neighbour, and not call them thy private property, for 
 if ye hold the imperishable things in common, how 
 much more the perishable ? " l 
 
 St Ambrose, commenting on the Sermon on the 
 Mount, speaks thus of the birds : 
 
 They are a great example truly, and one worthy of our 
 faithful imitation, for if God's Providence never fails to 
 supply the fowls of Heaven, albeit they use no husbandry, 
 and trouble nothing about the prospects of the harvest, the 
 true cause of our want would seem to be avarice. It is for 
 this reason that they have an abundance of suitable food, 
 because they have not learnt to claim as their private and 
 peculiar property the fruits of the earth which have been 
 given to them in common for their food. We have lost 
 common property by the claims of private property. 2 
 
 How far will your mad lusts take you, ye rich people, 
 till you dwell alone upon the earth ? Why do you at once 
 turn nature out of doors, and claim the possession of her 
 for your own selves ? The land was made for all : why do 
 you rich men claim it as your private property? Nature 
 knows nothing of rich men ; she bore us all poor. 3 
 
 Nature lavished all things for all in common, so like- 
 wise God made all things to be produced, that all should 
 have common pasture, and the land should be a kind of 
 property common to all men. 
 
 Nature then produced common property. 
 
 Robbery (usurpatio) made private property. 4 
 
 St Gregory the Great, the chief instrument in the 
 conversion of England, in his Pastoralis Cura, a 
 text-book for the guidance of bishops, teaches them 
 to instruct the faithful that it is not sufficient to for- 
 
 1 St Barnabas, Epistle. 2 - 3 ' * 4 Marson. 
 
io8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 bear coveting other men's goods, if one does not 
 bestow one's own in alms. The parable of the barren 
 fig-tree is the story of owners who idly keep what 
 could benefit so many : " A barren fig-tree holds the 
 land when a fool overcasts with the shadow of his 
 inactivity a place which another could use with the 
 sunshine of good work." Those who are niggardly 
 in almsgiving must be clearly made to understand 
 that 
 
 The land which yields them income is the common 
 property of all men, and for this reason the fruits of it, 
 which are brought forth, are for the common welfare. It is 
 therefore absurd for people to think they do no harm when 
 they claim God's common gift of food as their private 
 property, or that they are not robbers, when they do not 
 pass on what they have received to their neighbours. 
 Absurd ! because almost as many folk die daily as they 
 have rations locked up for at home. Really, when we 
 administer any necessities to the poor, we give them their 
 own ; we do not bestow our goods upon them. We do 
 not fulfil the works of mercy ; we discharge the debt of 
 justice. Hence it was that Very Truth, when He told us 
 to be careful to show mercy, said, ' See that ye do not your 
 justice before men.' In harmony with this the Psalmist 
 too said, ' He hath dispersed, He hath given to the poor, 
 His justice remaineth for ever.' For when he reviewed a 
 lavish generosity to the poor, he chose to call it justice 
 rather than mercy, because what is given us by a common 
 God is only justly used when those who have received it 
 use it in common. 
 
 St Chrysostom, in his sermons on the rich man and 
 Lazarus, compares owners of property with robbers, who 
 go out into the highways and despoil the passers-by ; 
 they convert their chambers into caverns in which 
 they bury the goods of others. He speaks of inherit- 
 ance as generally the fruit of theft and crime. St 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 109 
 
 Basil refers to rich men as thieves. St Clement 
 holds that private property is the result of iniquity. 
 St Basil again says, " Who gives to a poor man gives 
 to God." St Jerome asserts that wealth is the result 
 of one's own theft, or that of one's ancestors. Ter- 
 tullian tells us that all property is common among 
 Christians, excepting wives. 
 
 Tertullian, in spite of his communism, was never 
 canonised, because he held the anti-Christian position, 
 " that every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." 
 Clement of Alexandria fails to receive canonisation, 
 perhaps because, although he is sound on the subject 
 of human nature, he is suspected of pandering to the 
 rich on the subject of private property. He would, 
 of course, have been horrified at the individualist 
 sentiments nowadays expressed by opponents of the 
 Church Socialist League in the pages of the Guardian 
 and the Church Times. Every early and mediaeval 
 orthodox writer would have considered the opinions 
 of modern individualist Churchmen as the frankest 
 heresy ; Clement, nevertheless, is inclined to temporise, 
 and allegorises such stories as that of the rich young 
 man and the needle's eye. 
 
 Recent researches of Dr Harnack and Dr Gore 
 have established the fact that what is now called the 
 " right to live " was a foremost principle of the Early 
 Church. 
 
 The early Christian Church was, in its temper and char- 
 acteristics, just what we should expect from all this teaching. 
 In the everlasting opposition of rich and poor, beyond all 
 possibility of question, it ranked among and spoke for the 
 poor. It did not so much exalt the dignity of labour 
 as make the obligation of labour positive and absolute on 
 
no SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 all its members. . . . Each man is to labour with his own 
 hands, and so eat his own bread. There is to be support for 
 those who cannot work, but not for those who will not. The 
 Christian is to be content with the bare necessities of actual 
 life having food and covering. What he earns over and 
 above that, he should not accumulate for his own enjoyment, 
 but give to him that needeth. The Lord's warnings are 
 reiterated upon those who seek to become rich men. They 
 can hardly escape perdition (i Tim. vi. 6). 1 
 
 It will now be interesting to consider what manner 
 of men those early- Christians were who propounded 
 these theological and political doctrines. The French 
 theologian Bossuet speaks in one of his sermons of 
 the Church, which was founded for the poor alone, 
 for they are the true citizens of that happy city which 
 is called the City of God. We may compare this 
 with a paragraph from Dr Gore : " He chose his instru- 
 ments . . . from the class accustomed to live hardly 
 and depend for sustenance upon daily labour. To 
 this class he gave the prerogative position in his 
 Church. It is people of this kind who can pray most 
 naturally the prayer to God the Father, ' Give us 
 to-day bread for the coming day. 5 " 2 The Christian 
 Church carried on the Jewish tradition as to the 
 necessity of labour. 
 
 Our Lord's immediate followers were, for the most 
 part, poor men. They were not drawn from the 
 ranks of unskilled labour, nor from the abject poverty 
 of the slums. They were skilled artisans, precisely 
 the type of men who are now found voting for 
 socialism in the Colne Valley and the manufacturing 
 cities of the North and Midlands, hand-workers, in 
 
 1 Bishop Gore, Manchester, 1908. 
 
 2 Bishop Gore, Barrow-in- Furnace, 1906. 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH in 
 
 contact with the hard realities of life, and yet possessing 
 a comparative leisure and those bare necessities of 
 living, the denial of which drives the slum-dwellers, 
 not to revolution, but to the inertia of despair. The 
 men who had ears to hear the Gospel of a Divine 
 commonwealth were mostly master - boatmen and 
 skilled peasants; in addition to these we read of a few 
 disciples from outcast but not abjectly poor classes, 
 Mary of Magdala and Matthew, who has often been 
 described as a rich man, but who was more probably 
 a mere telonarius, existing on a small daily salary. 
 He was able to give a supper party to his friends ; but 
 small shopkeepers and artisans are no less able to 
 entertain. Modern Christians are fond of allegorising 
 and explaining away the simple facts of the Gospel. 
 They will hardly understand the significance of 
 Christ's " Come unto Me, all ye that labour," and of 
 His Mother's " He hath filled the hungry with good 
 things," until they bring themselves to realise that in 
 the early days not many high officials, not many 
 aristocrats, not many plutocrats were pressing into 
 the Church ; " but God chose the foolish things of this 
 world that He might put to shame them that are 
 wise, and God chose the weak things of the world 
 that He might put to shame the things that are strong, 
 and the base things of the world and the things that 
 are despised did God choose, yea, and the things that 
 are not, that He might bring to nought the things 
 that are." There was a tendency in early times to 
 snobbery. St James had to reprove some who were 
 too fussy in their attentions to plutocratic converts 
 with their gold rings and fine clothing. How the 
 
ii2 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 English Church, or indeed any other, can permit the 
 pew-rent system in face of St James's utterances, is 
 one of those mysteries which will never be solved 
 until we can understand the intricacies of the modern 
 Christian mind. 
 
 To those who say that the Christian religion has 
 only to do with men's souls and not their bodies, St 
 James answers in anticipation : " If a brother or sister 
 be naked and in lack of daily food, and one of you 
 say unto them, Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled, 
 and yet ye give them not the things needful to the 
 body, what doth it profit ? " The motto of this 
 Epistle is : " Let the brother of low degree glory in his 
 high estate, and the rich in that he hath been made 
 low ; because as the flower of the grass he shall pass 
 away. For the sun ariseth with a scorching wind, 
 and withereth the grass ; and the flower thereof falleth, 
 and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth : so also 
 shall the rich man fade away in his goings." 
 
 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries 
 that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and 
 your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is 
 cankered ; and the rust of them shall be a witness against 
 you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped 
 treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the 
 labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you 
 kept back by fraud, crieth : and the cries of them that have 
 reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. 
 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton ; 
 ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. 
 Ye have condemned and killed the just; he doth not 
 resist you. 
 
 There can be little doubt that St James voices the 
 current Christian belief that the world is on the eve 
 
THE EARLY CHURCH 113 
 
 of a revolution, for the King will come in His 
 Kingdom, the mighty will be put down from their 
 seats, the rich sent empty away ; the poor, whom 
 in the thought and language of the day, he calls the 
 just ones, for they alone have obeyed God's law of 
 labour, will be avenged of their adversaries. 
 
 St Paul, the manual labourer, asserts the universal 
 duty of work : if anyone will not work neither shall he 
 eat. He does, indeed, include intellectual and moral 
 ministry as labour, but for himself he prefers to 
 labour with his own hands and so earn his own 
 living. This duty of work was not treated by the 
 Church as the temporary advice of St Paul, but as 
 an essential note of New Testament teaching. It is 
 over and over again referred to by the Fathers and in 
 Church law, as the basic economic principle of the 
 Christian religion. The bishops and creed-builders 
 of the Church did not belong to the comfortable 
 classes. They were stone-cutters and masons, brick- 
 layers and carpenters, chosen by the whole Christian 
 democracy; none were too poor, too unlettered, or 
 too ordinary to be enfranchised ; baptism involved 
 the franchise for men and women alike, and, some 
 say, even for children. Athanasius was elected by 
 the vote of the whole people. Ambrose likewise 
 owed his archbishopric to the democratic vote. 
 St Cyprian and Origen, St Gregory Nazianzen, 
 St Jerome, St Leo, and a host of others bear witness 
 to the electoral rights of the christened democracy. 
 Our modern bishops are gentlemen l and are chosen 
 
 1 Many modern bishops have come from the artisan class, but on 
 becoming clergymen they now cease to be artisans. 
 
 8 
 
ii 4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 by capitalist governments. Bishop Alexander, in the 
 third century, was a charcoal-burner chosen by the 
 people. The Council of Constantinople, in the fourth 
 century, was composed of bishops who were plough- 
 men, weavers, tanners, blacksmiths, and the like. 1 
 From the socialist point of view, it is not necessary 
 to insist on this labour aspect of the Catholic Church, 
 for the socialist who understands his business will 
 prefer a social-democratic duke to a plutocracy- 
 loving dustman, welcoming help from whatever class 
 it comes, and knowing nothing of class distinction. 
 The socialist movement does not merely aim at 
 securing this or that material advantage for the 
 skilled artisan. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that 
 the coming of socialism will be greatly accelerated 
 by the conversion of the artisan class, and that social 
 democracy is unattainable without the aid of the 
 skilled workman ; and therefore it is significant not 
 only that the doctrine of the Church is essentially 
 socialist, but that the councils which built up that 
 doctrine might, with little exaggeration, be called 
 labour conferences. 
 
 1 Cf. Charles Marson's pamphlet on The Church and Democracy. 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF 
 ST PAUL 
 
 ' ' The Powers that be " The critics criticised Jewish hostility to the 
 Empire The crime of unsuccessful rebellion Unhealthy anti- 
 imperialism Early Christian self-satisfaction St Paul reasserting 
 the universality of the Good Spirit Saves the Church from 
 exclusiveness The successor of Alexander Wide-minded Jews 
 of the dispersion "Slaves, obey your masters" A revolutionary 
 counsel of obedience St Paul on fairness and charity Did 
 St Paul believe in a cataclysmic Kingdom ? Onesimus The 
 eternal and the temporal in Pauline teaching The Church and 
 manumission The reign of Nature The Golden Age The 
 Church and the philosophers on its implications St Augustine 
 exceptional and eccentric St Gregory on slavery The stagnant 
 versus the living ages The theory of Divine right Divided 
 opinions on nature of civil authority The socialism of the 
 Fathers questioned The theory of stewardship Almsgiving as 
 justice, not charity Ashley's conclusion Eternal ideas and 
 temporal forms. 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 
 
 " For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men, as 
 the world counts wisdom, not many influential, not many men of noble 
 birth, are called. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world 
 to confound the wise ; and God hath chosen the weak things of the 
 world to confound the things which are mighty ; and base things of the 
 world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things 
 which are not, to bring to nought things that are : that no flesh should 
 glory in his presence." I COR. i. 26-29. 
 
 " If any man would not work, neither should he eat." 2 THESS. iii. 10. 
 
 "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the 
 members of that one body, being many, are one body : so also is Christ. 
 For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be 
 Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free ; and have been all made 
 to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. 
 . . . Much more those members of the body, which seem to be more 
 feeble, are necessary ; and those members of the body, which we think 
 to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour ; 
 . . . God having tempered the body together, having given abundant 
 honour to that part which lacked : that there should be no division in 
 the body ; but that the members should have the same care one for 
 another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with 
 it ; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now 
 ye are the body of Christ, and its several members." I COR. xii. 
 
 "But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may 
 make good their want, that their abundance may make good your 
 want, that there may be equality. As it is written, He that had 
 gathered much had nothing over ; and he that had gathered little had 
 no lack." 2 COR. viii. 14, 15. 
 
 THE Church socialist position is often assailed by 
 people who quote certain passages from the various 
 
 117 
 
n8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Epistles which form so integral a part of the canon 
 of Holy Scripture. They argue that the socialist 
 position is ridiculous in the face of such Scriptural 
 injunctions as, " Slaves, obey your masters," and, 
 " Honour the king." l If this chapter is chiefly devoted 
 to a consideration of their contentions, it is because 
 St Paul's teaching on the democratic and socialist 
 nature of the Church's constitution has frequently and 
 fully been dealt with. It will be alluded to in the sacra- 
 mental section (Chapter VI.), and I have prefaced the 
 present chapter with quotations from his social teach- 
 ing. Should my readers accept the conclusions here 
 suggested in the matter of the Pauline attitude towards 
 government and slavery, they will be able themselves 
 to resolve the whole of his teaching into a harmony. 
 
 Before we proceed to a more minute examination 
 of St Paul's ideas, let us consider what is implied in 
 our critics' objections, and how far that implication will 
 lead us. 
 
 The authority whom Paul bade us obey was the 
 Roman Emperor, and the reason he gives in support 
 of his counsel is, that the Imperial Government is, 
 in his time, the supreme civil power, and the powers 
 that be are ordained of God. The limited monarchy 
 of modern England, the unlimited czardom of Russia, 
 the republicanism of France are as unlike each other 
 as anything could well be, but each, for its own country 
 and time, represents the powers that be. We must 
 ask our critics, do they consider that St Paul's counsel 
 
 1 Cf. with St Paul's teaching this Petrine passage, I Peter ii. 17 and 
 1 8. The Petrine and Pauline Epistles are remarkably alike in their view 
 of the nature of authority. The question of the authorship of St Peter's 
 letters need not concern us here. 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 119 
 
 limits us to honouring the head of a given State only 
 in the event of his possessing the exact status of a 
 Roman Emperor? Supposing his counsel to be of 
 eternal obligation, does it, or does it not, bind us to 
 honour and obey the president of a republic, if we 
 are Frenchmen ; or if we are Englishmen, the powers 
 that be in England, namely, Parliament together with 
 a limited monarchy ? Is the Church of France ortho- 
 dox or unorthodox when it sings in the public liturgy, 
 " O Lord, save the Republic," seeing that the French 
 Republic is a different type of " power that is " from 
 Roman Emperorship? Is the Church of England 
 right or wrong in singing, " O Lord, save the King," 
 seeing that the modern English monarchy is almost 
 as different a " power that is " from the Roman 
 Emperorship as is the French Republic ? The most 
 orthodox of theologians throughout the centuries 
 have generally held that this Pauline counsel, which 
 has in some sense been endorsed by the Church, has 
 in fact been so endorsed as meaning that Christians 
 owe honour and obedience to the civil government, 
 whatever may be the particular form of government 
 obtaining in their country in their own particular 
 period. The theologians are generally as careful to 
 add that there are exceptions to the rule, and to 
 admit on certain rare occasions an ultimate right of 
 rebellion. So careful and conservative a Catholic 
 encyclopaedist as St Thomas Aquinas leaves us 
 in no doubt on this point. If, therefore, our critics 
 insist on this line of argument drawn from St Paul, 
 I fear it must inevitably land them in implicit 
 obedience to a socialist government should such a 
 
120 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 form of government ever become the power that is. 
 They will then no doubt be glad to remember the 
 tradition as to a right of rebellion, all allusions to 
 which they are now so careful to suppress. Taking 
 it quite literally, therefore, as these critics urge us to 
 take this Pauline counsel, it would only seem to 
 commit us to a general respect and obedience to an 
 autocratic, or a social-democratic, or any other prevail- 
 ing form of administration. In the natural course of 
 events or, shall we say, in the Divine ordering of the 
 world ? a people more or less gets the government 
 it deserves. And a counsel of obedience to the civil 
 government accords with the socialist feeling for 
 order and construction, in opposition to the anarchist- 
 individualist contempt for all human administration. 
 
 Beyond all this, St Paul's teaching cannot in fact 
 be literally observed in our own day, although the 
 spirit of it may, by the modern Church, be applied to 
 meet the entirely changed circumstances. Christian 
 people were in his day a small band in the midst of 
 a hostile world, without civil rights, altogether unable 
 constitutionally to influence politics, or to take their 
 part in creating the powers that be. Their natural 
 tendency was therefore to ignore every regulation 
 of the civil government, and this passive resist- 
 ance easily became active resistance under such 
 an administration as that of Nero. The enormous 
 Jewish element in these early Christian communities 
 would tend to perpetuate that crude hostility 
 to the Empire which had been so strong a 
 feature of the Palestinian Jew of the Gospel period. 
 Resistance to the Roman power was very largely the 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 121 
 
 outcome of that narrow nationalist hatred of the 
 foreigner for which our Lord had sought to substitute 
 a wide internationalism. Rebellion against Roman 
 administration was to be discouraged for at least two 
 very good reasons. The minor reason was that all 
 such rebellion at that particular moment, and under 
 those particular circumstances, would have resulted 
 only in massacre and defeat. There was not even 
 that vestige of chance in the situation which there 
 must be admitted to exist in Russia at the present 
 day. The wise general will encourage a fight against 
 enormous odds ; but in circumstances where he knows 
 that defeat is not only very possible, but is practically 
 speaking inevitable, he will consider it a crime to 
 sacrifice his troops. Obedience, therefore, for the 
 time being, would have been the only possible 
 policy, even if St Paul had been an absolute rebel 
 against the Roman authority. There are many 
 circumstances in which those who take the sword 
 will perish by the sword. But the major reason was 
 that the motive of this constant tendency to rebellion 
 in the early Church was by no means free of a 
 certain meanness and inhuman crudity. Not only 
 was there the Jewish tendency to despise foreigners, 
 but Christian communities themselves, whether com- 
 posed of Jews or Gentiles, or both, were peculiarly 
 subject to the temptation of pride and complacent 
 exclusiveness. If one has to beware when all men 
 speak well of one, one has almost equally to be wary 
 when all men speak evil of one. The man 
 who is over-appreciated, and the man who is 
 altogether unappreciated, are alike in danger of 
 
122 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 being driven in upon themselves and of a conse- 
 quent Pharisaism. This is true not only of the 
 individual, but of the community : too easy a success 
 and too swift a popularity are perhaps its worst 
 danger ; but implacable hostility, universal misunder- 
 standing and persecution constitute a very real 
 danger also. Renan has a very illuminating passage, 
 in which, while he admits the truth of the saying, 
 " The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," 
 he points out that the ruthless persecution and hatred 
 of minorities by tyrannous majorities does often create 
 a lesion in the minds of the persecuted body, and 
 drives it or deflects it from its proper channel into 
 some unhealthy and neurotic by-path. Without 
 committing oneself entirely to this statement, one 
 cannot but acknowledge that something of this sort 
 was occurring in the early Christian communities of the 
 first century, and that they were saved from its worst 
 consequences by the sanity and the genius of St Paul. 
 The tendency among these Christians of the first 
 century, in consequence of the contempt and hatred 
 in which they were held, was to drive them into a 
 self-sufficiency and exclusiveness which led to their 
 belief that all virtue resided in the Christian body, 
 and to their claiming that monopoly in God which 
 had been in former times the disastrous claim of the 
 Jewish nation. The Kingdom had been taken away 
 from that nation and given to a people bringing forth 
 the fruits thereof. They rightly felt themselves to 
 be that people, but, driven in upon themselves by 
 persecution, they were likely to deny the universal 
 Spirit from whom all good things would come, and 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 123 
 
 to regard the whole civilised world, Jewish as well as 
 Gentile, as not only corrupt and very far gone from 
 original righteousness, but as essentially evil and 
 absolutely under the dominion of him from whom 
 no good thing can come. It was such a spirit as 
 this that led them to rebellion against the civil 
 government of their day; it was this spirit which 
 St Paul wished to exorcise. He saw in civil insti- 
 tutions, however imperfect their form, some attempt 
 of the good human spirit of society towards adequate 
 expression. He recognised no absolute divorce 
 between the spirit of Seneca and Plutarch and 
 the good spirit of the Christian community. The 
 Christian revelation was the fulfilment of Greek and 
 Roman as well as of Jewish hope and prophecy. 
 The God whom the Athenians unknowingly wor- 
 shipped, Him he declared unto them, for they were 
 also His offspring ; in Him all live and move and 
 have their being, as their own prophets had said. 
 Greeks and Romans, who had not known the Jewish 
 law, had not been left without witness : " For when 
 nations which have no law do by nature the things 
 of the law, these having no law, are a law unto them- 
 selves, in that they show the work of the law written in 
 their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, 
 and their thoughts one with another accusing or else 
 excusing them in the day when God judgeth the 
 secrets of men according to my gospel by Jesus Christ." 
 There is perhaps nothing more amazing in the 
 development of the Christian faith than the con- 
 version of St Peter and St Paul, the one a narrow 
 Palestinian peasant, the other a learned Jew of the 
 
124 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 dispersion, but belonging to the straitest sect of 
 the Pharisees, from the exclusive, contemptuous, 
 nationalist view of goodness, to the universalism of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 St Paul saw in the imperialism of Rome as 
 essential a contribution to the international Kingdom 
 of God as was to be found in quite another direction 
 in the teachings of the prophets of Israel. As a Jew 
 of the dispersion and a Roman citizen, Paul had 
 inherited not only the thought of the Jewish but of 
 the Graeco-Roman world, the Hellenistic ideal which 
 meant fusion of race, unity of language, union of 
 cities, and religious toleration. He has been called 
 the successor of Alexander the Great, of Julius 
 Caesar and Augustus. The ideal Roman Emperor 
 had stood for a certain largeness of belief, according 
 to which no citizen was to keep himself to himself, 
 cribbed and confined within his own little city, but 
 was to be a citizen of the world. The Emperor 
 refused to act in one way to Greeks and in another 
 to barbarians. He would not be a constitutional 
 ruler to the one and a despot to the other. He re- 
 garded himself as heaven-sent peace-maker to the 
 civilised world. Alexander's ideal was the conception 
 of a spiritual Greece beyond the bond of Greek blood, 
 with which we may well compare St Paul's conception 
 of a spiritual Israel beyond the bond of Jewish blood. 
 All brave men, according to him, were Greeks; all 
 cowards, barbarians. Plutarch says of him that as in 
 a loving-cup he mixed together customs, marriages, 
 manner of life, and ordered all to think of the whole 
 world as their native land, of the camp as the citadel 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 125 
 
 and garrison of that land, and to treat the good in 
 all lands as their kinsmen, and only the evil as of 
 alien race. 
 
 The Jews of the dispersion scattered up and down 
 the civilised world would naturally be inclined to a 
 broader view than their Palestinian fellow-country- 
 men. They did in fact lay stress upon the more 
 universal aspect of the Messiah, whose work would 
 transcend the limits of Israel and whose reign would 
 establish a world-wide goodness and justice. 1 There 
 were therefore in the world of that day Gentile and 
 Jewish lines of thought converging towards the 
 internationalism of Jesus. It would almost seem to 
 be as if a narrow Pharisaism dominated Saul's 
 nature, but that unconsciously he had absorbed what 
 we may call the modernist ideal, which was 
 working like a leaven beneath his surface ideas ; 
 the work was, though secret and gradual, thorough. 
 On the road to Damascus, in a blinding flash, 
 the truth came upon him that Jesus, whom 
 he persecuted, was the internationalist Saviour, the 
 very embodiment of that universal and liberating 
 spirit which he had unconsciously harboured, but up 
 till then consciously denied. We may seem to have 
 travelled far from the original question as to the 
 exact meaning in Paul's mind of "The powers that 
 be are ordained of God," but in reality we have only 
 sought to understand those deeper mental issues which 
 led him to check a crude and narrow revolutionism 
 with a certain vehemence. 
 
 If our critics insist on urging, as against the Church 
 
 1 Cf. Isa. xi. 9-12, xlii. 1-6. 
 
126 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 socialist interpretation of religion, the counsel of 
 St Paul, " Slaves, obey your masters," we must again 
 ask them how far we may take them seriously. Does 
 this counsel, in their opinion, bind the Church to a 
 perpetual defence of slavery, whether it be the 
 corporal slavery of the Congo or the economic 
 slavery of Europe? Does it, to their mind, involve 
 the position that any effort whatsoever, whether by 
 method of argument, of converting public opinion, 
 of the ballot-box, or of the bayonet, is antichristian 
 on the part of black or white slaves ? Do they further 
 hold that the Christian public generally may not, 
 because of this one text in St Paul, vote for the 
 modification or abolition of any form of slavery ; or 
 do they only hold that such an abolitionist move- 
 ment is of the spirit of antichrist, if slaves or other 
 down-trodden people themselves take any hand in 
 it? We understand them to say that working men 
 may not vote for a constitutional change in economic 
 conditions, known as socialism, because St Paul said, 
 " Slaves, obey your masters." Must working men, then, 
 vote against it, or merely abstain from voting on that 
 issue? Do they go further and urge that Christian 
 people generally may not vote for a constitutional 
 change of this sort, because it would involve an 
 abolition of slavery, under which abolition it would 
 be impossible for slaves to obey their masters ? Or 
 dp these people hold anything at all ; are they merely 
 flinging a chance text at our heads, the force of the 
 fling being in the bitterness of their prejudices ? 
 
 If they reply, " But we absolutely deny that the 
 present state of society involves slavery of any kind," 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 127 
 
 we must politely remind them that in that case the 
 counsel, " Slaves, obey your masters," cannot possibly 
 apply. If they further assert, "It was the force of 
 Christian opinion which abolished slavery in America," 
 we must remind them that it did so in spite of 
 their rendering of " Slaves, obey your masters," and 
 would never have done so had it accepted their 
 rendering. In point of fact, the intellectual ancestors 
 of these reactionary Christians ridiculed Shaftesbury 
 and Wilberforce, and raged against them as un- 
 scriptural revolutionaries. " Woe unto you ! for ye 
 build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers 
 killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the 
 deeds of your fathers : for they indeed killed them, 
 and ye build their sepulchres." l 
 
 Again we must remind ourselves of the actual 
 constitution and the limitations of these early Chris- 
 tian communities. They were almost entirely com- 
 posed of slaves, and they were without constitutional 
 rights. Slaves had from time to time decided to 
 disobey their masters and had revolted against them ; 
 the consequence had invariably been ruthless massacre. 
 Once more, then, from the point of view of the wise 
 general, how could St Paul at that time and under 
 those circumstances, even had he been a fiercer 
 revolutionist than he was, have counselled slaves to 
 disobey their masters ? I have known more than 
 one foreign revolutionist, whose views were extreme 
 enough to satisfy the fiercest of his followers, who 
 has, under the particular circumstances of the moment, 
 checked the impetuosity of those followers, and to all 
 
 1 St Luke xi. 47, 48. 
 
128 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 intents and purposes issued the order, " Slaves, obey 
 your masters." I have seen almost hundreds of strikes 
 averted by the counsel of labour leaders who would 
 not be suspected of pro-slavery inclination. It is 
 therefore not difficult to imagine that the leaders of 
 the Church, who were described as men who had 
 turned the world upside down a sufficiently revolu- 
 tionary description, should counsel obedience under 
 the particular circumstances. 
 
 But there was more than mere policy in such a 
 counsel. Just as the motive to revolt against the 
 civil government was not particularly worthy, so the 
 motive to revolt against masters was by no means 
 entirely free from suspicion. After all, conservatism 
 and obedience on the one hand, or revolution and 
 rebellion on the other, treated merely as abstract 
 conceptions, are things indifferent. St Paul had 
 preached to masters and slaves alike the Gospel of 
 a Kingdom in which there was neither Jew nor 
 Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, and we 
 can well imagine the difficult position of those few 
 masters who had been generous-hearted enough to 
 be converted to this revolutionary and democratic 
 philosophy. They would find that this essential 
 equality and fellowship was being seized hold upon 
 by all kinds of worthless and idle persons, not because 
 they believed in fellowship, but as an excuse for 
 putting the hated master into an intolerable position. 
 St Paul's counsel does rule out anarchy and misrule 
 grounded in hatred, while it leaves untouched that 
 constructive socialism which his own more essential 
 philosophy has done so much to encourage. 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 129 
 
 There are several other passages in which St Paul 
 treats of the slave question. There is his advice to 
 men not to go wandering about, but to abide in their 
 calling ; even if they are slaves, to remember that 
 both their masters and themselves are God's freed- 
 men. A sentence in this connection about obtaining 
 one's freedom is interpreted variously as advice not 
 to strive for this freedom, or advice to gain one's 
 freedom if that is possible. The sense cannot at 
 present be conclusively determined. It is of course 
 possible that St Paul believed in the cataclysmic 
 coming of God's Kingdom in his own time, in a 
 revolution not by blood but by miracle, and that the 
 business of the Church was not to hasten it by 
 violence, but to be on the watch, and merely to do 
 the best they could under the present evil institutions. 
 It is exceedingly difficult to arrive at any certainty 
 on this point. If he really believed this, his teaching 
 as to slavery would be adequately explained. In 
 any case, I cannot agree with those critics who would 
 have us believe that, although St Paul's teaching was 
 essentially democratic, it made no actual or immediate 
 difference in the status of the slave ; for although he 
 urged slaves to work heartily as unto God, he urges 
 their masters with equal emphasis to give them justice 
 and equality, and although he sends back a runaway 
 slave to his master both slave and master had 
 become Christians he orders his master, very court- 
 eously but authoritatively, to receive him into his 
 household no longer as a slave, but as one of the 
 family, a brother beloved. He implores Philemon to 
 do this of his own free will and not of necessity, but 
 
 9 
 
1 30 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the twenty-first verse of the Epistle leaves us in no 
 doubt that it was not mere consent but obedience 
 which St Paul expected. 
 
 It must always be remembered that in every great 
 prophet's teaching there are ideas of eternal validity 
 and temporal application. Individual interpreters 
 will rightly seek to distinguish the one from the 
 other. Moreover, we are not bound by St Paul's 
 ideas alone, nor by St James, nor by St John. It is 
 the business of the Christian to correct the concep- 
 tions of one by reference to those of another, and, 
 where the task is too heavy for the individual, to 
 appeal to that consensus of individual human opinions 
 which we call Church tradition. 
 
 Now if one reads Christian literature widely and care- 
 fully, one may here and there find passages from this 
 or that authority which seem to rely on the counsels 
 of St Paul for the support of autocracy or of slavery. 
 But the overwhelming stream of Church tradition 
 made in the direction of manumission and the abolition 
 of slavery. The whole Church there are no excep- 
 tions opposed Aristotle's essential difference between 
 slaves and freemen, holding with Seneca and Cicero 
 that all men are by nature free and equal. By nature 
 or natural law, the Church understood and taught a 
 Golden Age in which God's will prevailed. Most 
 Church writers put this age before the Fall ; all of 
 them believe that the object of the Christian religion 
 is the establishment of this perfect epoch ; all of them 
 hold that the Golden Age not only involves the 
 freedom and equality of men the later pagan philo- 
 sophers preached a like freedom and equality, but 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 131 
 
 that such freedom involves common property in the 
 essentials of life. St Augustine would seem to be 
 the only original thinker who, in practice, at one time 
 held a reactionary view about slaves. In one passage 
 of his writings he seems to suggest that slavery comes 
 upon the unfortunate, not because of their misfortunes, 
 but because of their sins. It is hardly likely that 
 modern opponents of Church socialism will assert that 
 all South American slaves were in bondage because 
 they were bad, while their masters were free because 
 they were good ; and it must be remembered that 
 St Augustine's thought was abnormal and eccentric, 
 and that in this very matter he speaks with no certain 
 voice, for in another passage he contends that slavery 
 is as unnatural as sin, and that no one may own a 
 man as he would own a horse or money. Gregory 
 the Great is fairly representative where he says : 
 " We act in a wholesome fashion if by manumission 
 we restore men, whom from the beginning nature 
 brought forth free, and the law of nations subjected 
 to the yoke of slavery, to that liberty in which they 
 were born." l 
 
 It is very significant that the great Christian writers 
 in constructive ages of Church thought, the men who 
 are generally admitted to have contributed most to the 
 upbuilding of Catholic philosophy, are glad to dwell 
 upon what I have called the eternal democratic con- 
 ception in the teaching of various Apostles; while less 
 original writers, who belong to more stagnant ages and 
 who contribute nothing to Catholic development, e.g. 
 writers of the ninth century, are fond of seizing upon 
 
 1 Gregory, Letters ', bk. vi. f. 12. 
 
1 32 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the temporal advice of either Paul or Augustine, and 
 of elevating it into a position of eternal validity. 
 
 In the matter of civil authority Christian tradition 
 speaks with no very certain voice. In the early days, 
 before Christians had any constitutional rights, some- 
 times the powers that be, i.e. the Roman Empire, are 
 treated with contempt, at other times the Pauline 
 view is upheld. When the Emperors began to 
 support orthodoxy, the temptation towards a theory 
 of Divine right naturally increased ; but the Church 
 in its totality cannot be said ever to have endorsed 
 that theory. I have spoken of the stagnant ages as 
 contrasted with living ages that contributed to the 
 development of Christian thought. Roughly speaking, 
 we may say that the first five centuries showed life 
 and movement, and that the same life and movement 
 are visible from the eleventh century to the end of the 
 fourteenth ; and in these latter centuries the great 
 Churchmen held generally that kingship and civil 
 government have their source in what may be called 
 a Divine democracy. It seems universally to be held 
 that the object of civil government is the establish- 
 ment of justice; that therefore disobedience to the 
 government of men is disobedience to the God of 
 justice, for man is essentially a social creature. Men 
 must therefore come together into a society, and 
 human society involves some form of government; 
 therefore Christians were inclined to think highly of 
 the State. But where the State is manifestly evil the 
 tradition becomes uncertain; some of the Fathers 
 counsel obedience, others disobedience, for if the 
 object of government be justice, apostasy from this 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 133 
 
 object absolves the people from their allegiance. 
 St Ambrose, in the fourth century, had held that a 
 priest must reprove an evil ruler, and all rulers are 
 within and not over the Church. He put his theory 
 into practice when he excommunicated the pious and 
 orthodox Emperor, excluding him from the Eucharist 
 because he had been guilty of a massacre. 
 
 A general survey of the teaching of the Fathers 
 appears, then, to yield the result that they are 
 practically unanimous in opposing private property 
 in the essentials of life, that is, in land and in any 
 form of capital used for the purpose of extracting 
 interest. Ideally, such a state of things could not 
 exist ; in the Golden Age to which they all looked 
 forward it would not exist. They are not so unani- 
 mous in their practical applications of the socialistic 
 theory. Sometimes the immediate advice and action 
 of certain of their number contradicts their unanimous 
 conception of the nature of the Golden Age. On 
 the further questions of government and slavery, 
 tradition speaks with less certain voice, but on the 
 whole tends to democracy and abolitionism. 1 
 
 In bringing this section (Chapters IV. and V.) to 
 a conclusion, it may be well to deal with the attempt 
 of a writer in the Economic Review of April 1895 to 
 defend the principles of modern commercialism from 
 the traditions of the early Church. The writer quotes 
 a passage from Irenseus aimed at that bitter and 
 extreme communism of certain heretics which may 
 
 1 Actual body-slavery died out of Europe from the sixth to the 
 fourteenth centuries. It was revived by the Portuguese in the fifteenth 
 century. Negro slavery was constantly defended by reference to St 
 Paul in Christo-capitalist times. 
 
i 3 4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 be likened to the communism with which modern 
 newspapers charge the socialist of the present day. 
 The passage is of doubtful interpretation, for Irenaeus 
 holds 1 that we should refrain from demanding our 
 own from such as may take it. The writer appears 
 therefore to argue that, even if socialists could prove 
 that much of the property of the rich rightfully 
 belongs to the poor, the poor must not demand it of 
 them ; but his own contention is, that the property of 
 the rich is really their own, and that the taxation of 
 the rich, by means of socialistic legislation, is little 
 short of theft. Now, if this is so, and if he still insists 
 on the authority of Irenaeus, he would seem to have 
 proved too much, namely, that it is unchristian in the 
 extreme on the part of his rich friends to demand 
 their own back again by resisting such legislation. 
 
 He quotes Justin Martyr 2 to prove that, if the 
 Christians contributed to a common store, they each 
 put in only a little, and no compulsion was used. A 
 man gives " only if he is able, for no man is obliged." 
 But what does the writer want to prove? No one has 
 said that compulsion was used. Does he insist that 
 each gave as little as he decently could ? But the 
 passage seems to establish exactly the contrary. 
 They were, for the most part, poverty-stricken slaves, 
 so that each could only give a trifle, and they gave as 
 much as they could. He deals with a passage from 
 St Chrysostom with no better success. He discovers 
 that the saint held that the rich man is a steward of 
 the common property. He quotes Clement of Rome 
 as saying, " Let the rich minister aid to the poor, and let 
 
 1 Irenseus, Adv. Hcer.^ lib. ii. cap. 32. 2 Justin, ApoL, i. 67. 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 135 
 
 the poor give thanks to God, because He has given 
 him one through whom his wants may be supplied," 
 and he argues that here is a proof that, according to 
 the Fathers, the rich man's property is his own. If 
 further proof is wanted, can it not be had in St 
 Augustine's sermon on the text, " The gold is Mine 
 and the silver is Mine ? " for Austin says, " Let him who 
 is unwilling to share his goods with the poor, under- 
 stand when he hears exhortation to show mercy that 
 God does not order him to give of his own, but of that 
 which is God's." The writer seems to argue that, 
 because this author asserts that a man's property does 
 not belong to him, he really considers that it does. 
 The writer does not seem to know that the thought 
 of property belonging to the common Father of all 
 men, and the thought of that property as the common 
 heritage of all His children, are ideas interchangeable 
 in the traditions of the early Church. 
 
 No one denies the point that he is labouring to 
 prove, namely, that God is the primal owner of all 
 things, that the early Church considered that the rich 
 were the managers through whose hands the common 
 property was to pass. This was not an ideal state of 
 things ; the ideal state was the Golden Age which 
 knew nothing of rich and poor ; but the early Church 
 was unable to see any other way out of the present 
 difficulty than this liberal dispensing of God's property 
 by God's managers. But when this writer goes on to 
 say that the Fathers never breathe a hint of their 
 latent belief that society was wrongly constituted, he 
 is guilty of an audacity which must promptly be 
 challenged. His further quotations are peculiarly 
 
136 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 unfortunate. He boldly asserts that the Fathers 
 would have denounced Proudhon's maxim, " La 
 propriete c'est le vol." But we soon find him referring 
 to St Ambrose as saying, " Nature has given all things 
 to all men in common, for God has ordained that all 
 things shall be so produced that food shall be common 
 to all, and the earth as it were the common possession 
 of all. Nature therefore is the mother of common 
 right, appropriation 1 (usurpatio) of private right." 
 He further quotes Ambrose's conclusion that we are 
 therefore bound to help one another and " to put all 
 our resources into one heap " (in media omnes utilitates 
 ponere), to help each other by kindliness, by service, 
 by money, etc., that social feeling may grow and no 
 one be called from his duty even by fear of danger, 
 but that each may go on his way, whether of prosperity 
 or of adversity. This critic of Church socialism con- 
 siders this the most conclusive passage he can find in 
 support of his case. He thinks that Ambrose here 
 has supplied a strong basis for individualistic property. 
 If he considers that urging one to place all one's 
 resources into one heap because nature and God have 
 given all things to all men in common supplies the 
 best possible basis for individualistic property, I do 
 not think the Christo-capitalists will thank him for 
 having entered into this controversy. If his great 
 proof that the Fathers would have repudiated 
 Proudhon's " Property is theft " rests on a quotation 
 from one of them which asserts that theft is the 
 mother of private property, I fear that commercial 
 individualism will have to seek some other line of 
 
 1 ' ' Appropriation " is a curiously mild interpretation of the term. 
 
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ST PAUL 137 
 
 defence than the appeal to Christian history. The 
 fact would seem to be that the writer has confused 
 the ancient theory of alms-giving with the modern. 
 Nothing can be more certain than that the giving of 
 alms, in the early Christian tradition, was always con- 
 sidered " a debt of justice." It was of obligation ; to 
 refrain from it was to act as a thief; to give alms was 
 to distribute among the poor what was theirs by right. 
 Chrysostom, in his sermons on Dives and Lazarus, is 
 quite explicit upon this point. 1 Stewardship had not 
 come to mean the vague thing it means in the mouths 
 of the modern pulpiteers ; it meant stewardship. The 
 rich man was steward of God's estate just as a land 
 steward is administrator of a landlord's property, or a 
 bank clerk administrator of the property of the bank 
 owners. The clerk receives a salary which is supposed 
 to supply him with the necessaries of life; the rich 
 man might take a salary as wages of administration 
 to supply him with necessities. If he took more, 
 or refused to disburse the property, he was considered 
 by unanimous Church tradition to be no better than 
 a common thief. We may sum up the situation 
 by a quotation from a studiously moderate non- 
 socialist authority, Professor Ashley. Commenting 
 on Clement's saying that it is only by injustice that 
 private property arises, since God meant property to 
 be common among men, he writes : 
 
 This view as to the origin of property gave Christian 
 moralists a philosophical basis for their teaching. To seek 
 to enrich one's self was not simply, they could argue, to 
 
 1 Cf. also quotations from Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, etc. in previous 
 chapter. 
 
138 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 incur spiritual risk to one's own soul ; it was in itself unjust, 
 since it aimed at appropriating an unfair share of what God 
 had intended for the common use of men. If a man 
 possessed more than he needed, he was bound to give his 
 superfluity to the poor ; for by natural law he had no 
 personal right to it ; he was only a steward for God. And 
 with Christian teachers such injunctions were no longer mere 
 philosophical deductions ; they came with all the weight of 
 practical precepts, pointing to duties to be observed and sins 
 to be avoided on pain of punishment in another world. 1 
 
 There is therefore no case to be made on behalf of 
 modern plutocracy and commercialism by pressing the 
 theory of stewardship, for, according to that theory, the 
 plutocrat who retains a penny more than that which 
 suffices to maintain him in the necessaries of life is a 
 worse kind of thief than the poor clerk who robs the 
 till ; and this is hardly what the writer wanted to prove. 
 Our modern critics are never tired of telling us that 
 we are not bound by the letter, but only by the spirit, 
 of Scripture and ancient tradition. There is no reason- 
 able doubt that the spirit of both does commit us to a 
 belief in God the common Father dispensing the earth 
 and its products to all men alike. The theory of the 
 stewardship of the rich is much more akin to the 
 letter of socialism than it is to the letter of commercial 
 plutocracy, but it is in itself just as much the temporary 
 letter or form of the Church's eternal conception of 
 common property as were, for instance, the Jewish 
 land laws. We may therefore suggest that a new 
 form is developing in our own day which more ade- 
 quately safeguards and expresses the Church's essen- 
 tial idea of common ownership than did this letter of 
 stewardship : that form is socialism. 
 
 1 Ashley, Economic History and Theory. 
 
VI 
 
 THE SACRAMENTS 
 
 The philosophy of socialism restated Nature and universality of sacra- 
 ments The sacramentalism of Christ and the poets Sacraments 
 of nature and of grace The sacraments of creation, incarnation, 
 and the Church Of baptismal regeneration and the sacrament of 
 confirmation The human priest and the functions of priesthood 
 Confession and absolution Holy Orders and the Divine democracy 
 Confirmation and the Eucharist as an offering Body and soul in 
 the Eucharist The sacrament of God's Body as the sacrament of 
 fellowship The holy communion in the early Church Havelock 
 Ellis on the sacrament of food Unction and healing Marriage 
 as the mirror of the family of God George Meredith and Robert 
 Blatchford on the sacrament of marriage Dante's Rose of Souls. 
 
VI 
 
 THE SACRAMENTS 
 
 The sacraments of the Church are witness "that the unreal spiritu- 
 ality which exists in a barren and boastful disparagement of ritual 
 observances or of outward acts, of earthly relationships or of secular 
 life, of material feelings or of bodily health, clashes with Christian 
 teaching as sharply as it does with nature and with common sense." 
 Lux Mundi) I3th edition, p. 310. 
 
 SOCIALISM derives its enthusiasm from a conception 
 of justice which challenges our industrial chaos, Tnd 
 demands the abolition of slaves and drones and the 
 reconstruction of an international commonwealth of 
 workers. Behind its demands are discovered certain 
 axioms, assumptions, doctrines about the nature^and 
 destiny of man, its two dominant doctrines being 
 concerned with the body and the fellowship. 
 
 (i) Concerning the body: That outward, sensuous, 
 material, physical things count. That to treat man's 
 body as vile or of no account, is to injure man and 
 to misread his nature; to ignore man's physical needs 
 is sacrilege ; to recognise the importance of material 
 considerations is not to be a " mere materialist " ; 
 although man does not live by bread alone, he does 
 live by bread ; physical desires the instinct for food 
 and drink, the sex instinct, the instinct for warmth 
 and shelter are not evil but good. 
 
 141 
 
142 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 (2) Concerning the fellowship : That the individual 
 is not redeemed, saved, built up into rich and generous 
 personality in isolation, but in fellowship. Every 
 socialist at once understands the philosophic truth 
 underlying the phrase, " Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus." 
 The socialist dogmas are paralleled theologically by 
 the dogmas of creation, incarnation, bodily resurrec- 
 tion, the dogmas of the Communion of Saints and 
 of the Holy Catholic Church, and find their full 
 expression in the sacraments of the Church. 
 
 The Holy Spirit, that " Light of every man coming 
 into the world," has prompted the use of sacraments 
 in many parts of the pre-Christian world and in 
 varying religions, as testify the ancient cults of 
 Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans, the later religion of 
 Mithraism, and the present Brahmanic rituals. Sacra- 
 ment was by the early Christians understood to mean 
 "anything sensuous whereby something holy might 
 be thought or enjoyed" (Harnack). It came to 
 signify an outward visible sign of inward spiritual 
 grace given or presence conveyed ; but the sign or 
 " matter " is called " effectual," because it does not arbi- 
 trarily remind us of the grace signified, but effectually 
 expresses and conveys it. A cup symbolises drinking. 
 A red flag symbolises danger ; but facial expression 
 is not only symbol but sacrament, in that it effectu- 
 ally expresses or conveys the personality behind it. 
 
 At first the number of sacraments was indeter- 
 minate. They are numbered sometimes as three, 
 sometimes as eight, fifteen, or even thirty. Mystics 
 have believed that Christ spoke sacramentally in 
 saying, " I am the Bread, I am the Vine, I am the 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 143 
 
 Door," in that He is in very truth the Bread, the 
 Vine, the Door, of which every visible and tangible 
 loaf, vintage, archway is the more or less effectual 
 expression. The poets speak of flowers as suggesting 
 thoughts that often lie too deep for tears, 1 of the 
 flower in the crannied wall as microcosm of God and 
 man, 2 of God's holy sacrament of spring, 3 of the way- 
 side sacraments of our hedgerows. 4 Poets and mystics 
 understand that God is really present to bless men 
 under forms of bread, wine, oil, salt, flowers, water, 
 fruit ; that the colour of the tulip, the scent of the 
 rose, the sound of the sea, the grace and symmetry 
 of the human body, are effectual signs of the presence 
 of the God who prevents and follows and enfolds us, 
 as the waters cover the sea. 
 
 All sacraments of nature and of grace take their 
 rise in the sacrament of Creation, for these worlds 
 are "the form whereby the beauty of God's mind 
 manifests itself" (F. W. Robertson), but the sacra- 
 ment of sun and moon, of sea and earth, of bird 
 and beast is not complete without the sacrament 
 of man made in the very image of God. And again, 
 it is only perfect man who perfectly images God, 
 for in us His image is blurred and distorted. The 
 human race but imperfectly expresses God, until 
 there springs from its loins the perfect being, the 
 very man of very man, the very God of very God. 
 
 The second fundamental sacrament is therefore the 
 Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Other men are sacra- 
 mental ordinances. This Man is the Sacrament of the 
 Gospel. Others are incoherent, unrelated, inarticulate 
 
 1 Wordsworth. 2 Tennyson. 3 Roden Noel. 4 Kingsley. 
 
144 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 letters of God's alphabet, till they are pieced together, 
 giving meaning and tongue in the Verbum Dei, the 
 Eternal Word of God, the intelligible language of 
 man, first-fruit of the human harvest, Crown and 
 Consummation of this sumptuous world. 
 
 In Him is revealed the Kingdom or Commonwealth 
 of God as object and ground of our creation, as the 
 home of mankind, as the reality to which men must 
 come. Until they enter into the conception of this 
 Commonwealth, and seek to actualise it in their 
 midst, they are dead ; so long as they wage their 
 dreary wars and nourish their infidel suspicions, they 
 possess a death-in-life existence, but they have not 
 begun to live. If they are to enter into the life which 
 the Very Man has come to give them, and to give 
 them more abundantly, they must renounce " this 
 age," "this world," this satanic ideal of separation, 
 schism, mistrust, strife, competition, and be translated 
 into the Age of Reality, the life to come which even 
 now is, into the Kingdom of God's dear Son. Stretch- 
 ing up their hands towards God's dream or Heaven, 
 or ideal, they must seize upon it, and drag it down 
 out of Heaven, and plant it firmly in the secular soil 
 of this material world. 
 
 United we stand, divided we fall. No one, individu- 
 ally and in isolation, can fully accomplish God's 
 purpose ; therefore the Christian watchword is associ- 
 ation, and the Christ proclaims, " I will build My 
 Church." So we come to the third fundamental 
 sacrament, with its outward and visible sign, the 
 Church, and its inward spiritual significance, the 
 Kingdom of God. " I will build My Church," that in 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 145 
 
 a visible society, pledged to exterminate the Devil 
 and all his works, man may bring into outward act 
 God's inward fact, the fact of the Commonwealth 
 which underlies our existence, and so translate the 
 cruel, competitive kingdom of " this age " into the 
 Kingdom of God and His Christ. 
 
 The man who begins to understand the sacraments 
 of Creation, Incarnation, and the Church can never 
 igain reject as " merely secular " the tangible, audible, 
 visible expression of a people's soul in laws, houses, 
 wharfs, ways, harbours, gesture, dress, drama, songs, 
 or language. He perceives the bond between inward 
 and outward, and rejecting the half-truth heresies of 
 spiritualism and materialism, pleads, " What God hath 
 joined together, let no man put asunder." The claims 
 of the senses and the need of political regeneration 
 are involved in the sacramental basis, for to starve 
 men's bodies is to rob the Holy Ghost, whose temples 
 they are. 
 
 There have been rare moments in the Church's 
 history when Christ might have taken the visible 
 fellowship or body into His holy and venerable 
 hands, saying, " This is my Body " ; such a moment 
 there was when " the multitude of them that believed 
 were of one heart and of one soul ; neither said any 
 of them that ought of the things which he possessed 
 was his own, but they had all things in common. . . . 
 Great grace was upon them all, neither was there any 
 that lacked." l 
 
 Baptism in Christ's time was the act by which the 
 Gentiles were regenerated by translation from pagan 
 
 1 Acts iv. 32 ff. 
 
 10 
 
146 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 customs and beliefs into the environment of the 
 Jewish commonwealth. Sponsors further emphasised 
 the social character of this re-birth into a new people 
 and tradition. 
 
 Christian baptism is the gate into Christ's Church, 
 and claims every human being brought to the font, 
 irrespective of race or colour, although seemingly a 
 child of nature, of an under-world " red in tooth and 
 claw," enmeshed in the wrathful ape-and-tiger disorder, 
 as child of God and property of the Holy Ghost. The 
 baptized person is hereby brought into the society 
 which is pledged by institution, traditions, creeds, 
 gospels, sacraments to destroy the separate sub- 
 human kingdoms of earth, and to establish the human 
 kingdom of grace. Thrust by our first birth into the 
 isolation of a disordered world, where " each for him- 
 self" is the watchword, we are hereby given a new 
 birth, a new start, a new enthusiasm ; being claimed 
 as children of grace, and for the life of God's 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 But, say the critics, of what use is this re-birth, 
 when you are, as a fact, grafted into the inertia of 
 Laodicea, into the deadly complacency of Slowcombe- 
 on-the-Marsh, into a small coterie of self-conscious 
 Britishers, shallow Italians, or superstitious Spaniards ? 
 Scarcely do modern parishes care about the establish- 
 ment of God's Kingdom ; what even do they care 
 about the children re-born into their midst, as witness 
 the post-Reformation scandal of solitary baptism, 
 which bids fair to eclipse the pre - Reformation 
 scandal of solitary masses ? The baptismal rites 
 always contemplate the presence of God's local family 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 147 
 
 to welcome the new member. Baptism in early times 
 was the greatest of social functions. Our hole-and- 
 corner celebrations of it throughout Europe are 
 witness of our apostasy. If the tree be dead, what 
 chance of life has the engrafted twig? If the 
 immediate parish be apostate, avaricious, pharisaic, 
 the immediate soil choked with stones and weeds, 
 God's scheme of the " common salvation " through 
 that interplay of gracious souls is altogether thwarted. 
 
 This is all appallingly true, but it is also true that 
 the grafting in of each new member brings a possi- 
 bility of renewed vigour to the local Church, and 
 that, in spite of the worst periods and most lifeless 
 localities, we are baptized into something beyond the 
 immediate period and environment. True though it 
 is that for some time the apostasy of a local Church 
 may thwart God's scheme, it is also true that the 
 fulness of the first century may supply the deficiencies 
 of the twentieth, or the vigour of the twentieth the 
 meagreness of some century past or future; the 
 sanity of one may counteract the superstition of 
 another ; the wisdom of one may counteract the 
 worldliness of another ; the spirituality of one the 
 pharisaism of another. We are not baptized into 
 Paul or Apollos, into the head of this or that sect or 
 Church, but into Jesus Christ and the whole company 
 of Catholic men, the living and the dead, nourished 
 by the rites, sacraments, gospels, traditions of the 
 living Church, limbs of the new Adam, regenerate 
 men, heirs of all the ages. 
 
 The character of Confirmation is essentially social. 
 Fifth and twentieth century theologians alike explain 
 
148 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 it as conveying to the confirmed his right in the 
 royal and priestly body. In " orders " and " confirma- 
 tion " anointing is often used. There is the laying on 
 of the hands of the bishop in both cases ; in both 
 cases the grace of God's Spirit is the gift to be con- 
 veyed. The newly ordained priest celebrates ; the 
 newly confirmed priest assists by communicating, and 
 by the assent of the "Amen" at the close of the 
 consecration prayer. 
 
 Baptism declares the true childhood of all, and 
 effectualises it by placing men within an effective 
 society ; confirmation declares the true priesthood of 
 all, and effectualises it by admitting men to the 
 priestly sacrament of God's Board. 
 
 For men are not only God's children but His priests, 
 bound to sacrifice, bound to absolve ; confess one to 
 another ; forgive one another ; have charity, believing 
 all things, enduring all things, hoping all things of one 
 another. Mutual confidence must supplant division 
 and distrust. A fund of energy is generated by God's 
 belief in, and absolution of, men, and men's forgiveness 
 one of another. Man, as Mr Stewart Headlam says, 
 is " bound perpetually to be the priest in absolution." 
 
 The sacrament of Penance, a wise development of 
 this earlier belief, in the universal obligation of mutual 
 forgiveness, is an exceptional focussing of that natural 
 confession and absolution which is obligatory on the 
 whole human race. Until at least the year 250, 
 cases of discipline were settled by all the people, and 
 scandals confessed before the whole priestly company 
 of the faithful ; some authorities go further possibly 
 too far in declaring the primitive custom to have 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 149 
 
 been a public confession of sins before each act of 
 communion. 
 
 Undoubtedly the orthodox Christian view has always 
 been that vice, however secret, is anti-social, frittering 
 away the energy consecrated to the service of God's 
 body, humanity. All sin is threefold against God, 
 society, 1 oneself. Forgiveness must also be threefold. 
 
 " Holy Orders " is the rite by which certain 
 members of the priestly body are set aside by its 
 chief officer as sacramental organs of the whole. 
 The Ordinals do not say, " Become now a Priest," 
 but, " Receive thou the Office of Priest." Conceive of 
 the anarchy of a thousand people celebrating the 
 sacrament, each at the altar of his own particular 
 fancy ; conceive the laxity of a community in which 
 none were appointed as guardians of and witnesses 
 to the obligation of absolution, and you will under- 
 stand the value of discipline and delegation which we 
 call " Holy Orders." For slipshod anarchy and 
 unbrotherly schism are indeed an unholy disorder. 
 Just as in the Jewish kingdom the sacerdotal func- 
 tions of " a nation of priests " were focussed in the 
 Holy Order of the Aaronic line, so the " difference 
 between priests and laity is a difference in function, 
 not in kind, 2 for the Holy Communion is an act of 
 the whole body through its organ and mouthpiece, 
 the ordained priest. " We break the bread," " We 
 bless the cup," says St Paul ; " We offer, we sacrifice," 
 repeat the liturgies. " No priest says, I offer, but, We 
 offer, in the person of the whole Church" (Peter 
 
 1 Therefore, of course, confession to man is obligatory and essential. 
 
 2 Cf. Gore, Church and Ministry, and his Body of Christ. 
 
150 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Lombard). "Sometimes there is no difference 
 between priest and people, e.g. when we partake of 
 the awful mysteries " (Chrysostom). 
 
 In old times theologians often declared that a layman 
 cast on some desert island might consecrate blades of 
 grass and so feed on God's presence in the Eucharist. 
 Theologians insist on the validity but irregularity of lay 
 baptism where necessity demands, or a baptism of blood 
 in the case of martyrs, or a baptism of sand in the case 
 of dying travellers, or even of an auto-baptism of de- 
 sire where matter and minister are alike unprocurable. 
 So also sacramental confession to laymen was some- 
 times urged. Cyprian, Origen, Lombard, Aquinas all 
 defend it, in exceptional cases, and Catholic bishops 
 have ordered it, in cases of plague or pestilence. 1 
 
 The first duty of priesthood, then, is forgiveness ; 
 and the power to forgive resides in humanity and is 
 focussed in ordained ministers. The second duty is 
 sacrifice, for men must consecrate body, mind, and 
 spirit to God in the service of the God-infused 
 community. Therefore the confirmed, their priest- 
 hood being acknowledged, are admitted to the 
 Blessed Sacrament, and there offer themselves, their 
 souls and bodies as pledge of their determination 
 to live the good life of the Commonwealth. 
 
 But in the Eucharist, it may be objected, we offer 
 not ourselves but Christ. Yet in our own, the 
 Roman, and primitive liturgies this offering of 
 ourselves is made prominent. There is in reality 
 
 1 Cf. a R.C. handbook to Rome, Eccles., vol. ii. (Black), 1807; 
 cf. Gore, Body of Christ, pp. 330-331 ; cf. Pullan's Prayer Book, 
 Oxf. Lib. ed., p. 206. 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 151 
 
 no contradiction between the two offerings ; for if 
 " the Christ in me " be the hope of glory, the light 
 that lights every man on his entrance into the 
 world, the better self, the self unto which we come 
 when we arise and go to the Father, the first-fruit of 
 the human harvest, the pledge of the best that is in 
 us, of all we may become, then to offer ourselves 
 apart from the God in us would be to offer our sins 
 and not ourselves an offering of an unnatural, 
 subhuman, ape-and-tiger " not-ourselves." So we 
 present before the Father the very Man, the very 
 ground of our being and the very assurance of our 
 liberation, and in this presentation we offer Him our 
 very selves, our very souls, our very bodies. 
 
 Our bodies, it will be noticed, are included in the 
 offering (see also the words of administration and 
 Prayer of Humble Access), and the sanctity of material 
 things is an even more prominent note in the earlier 
 Christian liturgies, in which "the Meal" 1 (as it is 
 still called in Russia) is treated as in itself sacrificial. 
 The sacrifice is seen in the offering to God of the 
 simple fruits of the earth, represented by bread and 
 wine " a veritable consecration of old dead matter 
 itself somehow redeemed at last." 2 Our own Church, 
 in restoring this idea of a reasonable sacrifice and 
 developing it, would seem to repudiate the fifteenth- 
 century idea of sacrifice as tribute for sin offered 
 by a priestly caste, not as mouthpiece of, but in 
 substitution for, the whole people. 
 
 1 It is possible that the term " Mass" had originally the meaning 
 of meal. 
 
 2 Cf. Pater's Marius the Epicurean. 
 
152 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 It is significant, as bearing upon our two doctrines 
 of the body and of fellowship, that Gospels and 
 Church should promise some special manifestation 
 of the everywhere-present God when "two or three 
 are gathered together in My name," and an even 
 more complete manifestation in this pre-eminently 
 social feast with its material symbols and the fellow- 
 ship of the common table. So dominant was the 
 communal aspect of the Eucharist in the early ages, 
 that the " This is My Body " is sometimes interpreted 
 as meaning the people gathered together into a 
 compact brotherhood, for Christ is to be found in the 
 body of men. and fellowship is heaven and the lack 
 of fellowship is hell (the mediaeval motto). St Paul 
 reproves the Corinthians for their individualistic 
 selfishness, "their avarice which is idolatry," their 
 separateness, turning the sacrament instituted as 
 sign of fellowship to " their own damnation," " not 
 discerning the Lord's Body " ; for the bread, he reminds 
 them, is the "fellowship of His Body, the cup the 
 fellowship of His Blood." " For one loaf, one body, 
 we the many are ; for all of us partake of the one 
 loaf." 1 Our Prayer Book insists on this aspect in 
 demanding that in preparation for communion we 
 must be in love and charity with our neighbours. 
 Our homilies call the sacrament "the strait knot of 
 charity," and urge that abstention from the common 
 feast is unbrotherliness, and the partaking of the feast 
 will only "increase our damnation," unless we are 
 just as ready to procure our neighbour's health of 
 soul, wealth, commodity, and pleasure as our own. 
 1 St Paul. 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 153 
 
 " Examine therefore and try thy good will towards 
 the children of God and towards that excellent 
 creature, thine own soul." Holy communion bears 
 witness to and has its root in the deep philosophic 
 truth that in God "all things hold together" (St 
 Paul), and " there is no object in the range of being 
 which does not in some way partake in the ONE 
 who embraced all things from the first in one single 
 existence, ... in the unity which permeates all 
 things." 1 This thought dominates the traditions of 
 the Church, and in its light is interpreted the 
 Eucharist. " For as this bread was scattered upon 
 the mountains, and having been gathered together 
 became one, so also, O Lord, gather together Thy 
 Holy Church from every race and country and city 
 and village and household, and make it a living 
 Catholic Church." 2 Even as late as 1550, the 
 Anglican theologian Lever writes : " As of divers 
 corns of wheat the liquor of water knoden into 
 dough is made one loaf of bread, so divers men, by 
 love and charity, which is the liquor of life, joined 
 into one congregation, being made as divers members 
 of one mystical body of Christ; whereby I say as 
 one example in the stead of many, learn that the 
 more gorgeous you yourselves be in silks and velvets, 
 the more shame it is for you to see others poor and 
 needy being members of the same body." 
 
 At first the social character of the Eucharist was 
 made plainer by its association with the love feasts, 
 
 1 Dionysius, quoted by Westcott in Religious Thought in the West. 
 
 2 Liturgy of Sarapion, Prayer of Oblation ; cf. Cyp. Ep. t Ixxiii. 13; 
 cf. The Didache and the Apostolic Constitutions. 
 
154 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 of which it was often the culmination. Consider how 
 frequently Christ connects meals with religion, and 
 thus warns against a false spirituality. 
 
 A great supper is used as a symbol of His Kingdom. 
 Emphasis is laid on meals eaten with His followers. 
 His ideal is that " ye may all eat and drink in My 
 Kingdom." He is made known to friends "in the 
 breaking of bread." Both early opponents and 
 apologists testify to the ideal of communion as 
 shown in the common meals of the early Christians, 
 where master and slave met as equals. Chrysostom 
 speaks of the common tables set up in the very 
 churches ; so from fellowship in eating and reverence 
 of the place, " men learnt to live in charity one with 
 the other." Clement speaks of the love feast and 
 Eucharist as that " sacrament of neighbourly love," 
 so that " he who eats of this meal shall acquire the 
 Kingdom of God," for the God of fellowship is 
 present in the social eating of the nourishing bread 
 and drinking of the generous wine. 
 
 In early times each city would appear to have had 
 but one altar and one communion, one single act of 
 worship for the whole local body. Ignatius urges 
 men to observe "one Eucharist." An interesting 
 comment on this is the practice of the early Roman 
 Church, for in Rome the bishop alone celebrated at 
 the single altar of the central church; no other 
 Eucharists were allowed, and when the Christian 
 population grew too great for the one church, and 
 daughter churches arose, Eucharists were not multi- 
 plied, but portions of the consecrated elements were 
 conveyed by deacons from one altar to the various 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 155 
 
 congregations. So the Mass witnesses, as is pointed 
 out by a great scientist, himself an agnostic, to the 
 Divine mystery of food, 1 for in this meal we realise 
 the present God as ground both of the most exalted 
 and spiritual emotions and of the common materials 
 of physical existence; the processes of bodily sus- 
 tenance are Divine, for at the back of them is the Divine 
 Spirit. The common, despised, simple material things 
 went indeed to form, and actually became, Christ's 
 Body, that Body transmuted and glorified by His 
 Divine will, and He would teach us so to consecrate our 
 physical life, the materials of our bodily sustenance, in 
 the service of God and Commonwealth that even the 
 bodies of our bondage may become like to His glorious 
 Body, and our souls and bodies may be preserved unto 
 fulness of life. May this not be the meaning of St 
 Augustine's famous eucharistic utterance, " Be what 
 you see, and receive what you are ? " 
 
 There are two other rites commonly called sacra- 
 ments in the historic Churches of Christendom. One 
 of them, namely, Unction, has unfortunately fallen 
 into disuse in the English Church, although the 
 Lambeth Conference of 1908 makes some attempt to 
 revive it. 
 
 But even in the present Roman rite there is a 
 beautiful recognition of the body and its function, for 
 the dying man is anointed on eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, 
 hands, feet, on all the avenues of sense, while the 
 priest pleads to the most tender and merciful God 
 that the penitent may be forgiven sins of the lips 
 and eyes and of other sensuous organs. Although 
 1 Havelock Ellis, The New Spirit. 
 
156 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the hope of recovery finds a place in the accompany- 
 ing prayers, it has been deposed from its dominant 
 position in the earlier rites. For unction in reality 
 was a sacrament of healing, administered not at the 
 close but at the beginning of an illness, and was a 
 witness to bodily health as the will of God for the 
 human race, and outward sign of the sacredness of 
 the body and for the hope of recovery. Could the 
 Christians who composed this prayer have sneered at 
 the material world ? In the Gregorian Sacramentary 
 we read : " Send forth, O Lord, from the heavens 
 Thy Holy Paraclete into the fatness of the olive 
 which Thou hast deigned to bring forth out of the 
 green tree for the refreshment of the body, that it 
 may become Thy holy benediction, to everyone who 
 touches this ointment a means of protection for mind 
 and body." Here again is suggested the possible 
 transmutation of matter into the " glorified body," at 
 the bidding of a will which is in harmony with the 
 Supreme Will and in harmony with its neighbours. 
 For health is harmony within the body, or wholeness. 
 May not this lesser harmony be in the same way 
 dependent on the harmony of men within the will and 
 Commonwealth of God ? 
 
 Marriage, more than any sacrament, excepting the 
 two great sacraments of the Gospel, involves our two 
 socialist dogmas concerning the body and the fellow- 
 ship, and denies that any of the primal instincts are 
 " common or unclean." 
 
 There have been Manichean currents of tremendous 
 force that have swept through different periods of the 
 Church's history, all but drowning the sane and 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 157 
 
 wholesome wedding of the material and spiritual. 
 Her foes have been of her own household, but her 
 liturgies and official teaching have been marvellously 
 preserved from the prurient divorce of what God has 
 joined together. The fact that so often in practice 
 domestic union becomes vulgar and trivial, the 
 Church attributes to man's failure to regard the conse- 
 crated union of lovers as " Magnum Sacramentum, " l 
 as no mere gratification of the senses, no mere 
 artifice of society, but as belonging, like every other 
 great human institution "to a gracious economy," 
 for "it embodies and presents a Divine mystery; 
 beginning from Heaven, it can speak simply and 
 bravely of that which belongs to earth. It discards 
 the Manichean dogma once and altogether. It claims 
 the whole region of human feelings and sympathies 
 as a sanctified region." 2 One of the grievances of the 
 Puritan enemies of the Anglican Church was the 
 frankly sensuous, " With my body I thee worship," 
 of the Liturgy. The bridal psalm tells of the bride 
 as fruitful vine and of the fructifying earth. The 
 collect illegally omitted by drawing-room decadents 
 calls upon the Father, "by whose gracious gift mankind 
 is increased, that these two persons may be fruitful 
 in procreation of children." The ministers of marriage 
 are not the official priests, but the lovers, who, how- 
 ever, must receive the recognition of society (Church 
 and State), and who come into the body of the Church 
 to signify their willingness to submit their private 
 choice to public sanction. The most Catholic of 
 modern novelists has attempted to restore the 
 
 1 St Paul. 2 Maurice, The Church a Family. 
 
158 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 robust purity of the matrimonial teaching of the 
 Prayer Book and early liturgies : l " She gave him 
 comprehension of the meaning of love, a word in 
 many mouths, not often explained. With her, 
 wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify 
 a new start in existence, a finer shoot of the tree 
 stoutly planted in good gross earth ; the senses 
 running their live sap and the mind companioning, 
 and the spirits made one by the whole natural con- 
 junction." "In sooth a happy prospect for the sons 
 and daughters of earth, divinely indicating more 
 than happiness, the speeding of us, compact of what 
 we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensuous 
 whirlpools to the creation of certain nobler races, 
 now very dimly imagined." The fellowship of 
 marriage is emphasised by Chrysostom where he 
 advises marriage with a poor rather than with a 
 wealthy wife, for " private property divides lovers " ; 
 and continues, " not even the bodies of married 
 people are private ; how can their money be ? One 
 man, one living creature, is what you both are now, 
 and do you still say mine? That word is accursed 
 and unholy and brought in by the devil. Things 
 far more needful than this God made wholly agree- 
 able to us. ... We cannot say my light, my 
 sun, my sea." 2 The true marriage is not only an 
 internal community but broadens out into social 
 teaching and the fulfilment of neighbourly duties. 
 It is valuable as training-ground for the exer- 
 cise of virtues which expand in widening circles 
 
 1 Meredith, Diana, ch. xxxvii. 
 
 2 Chrysostom, trans, by Charles Marson in Optimist, 1906. 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 159 
 
 to our neighbours, to our country, and to other 
 nations. 1 For, says a modern socialist leader, "is 
 there any community as united and effective as a 
 family? . . . All the relations of family life are 
 carried on in direct opposition to the principles of 
 political economy and the survival of the fittest. A 
 family is bound by ties of mutual love and helpful- 
 ness: the weakly child is not destroyed ; it is cherished 
 with extreme tenderness and care. The rule is vested 
 in the parents, and not knocked down to the highest 
 bidder. The brothers do not undersell each other ; 
 the women are better treated than the men, not worse, 
 as in the factories, and each member receives an equal 
 share of the commonwealth." 2 
 
 It has been well said that the roots of universal 
 love are found in the intimate physical union of 
 lovers, 3 for the heart of the lover goes out to every 
 creature that shares the loved one's delicious humanity. 
 " A great mystery " truly, by which St Paul meant 
 not a silly puzzle into which we must not inquire, 
 but something so vital, primal, and inspiring that it 
 transcends logic and escapes the nets of definition. 
 If men are God's family they must model their 
 public and political life on the basis of holy human 
 families, the members of which fulfil not each one his 
 own but every one the commonwealth. Monopolist 
 narrowness, want of mutual belief and liberty, bully- 
 ing, nagging, jealousy, the modern proprietary rights 
 
 1 Knox Little, Marriage, p. 243. 
 3 Blatchford, Merrie England^ id. edition, p. 118. 
 3 Ellis, New Spirit, p. 121 ; cf. several passages in the writings of 
 Balzac. 
 
160 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 of the male 1 all these too often destroy the holy 
 sacrament of marriage. 
 
 Finally, every sacrament bears witness that " there 
 is really a free society ... to which we all in our 
 inmost selves . . . belong the Rose of Souls that 
 Dante beheld in Paradise, whose every petal is an 
 individual only through its union with all the rest 
 the early Church's dream of an eternal fellowship 
 in Heaven and on earth, prototype of all the brother- 
 hoods and fellowships that exist on this or any other 
 planet." 2 
 
 1 Cf. Chapter VII., pp. 173, 174- 
 
 2 Quoted in Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming of Age. 
 
VII 
 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 Poverty preventible Material readjustments Anti-socialist arguments 
 met by the fact of the Middle Ages Prosperity of the people from 
 1450 By their architecture ye shall know them The meaning of 
 hospitals The property of the Church A defence of the monas- 
 teries Various monastic ideals The life and power of the demo- 
 cratic parish The anti-feudalism of the Church's parochial system 
 How far it was " the Golden Age " of the labourer The Church 
 as mediator between barbarians and Romans The Aristotelian 
 influence Becket and Langton For what did they fight The 
 materialist conception of history challenged The Crown and 
 the people St Thomas Aquinas on property The deadly sin 
 of avarice : instances Interest- taking and buying in the cheapest 
 market The socialistic influence of the confessional Canon 
 law on common property On usury Papal bull, 1176, on 
 credit operations The Church and mortgages Innocent III. on 
 lawfulness of moderate interest for invalids Church law clashes 
 with Roman law Land and labour as sole sources of wealth Mr 
 Ashley's misunderstanding of socialism The Church and compul- 
 sion Newman quoted on compulsion Anarchist archdeacons and 
 bishops The peasant revolt Summary of the social aims of the 
 Church The old order changeth, giving place to new. 
 
 II 
 
VII 
 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 " It is not true that the Church of our ancestors was the organised 
 fraud which it suits fanatics to represent it ; it is not true that the 
 monasteries, priories, and nunneries were mere receptacles for all 
 uncleanness and lewdness ; it is not true that the great revenues of the 
 celibate clergy and of celibate recluses were squandered as a rule in 
 riotous living. As a mere question of religion, Catholicism was as 
 good as any creed which has ever found acceptance among men. 
 Abuses doubtless there were, and most of them were bitterly attacked 
 by members of the Church themselves ; tyranny and persecution there 
 were too, in many forms ; but the Church, as all know, was the one 
 body in which equality of conditions was the rule from the start. 
 There, at least, the man of ability, who outside her pale was forced to 
 bow down before some Norman baron whose ruffianly ancestor had 
 formed part of William's gang of marauders, could rise to a position in 
 which this rough, unlettered swashbuckler grovelled before him. 
 Sixtus V. was picked up out of the gutter ; our Englishman, Nicholas 
 Breakspear, Adrian IV., was a poor labourer's son ; and these are but 
 two instances out of thousands of distinguished ecclesiastics of humble 
 birth. However dangerous also the spiritual authority of the Church 
 may appear to us, it was used, for the most part, notwithstanding all 
 the hideous corruptions of the papal court in the days of the Borgias 
 and others, for the people and against the dominant class ; and its 
 influence, as history shows, was almost unbounded. Kings and barons 
 alike trembled before it. ... So I might go on in refutation of the 
 foolish idea that the greatest institution of the Middle Ages, the most 
 complete and widespread organisation ever known on this planet, 
 was a mere collection of idol-worshippers and incense- burners, and 
 its ecclesiastical establishments nothing but dens of iniquity. My 
 purpose, however, is not to champion the Catholic Church against the 
 attacks of ignorant historians, but to show briefly the useful functions 
 it fulfilled in the social economy of the time." HYNDMAN, Historical 
 Basis of Socialism in England. 
 
 163 
 
1 64 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 WHEN we are facing the fact of our twelve million 
 people on or below the hunger-line, of our hundreds 
 of thousands of semi-starved school-children, of our 
 three-farthings an hour rate for women and children, 
 working often over sixteen hours a day in the sweated 
 industries, of our large areas of unemployed and 
 underfed, and of our thousands of homeless, one 
 often hears it said that we are wrong in considering 
 these things preventible. Poverty will always be 
 with us. These conditions more or less exist in all 
 times. Mere legislation or reconstruction of in- 
 dustries, or economic readjustments, have over and 
 over again been proved entirely futile ; you cannot 
 help people by Act of Parliament ; it is ridiculous to 
 suppose that Lord Shaftesbury's Acts preventing the 
 employment of five-year-old children in factories 
 could have altered the condition of children in 
 factories ; children of five years are therefore still 
 employed in factories, because our friends say you 
 cannot alter evils by Act of Parliament. The fact 
 that they are not so employed any longer does not, of 
 course, trouble the anti-socialist Christian who argues 
 in this way. 
 
 Now, the argument that poverty is not preventible, 
 that no change in economic conditions could reduce 
 it, that there has always been more or less this huge 
 margin of unemployment, that there have always 
 been more or less large classes working sixteen hours 
 a day, that other large classes have always been 
 without a roof to their heads, must be met with a 
 direct denial. The appeal to history on this point is 
 conclusive. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 165 
 
 Let us consider the lives of the English people 
 during a hundred years of what is generally known as 
 the mediaeval period, from early in the fifteenth century. 
 There were, it must be admitted, two or three brief 
 periods, covering from two to three years each, of 
 extreme misery caused by plague and famine, but it 
 is remarkable how swiftly and completely the people 
 recovered from these periods. Moreover, the plagues 
 were admittedly accidental. There is no controversy 
 between the opponents of socialism and its adherents 
 on this point. With their usual want of logic, people 
 who assert that no mere outward changes can really 
 better a nation, assert with equal cheerfulness that 
 plagues are now stamped out wherever the mere 
 outward change of proper sanitation, more sunshine, 
 less crowding, greater cleanliness prevails. That 
 particular form of mediaeval misery, therefore, they 
 admit need hardly recur ; but for that particular form 
 the hundred years I have chosen presents a startling 
 contrast to the last hundred years in our history. 
 The critics of socialism assert that unemployment 
 is more or less inevitable : during that hundred years 
 there was no unemployment. The critics of socialism 
 assert that there will always be, and that there always 
 have been, large numbers of people working fourteen, 
 sixteen, and sometimes eighteen hours a day : during 
 that hundred years hardly anyone worked above eight 
 hours a day. The critics of socialism assert that a 
 minimum wage is an impossibility : during that 
 hundred years the minimum wage was in full 
 operation. The critics of socialism assert that 
 there have always been large numbers of home- 
 
1 66 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 less people: during that hundred years no man 
 or woman was homeless. The critics of socialism 
 assert that women in industry must naturally work 
 longer hours than men and be paid less : during 
 that hundred years women worked the same number 
 of hours as men, and were often paid as much. 1 
 We are told that a permanent class of wage- 
 earners, at the beck and call of capital, is a neces- 
 sary condition for the prosperity of a country : 
 the England of that hundred years had no such 
 permanent class. 
 
 Let us look more closely into the life of the period. 
 There did not exist the great gulf between rich and 
 poor which so many now regard as inevitable. Con- 
 ditions were rougher for all ; but a rough life is not 
 altogether to the bad if one is secure in food, clothing, 
 and shelter ; the great majority of the people lived 
 upon the land, and the artisan minority were particu- 
 larly prosperous. Their unions were strong; black- 
 legging was forbidden, holidays were frequent, and 
 almost every artisan became an independent master 
 worker, having passed through a few years of appren- 
 ticeship. He owned his own tools and was not at 
 the mercy of an employer. He was free in everything 
 excepting the chance of becoming a capitalist in the 
 modern sense, that is, of cornering essentials and 
 thereby enslaving other men. The type of man 
 whom we now delight to honour, the successful 
 plutocrat, no doubt existed, but he was rigidly kept 
 
 1 Mr Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Cent^^ry (1909), cites 
 instances to the contrary, but in the worst cases wages of women never 
 fell to anything approaching the starvation rates of pay for women in 
 our own day. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 167 
 
 under and regarded as a scoundrel by the whole 
 community. 
 
 But only one-tenth of the population lived in the 
 towns. Agriculture was carried on by tenants of the 
 manor, who themselves often owned a small piece of 
 land and were part-owners of the common land of the 
 neighbourhood ; their fuel cost them little or nothing, 
 as they had the right of free fuel from the forests ; 
 they had also the right of snaring wild animals, which 
 were very numerous. The poacher of to-day is but 
 instinctively claiming an ancient privilege of the 
 people. Serfdom had almost died out. The tenant 
 had formerly been obliged to cultivate his lord's land 
 on certain days of the week, in return for his lord's 
 protection ; this labour service had by now been to 
 a great extent commuted into a small rent to the 
 manor. It has been estimated that the peasant of 
 that day would be able to earn his rent for the 
 year by a few days' work. A day's earnings would 
 keep a labourer for a whole week. Bread and ale, 
 the staple food of the people, were under close muni- 
 cipal inspection, and there are several cases of towns 
 owning their own bakery. The artisan as well as 
 the peasant often owned a small piece of land. 
 Towns and villages were solidly and beautifully 
 built. The architecture of the day expresses the 
 life of a joyous people. Ruskin and William Morris 
 have pointed out how one may read the life and 
 fortunes of a people in their art; and if art be 
 the language of a nation, the language England 
 spoke in those days reveals a merry England in 
 fact and in deed. 
 
1 68 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 The cathedrals and parish churches were built 
 and adorned for the most part by local craftsmen. 
 " We get fairly bewildered by the astonishing wealth 
 of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling which 
 there must have been in this England of ours in 
 times which, till lately, we have assumed to be 
 barbaric." l 
 
 We often read of hospitals in the literature of the 
 day ; these institutions, kept up from revenues from 
 land or other sources bequeathed by will, were not 
 always, nor indeed chiefly, hospitals for the sick, but 
 were houses for the old and disabled ; they were in 
 a real sense substitutes for old-age pensions. The 
 Church held about a third of the total wealth of 
 the country ; most of this was in landed property. 
 The monasteries were large landed proprietors; the 
 monks were often themselves peasants who had 
 escaped from the risks and hardship of secular life 
 into the security of the monastery. They were fellow- 
 workers alongside of their tenants, and " abbots and 
 priors were the best landlords in England." Theearliest 
 improvements in agriculture were due to the clergy. 
 The Church's internationalism led to the introduction 
 of new articles of cultivation. Immense monastic 
 revenues led to improved husbandry on a lavish 
 scale. "This general employment which as land- 
 lords resident among the people they afforded, the 
 improvements of the farms and of their own buildings 
 which they carried out, the excellent work in road- 
 making which they did (a task specially necessary 
 in those times), in addition to their action as public 
 
 1 Jessop, Before the Great Pillage, p. 25. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 169 
 
 alms-givers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, shows what 
 useful people many of these much-abused monks and 
 nuns really were. . . . That the Church as a whole held 
 its lands in great part as a trust for the people cannot 
 be disputed, and as the children of the people in great 
 part formed the hierarchy of the Church, Church 
 property in land then meant something very different 
 from Church property in land now." l 
 
 The monastic system is a curious instance of the 
 associative, one might almost say communistic, 
 tendency of the Christian religion. For the monk, in 
 the first instance, was he who dwelt alone, a hermit, 
 who had escaped from the dangers of a turbulent 
 pagan society. In some senses the monk might 
 almost be considered Protestant, individualist, im- 
 patient of the collective discipline of the Church 
 and its democratically elected bishops. There is in 
 St Jerome, the monk par excellence, a passage which 
 contrasts strangely with the main stream of collective 
 Church thought. Churchmen generally had held with 
 Clement of Alexandria that God would be found 
 among men dwelling together, and that terms of 
 citizenship were most descriptive of the Christian 
 life. But St Jerome speaks as a precursor almost of 
 John Bunyan the individualist, who finds salvation in 
 escape from the city. The founder of Christian 
 monasticism counsels us to escape from towns and 
 the haunts of men, that we may find God in the 
 desert. But so strong is the socialist principle in the 
 Church that these solitaries inevitably come together, 
 and are soon discovered to have formed themselves 
 
 1 Hyndman, Historic Basis of Socialism in England. 
 
i7o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 into bodies wherein fellowship is the rule and com- 
 munism the practice. In the case of most of the later 
 monastic leaders, it is because the world of their day 
 is so anarchic and disunited, and because in fellowship 
 alone they can discover God, that they found their 
 communities. The Venerable Bede, for instance, 
 turning away from the rudeness of Saxon England 
 to the fellowship of the monastery, finds in that 
 fellowship a heavenly citizenship. Heaven was to 
 him the city, his monastery a room in the "urbs 
 ccelestis." 
 
 The ideals of the religious orders were not always 
 the same. The strictly monastic aim was the 
 perfecting of the individual in withdrawal from the 
 world, and the helping forward of the salvation of the 
 world by the prayers of persons on the vantage-ground 
 of seclusion. But the missionary orders as, for 
 instance, the Franciscans and the Cistercians flung 
 themselves out upon the world with all the force of 
 a collective enthusiasm. 
 
 But it is not to the monastery alone or chiefly that 
 we must look, if we would appreciate the value of the 
 Church's contribution to mediaeval life. Nor must we 
 overestimate the influence of the central government. 
 Municipal administration wasof much moreimportance, 
 and was very largely democratic. The ecclesiastical 
 parish was completely interwoven with the life of the 
 people. " Now the parish was the community of the 
 township organised for Church purposes, and subject 
 to Church discipline, with a constitution which recog- 
 nised the rights of the whole body as an aggregate 
 and the right of every adult member, whether man or 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 171 
 
 woman, to a voice in self-government, but at the same 
 time kept the self-governing community under a 
 system of inspection and restraint, by a central 
 authority outside the parish boundaries." 1 
 
 The rector of the parish was its chairman, but not 
 its ruler. Finance was not under his control. The 
 parish clerk, gravediggers, and others were paid 
 servants, not 'of the rector, but of the parish. The 
 parish owned considerable properties houses, lands, 
 flocks, herds, jewels, silver, gold, furniture, bells, 
 tapestry, crosses, candlesticks, vestments, carpets, 
 pictures, service-books, and a host of other things. 
 
 "All the tendency of the feudal system, working 
 through the manorial courts, was to keep the people 
 down. All the tendency of the parochial system, 
 working through the parish council, holding its 
 assemblies in the churches where the people met on 
 equal terms as children and servants of the living 
 God and members of one body in Christ Jesus, was 
 to lift the people up." 2 
 
 It must not be thought that this period was without 
 its economic miseries ; it is only in comparison with 
 the dark ages, with the individualism of the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries, that it can be called "the 
 Golden Age of the British labourer." It was a 
 comparatively Golden Age, because the bulk of the 
 working nation had some access to land and such 
 embryo forms of capital as existed, because plutocracy 
 was ruthlessly kept down, and restrictions of every 
 sort were placed upon the owners of private property. 
 
 1 Bishop Hobhouse, Somerset Record Society, vol. iv. p. ix. 
 
 2 Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage, p. 22. 
 
172 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 If it be asked how this result had been obtained, the 
 causes of it will be found to be complex. The Gothic 
 invasion had introduced democratic elements into a 
 dying civilisation. Uprooted from their own soil and 
 in the first flush of conquest, the conquerors may well 
 have seemed passionate and brutal, fully deserving of 
 the contemptuous nickname " barbarian " which the 
 Romans had given them. The immediate result of 
 this inpouring of new human forces seemed to be 
 anarchy and confusion ; the only element in the dying 
 Empire which was able to withstand the shock of this 
 disintegration was the Catholic philosophy and 
 system. The democratically chosen bishops were 
 really leaders of the people, and stood for order and 
 fellowship in the midst of the prevailing chaos. They 
 were friends of the barbarians, as well as of the 
 Romans : the Church stood on no distinction ; for her 
 there was neither barbarian nor Scythian, Greek nor 
 Roman, bond nor free, and just as Church philosophy 
 had in earlier times been developed by fusion with 
 certain living Graeco-Roman ideas, so now it was 
 developed by its incorporation of the most living 
 tradition of the invaders. The conquerors found in 
 the Christian bishops men who withstood them to 
 the face in the matter of their passions and extrava- 
 gances, but they also found in them men who could 
 interpret what was finest in their own thought and 
 customs, and the new Europe believed and was 
 baptized. One sees in English life of the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries a Christian philosophy and 
 economic system, strengthened by Teutonic thought 
 and custom, warring against the more individualistic 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 173 
 
 elements of feudalism which had their origin in the 
 individual private property theories of the earlier 
 Roman lawyers. To some extent the popularity of 
 Aristotle among the dominant Catholic philosophers 
 of this period may have inclined them to a less 
 communistic view of property than had obtained 
 among the earlier Fathers of the Church ; but this 
 view was in some part counteracted by the ideals of a 
 rival school of Catholic thought, a school well repre- 
 sented in the philosophy of Duns Scotus. But the 
 Christian Aristotelians must be considered to have 
 made their intellectual contribution to a Catholic 
 philosophy by their appeal to Aristotle, for the 
 Aristotelian note is no less necessary than the 
 Platonic to the building of a Christian ethic. 
 Socialists are not communists, and need have no 
 quarrel with the catholicised Aristotle of Aquinas. 
 We find Church law everywhere modifying the 
 secular laws of nations which had come under the 
 dominion of the Holy Roman Empire. 
 
 But during the eleventh and twelfth centuries in 
 England the codified law of the Church and the 
 uncodified laws of feudalism were in opposition. 
 The English people felt dimly that Anselm was 
 fighting for their liberties against despotism. For 
 fifty years after his death the influence of feudalism 
 increased, and the Crown tightened its hold upon 
 the Church. The bishops tended to become mere 
 officers of the Crown. Feudalism made much of 
 offences against property, little of offences against 
 persons. In the patriarchal or feudal idea of the 
 family, the husband has absolute right over the wife, 
 
174 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the father over sons and daughters. Parents might 
 give their children in marriage without their consent. 
 Neither Scripture nor Church law gives support to 
 this monogamic despotism. Church law again put 
 strict limits to the feudal theory of obedience of 
 slaves and servants. As the reader realises the 
 singular justice, leniency, and humanity of the 
 Church's law, and the brutality of the customs of 
 the realm, death being the punishment for offences 
 against property, he will begin to understand the 
 tremendous issues involved in the struggle between 
 Church and State. In order to escape the secular 
 law, thousands of folk were taking Orders in the 
 Church ; gravediggers, bell - ringers, secretaries, 
 lawyers, lawyers' clerks, sextons, scholars, and many 
 others were in one or other of its seven Orders. 
 Tyndale, true precursor of Christo-capitalism, voiced 
 the ancient feudalism and the coming commercialism 
 when he fastened the charge of bearing u the mark of 
 the Beast" upon all who rebelled against the king, 
 or against their overlords, or against the nigger- 
 driving of the feudal family by taking Orders and so 
 escaping into comparative freedom. According to 
 him, the king could do no wrong, a parent was 
 absolute master of his family, a lord absolute over 
 his servants. 
 
 St Thomas of Canterbury (1117-1 170), in his resist- 
 ance to King Henry II., was therefore championing 
 the liberties of the people. He was driven by the 
 necessities of the situation to appeal to Rome, and 
 so to strengthen a power, beneficent in chaotic days, 
 but malevolent at a later period. He was claiming 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 175 
 
 for as large a portion of the English nation as possible 
 exemption from the uncertainties of the " customs of 
 the realm," and the more lenient and even treatment 
 of international Christian law, a law which we shall 
 recognise as embodying the underlying assump- 
 tions of socialism, and as not unlike it in some of 
 its actual and practical judgments. St Thomas 
 the martyr was canonised in the hearts of the 
 English people. From that date onwards through- 
 out Stephen's reign religion was a living reality, 
 and the Cistercian revival became strong enough to 
 wrest England from the confusion of feudalism and 
 prepared the way for the Great Charter. The quarrel 
 between John and the Pope (1207-1213) ended in the 
 victory of Rome and the realisation of Hildebrand's 
 dream. England had become a fief of the Papacy. 
 Stephen Langton, at first the servant and ultimately 
 the opponent of Rome, formulated a democratic 
 policy for the people. " Rights and liberties were no 
 longer to be vague and shadowy things half-veiled 
 in sentiment, they were to be written down fair in 
 black and white and embodied in a charter." 1 
 
 On 1 5th June 1215, the signature of the Great 
 Charter by John at Runnymede confirmed Langton's 
 policy. But the Pope betrayed the archbishop, and 
 supported the king against the people, annulled the 
 Charter, excommunicated the barons who had signed 
 it, and suspended Langton for refusing to publish the 
 excommunication. The Charter was subsequently 
 confirmed by Honorius III., and the Church of 
 England was at peace. 
 
 1 Wakeman's Church History ', p. 130. 
 
1 76 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 By the middle of the thirteenth century the 
 religious revival had spent its force. The monas- 
 teries had become large landholders. The clergy 
 were often non-resident and illiterate. The Black 
 Friars and the Grey Friars restored the faith of the 
 democracy. The monk had sought the salvation of 
 his own soul. The friars saved the soul of the nation, 
 and " Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellow- 
 ship is hell," became a common motto. Their warm 
 hearts and coarse wit won the masses. They invaded 
 sleepy parishes, were offered on occasion the hospi- 
 tality of the church, but more often preached without 
 the parson's leave on the village green, and stirred up 
 strife and life wherever they went. Their mission 
 throughout England led to the recognition of repre- 
 sentative government and the summoning of the first 
 parliament. 
 
 The idea of representation was borrowed from the 
 Church, who took her full share in the upbuilding of 
 democratic England. But from the time of John's 
 submission Pope and king are united in unholy 
 alliance against the democracy, and the official 
 clergy and courtiers are not often found on the 
 popular side. 
 
 Critics who adopt what is called the materialist 
 interpretation of history, an interpretation based 
 on the assumption that ideas do not create con- 
 ditions, but that those conditions create the idea, 
 would, we suppose, ignore the part played by the 
 Church in constructing a prosperous England. They 
 would say that the people of that epoch were 
 comparatively prosperous because they happened to 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 177 
 
 have some access to land and capital : that they had 
 such access is undeniable, but that they happened 
 to have it must be emphatically denied. Their 
 prosperity was not due to chance happenings, but to 
 deliberate beliefs and a deliberate exercise of the 
 collective will, which embodied itself in this material 
 access and socialistic legislation of various kinds. 
 Individualist Protestantism, as we shall see in a later 
 section, revives the old Roman theory of absolute 
 ownership. Collective Catholicism denies that concep- 
 tion, and, in denying it, is able to apply a theory of 
 land and of other forms of property which succeeded 
 to a large extent in drawing the sting of feudalism. 
 In this country, for instance, before the Reformation, 
 land was considered not to belong absolutely but 
 relatively to the lords of manors. In reality it 
 belonged to the king, and was given to the baron or 
 the Church community in return for certain services 
 to be rendered annually to the nation. But the king 
 himself was, at least in theory, and to a great extent 
 in practice, no Oriental despot, but representative of 
 the whole people. All land was ultimately Crown 
 land, and the Crown meant ultimately the people. 
 This interpretation of the land laws tallies with the 
 law of the Church. 
 
 Every age has its popular encyclopaedia. Harms- 
 worth is the popular encyclopaedist of the twentieth 
 century. St Thomas Aquinas was the popular 
 encyclopaedist of the thirteenth. St Thomas does not 
 hold the extremer communistic theories of some of 
 the early Fathers. He would allow some kinds of 
 private property. He holds that such property is not 
 
 12 
 
178 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 indeed found in natural law, but that both property 
 and government are legitimate within certain bounds, 
 and are not the result of sin, nor in contradiction to 
 that earlier law, but are super-added to it by the good 
 human reason. While men may therefore hold certain 
 forms of private property, they must administer it, after 
 the necessities of their own position have been guaran- 
 teed, as being common to all. Their superfluity is com- 
 mon, is the right and property of the poor. In certain 
 cases of necessity " all things become common." 
 
 " Where there is such evident and urgent necessity 
 that it is manifest that help must be given from 
 whatever is at hand, as, for instance, if a person is in 
 danger and cannot otherwise be helped, then we may 
 lawfully give assistance from the property of others, 
 whether it be taken openly or by stealth." 1 
 
 He devotes considerable space to questions of 
 buying and selling. Advantage must not be taken 
 of the necessity of the buyer, nor may the buyer 
 take advantage of the ignorance of the seller. He 
 decides, in spite of some of the earlier Fathers, that 
 certain forms of trading are lawful ; but it is dishonest 
 to engage in the exchange of commodities if one's 
 motive be gain, and not a modest livelihood. A 
 moderate income derived from trading, if you are 
 yourself actively engaged in the business, such an 
 income as shall be adequate to the support of your 
 family and household, or that you may have to give 
 to the poor or to the public service, is legitimate. 
 Such an income is to be considered as salary taken 
 for work rendered. He would seem to admit the 
 
 1 Quoted by R. W. Carlyle in the Economic Review, Jan. 1894. . 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 179 
 
 morality of moderate rent from houses, 1 but interest 
 from anything else, whether in money or in kind, he 
 considers unlawful. Even if you forego the use of 
 money by which a profit might be made by yourself, 
 you have no right to claim interest on that account, 
 or for the risk you run as lender. The only form of 
 interest that Aquinas would allow is a small sum to 
 secure the lender against the possibility of the non- 
 return of the capital. He absolutely condemns specu- 
 lative trading, or gain resulting from a skilful use of 
 the markets. The adequate reward of labour, a 
 proper living wage, must be considered in determining 
 the price of commodities. He lays down the absolute 
 law that all commerce must base itself upon the 
 Gospel precept, " Whatsoever ye would that men 
 should do unto you, do ye also unto them." " He 
 clearly considers that in any particular country or 
 district there is for every article, at any particular 
 time, some one just price : that prices, accordingly, 
 should not vary with momentary supply and demand, 
 with individual caprice, or skill in the chaffering of 
 the market." 2 The significance of St Thomas is 
 that he was not only an original thinker, but the 
 representative of the more moderate traditions of the 
 Church on these subjects. 
 
 It is valuable to notice that when the economic 
 revolution of the eleventh century, involving the 
 growth of towns, the formation of merchant bodies, 
 the establishment of markets, sought to justify a 
 
 1 Rent on land itself was but grudgingly permitted by the Church. 
 God's ultimate intention was common ownership. Rent, therefore, 
 could only be taken as payment for services annually rendered. 
 
 ' 2 Ashley, Economic History and Theory, vol. i. p. 146. 
 
i8o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 theory of absolute individual property and unlimited 
 freedom of contract, it was met by organised resistance 
 on the part of the Church, with its two doctrines of 
 the just price and the sinfulness of interest. These 
 doctrines were enforced from the pulpit, in the confes- 
 sional, in the ecclesiastical courts ; " and we shall find 
 that, by the time that the period begins of legislative 
 activity on the part of the secular power, these two 
 rules have been so impressed on the consciences of men 
 that parliament, municipality, and gild endeavoured of 
 their own motion to secure obedience to them." 1 
 
 It has been pointed out in a previous chapter that 
 the original of the confessional was essentially social 
 and democratic, and now that the Church had begun 
 to come into its kingdom, it exercised an enormous 
 influence in the affairs of men. It required above all 
 that penitents should examine themselves as to their 
 guilt in the matter of the seven deadly sins. One of 
 these sins was avarice ; covetousness or avarice was 
 defined as eagerness for gain, or the desire of what 
 is now called getting on, the desire to be rich. The 
 theologians, following St Paul and St Augustine, 
 and indeed the law of the Church, stigmatised this 
 desire to get on as idolatry. In Chaucer's Canterbury 
 Tales, the Good Parson gives as example of the deadly 
 sin that extreme enforcement of the legal rights of 
 the lords of land which prepared the way for the 
 modern system of competitive rents. St Chrysostom 
 had led the way centuries before in his definition of 
 covetousness as the desire for more things than those 
 to which our faculties can correspond over-endow- 
 
 1 Ashley, Economic History and Theory, vol. i. p. 132. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 181 
 
 ment, we might call it. Virtue is the mean between 
 two vices : over-endowment or avarice is the one vice, 
 the opposite of which is under-endowment, or thrift, 
 which the Fathers as unanimously condemned. In 
 books for the training of confessors, the taking of 
 interest is always instanced as one of the chief forms 
 of the deadly sin ; buying in the cheapest market and 
 selling in the dearest is another form. The penitent 
 was obliged to confess such actions as these, and 
 could not be shriven until he had promised to make 
 such amends as were possible. 1 
 
 This teaching is not only to be found in Aquinas 
 and other encyclopaedists and in popular manuals of 
 devotion, but becomes an integral part of Church law 
 itself. Canon law, or Church law, was only very 
 gradually codified. At first, like all forms of law, it 
 is found in floating traditions and customs. In course 
 of its compilation, it is developed or modified accord- 
 ing to the particular tendencies of the age. There are 
 several strata of Canon law; the first compilation 
 belongs to the middle of the twelfth century. Con- 
 siderable additions are made about a hundred years 
 later ; a third compilation, now considerably swollen, 
 bears the date of 1298; a fourth belongs to the early 
 fourteenth century. The first two compilations, as we 
 should expect, are more frankly social-democratic 
 than the later, or rather, the later reiterate the earlier 
 law with all kinds of reserves and modifications. But 
 the law of the Western Church lays it down that, in 
 God's original intention for the world, the use of all 
 that is in the world ought to be common to all men, 
 
 1 Cf. Marson, Vox Clamantium, p. 215. 
 
1 82 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 The earlier compilations, unimpeded by later reserves, 
 prohibit every kind of money interest. If you lend 
 money to a man expecting to receive from him more 
 than you have given, you are a usurer. " Usury is 
 whatever is added to the capital, whether it be food, 
 clothing, or whatever else you like to call it." 1 All 
 payment of money in return for the giving of credit 
 is usury. Prohibition of this practice appears first 
 in a bull directed by Alexander III. in 1176 to the 
 Archbishop of Genoa, which city was then struggling 
 with Pisa for commercial supremacy in the Medi- 
 terranean. " You tell us it often happens in your city 
 that people buy pepper, or cinnamon, or other wares at 
 the time not worth more than $ promising to pay those 
 from whom they receive them 6 at the appointed 
 time. Though contracts of this kind and under 
 such a form cannot strictly be called usuries, yet 
 nevertheless the vendors incur guilt, unless they 
 are really doubtful whether the wares will be worth 
 more or less at the time of payment. Your citizens 
 therefore will do well, for their own salvation, to cease 
 from such contracts." 2 St Thomas Aquinas had 
 said : " A man has not the right to do what he likes 
 with his own," and this becomes the law of the Church. 
 In some cases, a lender who had not been promptly 
 paid back the capital had taken possession of the 
 poor man's land. 3 The Canon law in such cases 
 laid it down as sin, if he did not restore the land 
 immediately he had received from its produce the 
 value of the sum originally lent. The law appears to 
 
 1 Ashley, vol. i. p. 158. 2 Quoted by Ashley, vol. i. p. 160. 
 
 8 Ashley, vol. i. p. 159. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 183 
 
 include under the sin of usury the action of those 
 who do not lend themselves, but retain what their 
 fathers, or those whose wealth they have inherited, 
 had received through usury, and also to condemn 
 those who borrow at a low rate of interest to lend at a 
 greater. This, in any case, is condemned in a manual 
 for confessors in wide use in the later Middle Ages. 
 The Jewish law on economic questions is often 
 referred to, as are also the precepts of the Gospel. 
 Rent on houses is apparently allowed, and in the case 
 of those who could not earn their own living, Innocent 
 III. had allowed that their money might be committed 
 to a merchant for the obtaining of moderate gain. 
 The first legal prohibition of usury was passed by the 
 Council of Nicaea in 325, but only applied to the 
 clergy ; the prohibition was extended to the laity in 
 Western Europe by the capitularies of Charles the 
 Great and the councils of the ninth century. Church 
 legislation clashed with the Roman law, which was 
 studied by the secular lawyers as the highest embodi- 
 ment of human wisdom, and which permitted usury, 
 enforcing the payment of interest as well as capital. 
 
 The capitalist had no right to a reward, in the 
 earlier opinion of the Church, unless of course his 
 remuneration was not that of a capitalist, but of an 
 actual trader or manager. The living wage was 
 always insisted on ; but it is in the Church's legal 
 theory of the sources of wealth that Canon law con- 
 flicts most directly with modern political economy. 
 
 It has been usual until recently, with the rank and file 
 of modern economists, to speak of three "factors," "instru- 
 ments," " agents," or " requisites " in production, viz. land. 
 
i8 4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 labour, and capital, and to put them all on very much the 
 same level of importance. Mediaeval thinkers saw but two, 
 land and labour. The land was the ultimate source of all 
 wealth ; but it needed human labour to win from it what it 
 was able to provide. Labour, therefore, as the one element 
 in production which depended on the human will, became 
 the centre of their doctrine. All wealth was due to the 
 employment of labour on the materials furnished by nature; 
 and only by proving that labour had been engaged in 
 bringing about the result could the acquisition of wealth by 
 individuals be justified. " God and the labourer," as one 
 widely read theologian expressed it, " are the true lords of 
 all that serves for the use of man. All others are either 
 distributors or beggars " ; and he goes on to explain that the 
 clergy and gentry are debtors to the husbandmen and crafts- 
 men, and only deserve their higher honour and reward so 
 far as they fitly perform those duties, as "ruling classes," 
 which involve greater labour and greater peril. The doctrine 
 had thus a close resemblance to that of modern socialists ; 
 labour it regarded both as the sole (human) cause of wealth, 
 and also as the only just claim to the possession of wealth. 1 
 
 Mr Ashley goes on to say that the canonist 
 doctrine only differed from modern socialist teach- 
 ing on this point, in that it allowed varying rates of 
 remuneration for different kinds of services. This, 
 however, is a mistake, for modern socialists allow 
 that such varying rates will, in all probability, obtain 
 in the socialised state. 
 
 It is sometimes objected by Christian critics of 
 socialism that it involves compulsion, and that the 
 Church can have nothing to do with compulsory 
 measures. This argument has been partly considered 
 in a previous chapter. 
 
 The early Christian had no political rights ; the 
 political power of the Empire was used to crush 
 
 1 Ashley, vol. i. p. 393. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 185 
 
 them out of existence. It is little short of amazing 
 that under such circumstances their leaders should 
 not have developed a theory of the essential evil of 
 government and of all compulsion, especially if they 
 had had in their minds a picture of a non-resistant 
 Christ, and were under the guidance of His Holy 
 Spirit. Their own socialist philosophy, the exist- 
 ence of which these particular critics do not seem to 
 deny, could under these circumstances only function 
 in voluntary experiments, in semi-communism, in the 
 giving of alms considered as a repayment to the 
 poor, as a debt of justice. But so far from holding 
 that State compulsion was essentially antichristian, 
 they developed the doctrine that State compulsion, 
 the pagan compulsion that was crushing them out 
 of existence, was in its essence Divine. We find in 
 Church tradition nothing of that horror of the State 
 which haunts the mind of so thorough-going an 
 individualist as Herbert Spencer. St Basil defines 
 the State as an organised whole, the parts of which 
 are men trained out of separate aims into common 
 life. A particularly autocratic ruler or despotic form 
 of that State was from time to time fiercely opposed. 
 We have already referred to St Ambrose's opposi- 
 tion to the Emperor, and there are in later centuries 
 treatises on kingship which are full of warning. The 
 king must appoint rulers who must protect the weak, 
 and not lord it over his subjects who are actually 
 their equals. There are brave sermons in the ninth 
 century, especially on the king as champion of the 
 poor, and coronation addresses warning kings of the 
 fate of tyrants. Sedulius Scotus threatens ruin to 
 
1 86 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 evil monarchs, who are described as lions and wolves. 
 They are no true kings, but tyrants. " They reign, but 
 not by Me." But even these opponents of particular 
 tyrants are not led into a general opposition to 
 governments and their compulsions. 
 
 There was never any question, if the Church 
 should itself be in the position to obtain political 
 influence, of refusing that position ; and, in point of 
 fact, immediately it was able to function politically it 
 did so, and used its power in what our critics them- 
 selves call a socialist direction. John Henry Newman, 
 still an orthodox Anglican, and as always in politics 
 a conservative, has no doubts upon this point : 
 
 Strictly speaking, the Christian Church has been a 
 visible society with necessarily a political power and party. 
 It may be a party triumphant or a party under persecution, 
 but a party it must always be prior in existence to the civil 
 institutions with which it is surrounded, and from its latent 
 divinity formidable and influential to the end of time. . . . 
 If the primitive believers did not interfere with the acts of 
 the civil government, it was merely because they had no 
 rights enabling them legally to do so. Where they have 
 rights the case is different. . . . Since there is a popular 
 misconception that Christians, and especially the clergy as 
 such, have no concern in temporal affairs, it is expedient 
 to take every opportunity of formally denying the position 
 and demanding a proof of it. In truth, the Church was 
 framed for the express purpose of interfering or (as irreligious 
 men will say) meddling with the world. 1 
 
 Society works so smoothly and politely for the 
 comfortable classes that they forget that the civilisa- 
 tion which secures them in their comforts rests 
 ultimately upon force. By force they took the 
 
 1 Newman, History of the Arians, part ii. chap. iii. p. 264. Quoted 
 by Marson, ibid. } p. 201, 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 187 
 
 people's land ; by force they secure to themselves a 
 certainty of interest upon the wealth produced by 
 the majority : the rate is recoverable at law. For 
 behind the ballot box and parliamentary laws are 
 the bars of prisons, the batons of the police, and the 
 bayonets of soldiers. They do not question com- 
 pulsory government now. They are only shocked 
 when a just kind of compulsion is suggested as 
 substitute for an unjust. Anarchy strictly means 
 no government, no compulsion. It is a curious 
 position that we should have to teach Conservatives 
 not to use anarchist arguments. Man, as the Chris- 
 tian religion teaches us, is a social and interdependent 
 animal. By the divine law of his nature he lives in 
 society, and the fact of society cannot be considered 
 without the fact of force of some sort and in some 
 degree. If we were to be independent, says St 
 Chrysostom, " should we not be untamable wild 
 beasts? By force and necessity God has subjected 
 us to one another" (2 Cor., Homily 17). 
 
 For these reasons Christians who have been 
 trained to think will not use the argument that 
 socialism is necessarily wicked because it involves 
 compulsion. There is nothing in their New Testa- 
 ments to lead them to such a supposition ; everything 
 in their traditions contradicts it. 
 
 It may be thought that I have drawn too roseate a 
 picture of the Middle Ages, and that, even if it has 
 been proved that Church thought and Church legisla- 
 tion modified and corrected secular law in a socialist 
 direction, the actual results did not amount to much. 
 Some will bring forward the evidence of the peasants' 
 
1 88 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 rising as conflicting with my contentions. What 
 cause was there for revolution if grievances were so 
 few ? But this rebellion predates my period, and 
 was itself among the many causes that led to the 
 later prosperity. Moreover, few people understand 
 revolutions. The slums never revolt. There is a 
 point at which all spirit of revolt is ground out of the 
 people. " It is a popular fallacy that long-continued 
 oppression and misery cause revolutionary impatience. 
 On the contrary, it is while the bit is new in the 
 mustang's mouth that it rears and plunges. To the 
 fellahin of Egypt poverty and exploitation seem as 
 inevitable as the fall of night and the coming of 
 death." 1 When a people saturated with memories of 
 better days are forced under the yoke, rebellion is 
 inevitable. Church tradition was with them ; the 
 landed plutocracy and ecclesiastical officialdom were 
 against them. It was the rising of a Catholic 
 democracy appealing to their religion in justification 
 of rebellion. They were led by priests and friars 
 Wat Tyler, John Ball, Jack Straw who, if they 
 knew little of Canon law, knew much of the Gospel 
 to which itself appealed. For over twenty years 
 John Ball and other priests had been preaching up 
 and down the countryside. Three archbishops had 
 opposed them. The sermon that led Archbishop 
 Langham to have him arrested and imprisoned is 
 characteristic of this agitation. 
 
 In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen ; 
 no man ought to become bond unless he has done treason 
 to his lord, such treason as Lucifer did to God. But you 
 
 1 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis ; p. 16. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 189 
 
 and your lords, good people, are neither angels nor spirits ; 
 both you and they are men, men formed in the same 
 similitude. Why then should you be kept like brute beasts ? 
 and why, if you labour, should you have no wages ? 
 
 Good people, things will never go well in England so 
 long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be 
 villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom men 
 call lords greater folk than we? On what ground have 
 they deserved it if all came from the same father and 
 mother, Adam and Eve ? How can they say or prove that 
 they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain 
 for them what they spend in their pride ? 1 
 
 One of John Ball's letters, a signal for the rising, 
 commences : " John Ball, Priest of St Mary's, greets 
 well all manner of men, and bids them, in the name 
 of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to stand 
 together manfully in truth." The organisation of the 
 peasant clubs throughout various counties, and their 
 intercommunion, was for the most part the work of 
 the clergy of the English Church. " Rarely has a 
 democratic movement produced such men of character 
 and capacity as the great uprising of 1381 produced ; 
 rarely has a people responded to its leaders as the 
 people responded in that year." 
 
 What, then, were the aims of the Church in the 
 earlier Middle Ages, in so far as they affected the 
 material and social life of men ? The attempt to 
 develop the tradition of the Gospel and the early 
 Fathers, and to apply it to the social life of their 
 age. The opposition to interest, the doctrine of just 
 price and living wage, the regulations of commerce 
 and agriculture, were methods expressing the Church's 
 desire that men should live justly in the bond of 
 
 1 Wat Tyler and the Great Uprising* by Joseph Clayton. 
 
190 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 fellowship, that the Kingdom of God might be 
 established in their midst. We have noted the 
 intimacy between theology and politics in Canon law. 
 The greatest book of the Middle Ages, dealing at 
 such length with economic questions, is given a 
 theological title (the Summa Theologia). Anything 
 approaching a defence of plutocracy or an individu- 
 alistic commercialism is branded as heresy. The 
 modern divorce between theory and practice, between 
 God and man, between theology and politics would have 
 got short shrift in those days ; heresy was not only 
 deflection from right theological thinking, but accord- 
 ing to a Church law of 1 3 1 1, to quote one among many 
 instances, " If anyone fall into the error of daring 
 pertinaciously to affirm that to engage in usury is not 
 a sin, we decree that he shall be punished as a 
 heretic, and enjoin all ordinaries and inquisitors to 
 proceed with rigour against any suspected of this 
 heresy." l 
 
 There has been more than one attempt, on the part 
 of certain critics, to do away with the value, in a 
 socialist direction, of the early and mediaeval anti- 
 usury pronouncements and legislation. The opposi- 
 tion, it is contended, is based on an absurd miscon- 
 ception of the nature of money. But the mediaeval 
 conception of money was purely incidental. If one of 
 the arguments used to defend a certain proposition is 
 discovered to be unsound, it does not necessarily 
 invalidate that proposition, nor does its defender 
 abandon the position for that reason. And what was 
 the essential position of the Church ? That the poor 
 
 1 Ashley, vol. ii. p. 150. 
 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 191 
 
 should not be exploited ; that all should be, in their 
 various stations, contributors and producers. It was 
 merely a repetition of the earlier economic law, " If any 
 will not work, neither shall he eat." 
 
 We are not bound by the letter of the earlier Canon 
 law, though, if we were so bound in it, we should be 
 compelled to fight the present system to the death. 
 We are bound by the spirit of that law, for it is the 
 spirit of the earlier tradition and of the Gospel. A 
 new form or outward letter is developing in our own 
 day, which more adequately safeguards and expresses 
 the Church's philosophy of the common life. That 
 form is economic socialism. 
 
VIII 
 THE REFORMATION 
 
 Recapitulation Protestant and Catholic ideas contrasted Protestant 
 individualism the mother of modern commercialism Individualistic 
 and Puritan tendencies in Catholic Communions Modifications and 
 evasions of the Canon law Mr Ashley whitewashes the later 
 practice of the Church Jesuit and Calvinist defences of com- 
 mercialism Molinseus : a farcical condemnation, 1 546 Pius 
 VIII, 1830 : contrast with St Thomas Aquinas Rigorism and 
 corruption John Major, 1600, Papist and anti-Catholic The 
 Blessed Thomas More's evidence on the miseries of the poor 
 Protestantism indirectly pro-plutocratic Calvin, the true and 
 honest Protestant More and Calvin contrasted Protestantism 
 boldly justifies usury Lutheranism, a compromise Luther 
 supported by the plutocracy : attacks the peasants Luther some- 
 times denies the right of usury Melancthon, the complete Pro- 
 testant individualist Nitti's evidence on Church leniency and 
 feudal severity Papal claims and pre-Reformation abuses The 
 English Reformation and the people's religion The Great Pillage 
 Thomas Hancock's quotation The Anglican interdependent 
 ideal is Catholic Papist uniformity broke unity Cranmer's 
 action quoted Lever on the parliamentary permission to usury 
 His protest effectual Anglican bishops denounce the aristocracy 
 and plutocracy The Anglican Church against interest and land- 
 grabbingjewel on five per cent, as theft and murder Latimer 
 before the landlords Latimer quoted by Bishop Gore Other 
 Anglican divines quoted Protestant leaven at work : Bullinger's 
 decades Anti-democratic Puritanism William Laud, the martyr- 
 archbishop Laud, the enemy of property and Puritanism The 
 Puritan "liberty" and its defence of slavery Individualistic 
 attack on the liturgy and catechism Is the Papal Church the 
 friend of the poor ? Between the millstones The Restoration. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE REFORMATION 
 
 " The enormous increase of money which had been produced by the 
 trade of Uzziah's reign threatened to overwhelm the simple economy 
 under which every family had its croft. As in many another land and 
 period, the social problem was the descent of wealthy men, land-hungry, 
 upon the rural districts. They made the poor their debtors, and 
 bought out the peasant proprietors. They absorbed into their power 
 numbers of homes, and had at their individual disposal the lives and 
 the happiness of thousands of their fellow-countrymen. Isaiah had 
 cried, ' Woe upon them that join house to house, that lay field to field, 
 till there be no room for the common people, and the inhabitants of the 
 rural districts grow fewer and fewer.' Micah pictures the recklessness 
 of those plutocrats the fatal ease with which their wealth enabled 
 them to dispossess the yeomen of Judah. ' They covet fields and seize 
 them, houses and lift them up. So they crush a good man and his 
 home, a man and his heritage.' This is the evil the ease with which 
 wrong is done in the country ! ' It lies to the power of their hands ; 
 they covet and seize.' And what is it that they get so easily not 
 merely field and house, so much land and stone and lime ; it is human 
 life, with all that makes up personal independence, and the security of 
 home and of the family. . . . The tyranny of wealth was aided by the 
 bribed and unjust judges. . . . But meantime Micah feels that by 
 themselves the economic wrongs explain and justify the doom impending 
 upon the nation. . . . The rich in their immoral confidence that 
 Jehovah was neither weakened nor could permit such a disaster to fall 
 on His own people, tell the prophet that his sentence of doom on the 
 nation, and especially on themselves, is absurd, impossible. They cry 
 the eternal cry of respectability : ' God can mean no harm to the like 
 of us. His words are good to them that walk uprightly, and we are 
 conscious of being such. What you, prophets, have charged us with 
 
V 
 
 196 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 are nothing but natural transactions.' . . . They pride themselves that 
 all is stable and God is with them ; . . . they feel at ease, yet injustice 
 can never mean rest. . . . 
 
 * ' While Micah spoke he had wasted lives and bent backs before him. 
 His speech is elliptic till you see his finger pointing at them. Pinched 
 peasant-faces peer between all his words and fill the ellipses. And 
 among the living poor to-day are there not starved and bitter faces 
 bodies with the blood sucked from them, with the Divine image crushed 
 out of them ? . . . Many families of the middle class are nourished 
 by the waste of the lives of the poor. To a large employer of labour, 
 who was complaining that his employees, by refusing to live at the low 
 scale of the Belgian workmen, were driving trade out of the country, 
 the present writer once said : ' Would it not meet your wishes if, 
 instead of your workmen being levelled down, the Belgians were 
 levelled up ?' His answer was, ' I care not so long as I get my profits.' 
 He was a religious man, a liberal giver to his Church, and he died 
 leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds." GEORGE ADAM 
 SMITH, The Twelve Prophets, chap, xxvi. 1 
 
 WE have seen that the Catholic conception of 
 religion involves two theories which dominate modern 
 socialism, theories concerning the body and concern- 
 ing fellowship. The doctrine of both Church and 
 socialism concerning the body is, that outward, 
 sensuous, material things count ; that to treat man's 
 body as vile or of no account is to wound his whole 
 personality ; to ignore man's physical needs is 
 sacrilege ; that, though man does not live by bread 
 alone, he does live by bread ; that the physical 
 instincts, though dangerous and often leading men 
 into sin, are not essentially evil but good ; that the 
 mission of the Church is to redeem, not ghosts nor 
 beasts, nor mere creatures of intellect, but men ; and 
 that man is a tri-unity of body, mind, and spirit. The 
 doctrine of both the Church and socialism concerning 
 
 1 Compare this quotation with the evidence of the state of England in 
 the following chapter. 
 
THE REFORMATION 197 
 
 fellowship is that the individual is not redeemed, 
 saved, built up into a rich and generous personality 
 in isolation, but in association. There is a wide sense 
 in which the mediaeval phrase, " Extra ecclesiam nulla 
 salus," is true. 
 
 When the Catholic philosophy dominated Europe, 
 we have seen it express itself in economic theories, 
 and to some extent practice, which would be described 
 by individualists of to-day as disastrous socialism. 
 
 It should be made quite clear that the mediaeval 
 Church was not in practice dominant, but was only 
 able considerably to modify existing anti-Christian 
 ideas and institutions. It must again be insisted 
 that this modification was not identical with economic 
 socialism, but that the main lines of attack by 
 Churchmen and others to-day upon economic socialism 
 are equally an attack upon the practice of their Church 
 in its quick and robust ages, and upon the funda- 
 mental and orthodox ideals of Catholicism which 
 formerly expressed themselves in anti-interest and 
 in sumptuary legislation, and now express themselves 
 in economic socialism. If we contrast the Protestant 
 conception of religion with the Catholic, and trace 
 the course of economic history after the Reformation, 
 we shall notice that in both theological doctrine and 
 economic practice Protestantism directly contradicts 
 the Catholic ideal. We must, however, remember 
 that no man is absolutely Protestant or Catholic, for 
 no man is absolutely logical. 
 
 Luther, for instance, retains many Catholic ideas ; 
 Calvin is more essentially Protestant ; and immediately 
 we have said that, we remember that Luther was not 
 
i 9 8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 uncompromisingly opposed to the earlier mediaeval 
 conception of economics, while Calvin went beyond 
 even the Jesuits in his approval of usury. We shall 
 find the Roman Church becoming more and more 
 Protestant, laying less and less stress on the dogmas 
 of fellowship and of material sanctity. It is often and 
 rightly said that Protestant individualism is the mother 
 of modern commercialism ; but we must remember 
 that there are certain Catholic tendencies in Protestant 
 bodies, especially in the present development of those 
 bodies, and that anti-Catholic individualism has made 
 considerable inroads into the historic Churches, the 
 Church of Rome, the Church of Russia, the Church 
 of England. 
 
 These individualistic tendencies are to be noticed 
 in the pre-Reformation period. Just as there has from 
 time to time been a wave of Puritanism sweeping over 
 the life of Catholic bodies which came near to denying 
 the orthodox doctrine of the body, so there have been 
 waves of individualism in Catholic countries, theories 
 which came near to denying the orthodox doctrine 
 concerning fellowship. A wave of this kind was 
 passing over Europe in the later Middle Ages. A 
 Puritan tendency is noticeable in the pre-Reformation 
 Churches of France and England. Preachers who 
 fancied themselves to be unimpeachable Catholics 
 were popularising a base Sabbatarianism, appealing 
 to the intricate outward letter of the Jewish law for 
 a precedent, and interpreting that letter in the most 
 lifeless and inhuman sense. But neither the Roman 
 Church nor the post-Reformation English Church 
 would officially endorse such heresy ; the Roman 
 
THE REFORMATION 199 
 
 Church was more willing to compromise with the 
 heresy that arose in another direction. Towards the 
 end of the Middle Ages ecclesiastical lawyers and 
 theologians were beginning to make all kinds of 
 evasions in the matter of the doctrine of fellowship 
 and its expression in socialistic legislation. Even 
 Mr Ashley, who stands almost alone among expert 
 historians of the period, in his endeavour to minimise 
 the break between earlier and later canonists, admits 
 that these modifications and evasions do sometimes 
 amount to the assumption of an altogether new 
 position. Langenstein, even late in the fourteenth 
 century, only defends rent charges from the guilt of 
 usury under special circumstances. To live upon 
 rents, if such a source of income enabled nobles to 
 live in luxurious idleness, or plebeians to desert honest 
 toil, is a violation of the Divine command, " In the 
 sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread." During the 
 fourteenth century the more conservative theologians 
 still brought all commercial and political practices to 
 that particular test : did they or did they not enable 
 men to live by means of rent and interest upon the 
 wealth produced by the working communities, and 
 to give no adequate service for wealth so extracted 
 from the producers ? Church officialdom, however, 
 begins to speak with less certain voice, and veers 
 round to the side of parliaments of landlords and 
 plutocrats. Mr Ashley would have us believe that, 
 with the rise of the middle classes and the develop- 
 ment of modern commercialism, the Church merely 
 adapted her teaching to the new needs, altering the 
 letter, but preserving the spirit. The later canonists 
 
200 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 met the business man's desire for exemption from 
 the earlier law concerning usury, not by a frank 
 avowal that usury was justifiable, but by allowance 
 of an infinite number of exceptions to the general 
 rule. Mr Ashley is right when he says that " the 
 original prohibition had really aimed at preventing 
 the oppression of the weak by the economically 
 strong," but he goes on to say that the "gradual 
 exemption from the prohibition of methods of employ- 
 ing money which did not involve oppression, instead 
 of obscuring the original principle, may have brought 
 it out more clearly." It is the assumption that the 
 methods of middle-class commercialism do not involve 
 oppression which must be emphatically challenged. 
 The judgments of the later Papal courts in the matter 
 of rent charges are suspect, when we remember that 
 a large part of the revenues of ecclesiastical bodies 
 consisted of such charges. The pro-rent judgments 
 of Martin V. and of Calixtus III. become the basis 
 of an actual addition to the Canon law, which, however, 
 dates in the post-Reformation period. 
 
 It is immensely significant that the philosophy of 
 the undivided Church, and the political expressions of 
 that philosophy, should have been frankly socialistic ; 
 that after the schism of East and West the socialist 
 teaching is not quite so evident, but that the Western 
 Church was still making an effort to uphold the 
 social tradition and to apply it ; that the socialism 
 of the Church is fainter and less evident in the years 
 immediately preceding the Reformation, and that the 
 further schism known as the Reformation, which rent 
 the body of Christ into many fragments, marks the 
 
THE REFORMATION 201 
 
 decline of Catholic socialism, that is, of essential 
 Catholicism in both the Protestant and the Papal 
 communions. The Franciscans are among the worst 
 offenders ; their popularity was therefore great with 
 the business men and financiers of the times. The 
 Jesuits, of course, being a purely post-Reformation 
 Order, are the defenders of individualist commercial- 
 ism as against the older Catholic belief; they are 
 anxious to prevent the moral standards of the Church 
 from coming into too violent a collision with the 
 necessities of everyday life. But the Jesuits were 
 only filling up the measure of their immediate 
 fathers, for the Lateran Council, under Leo X., 
 had adopted many of the modifications and contra- 
 dictions of the later canonists, defining usury merely 
 as " gain sought to be acquired from the use of a thing 
 not in itself fruitful without labour, expense, or risk 
 on the part of the lender." Mr Ashley himself admits 
 that from this time " Churchmen were more and more 
 reconciled to the idea of payment for the use of money, 
 even by the poor who could make no business investment 
 of the loan" 1 In face of this new departure, the frank 
 justification of usury in 1546 by Molinaeus is not 
 surprising, and he might well have been spared the 
 charge of heresy brought against him by those who 
 would preserve the condemnation of the term usury, 
 when they had altogether ceased to condemn the 
 thing. 
 
 It may be added that leaders of the Roman Church 
 have been more and more inclined to justify the 
 principle of usury, but that even the Congregation of 
 1 Cf. Ashley, ii. p. 447. 
 
202 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the Holy Office, with the approval of Pius VIII., in 
 1830 did not dare whitewash usurers. They decided 
 that those persons who regarded the fact that the 
 civil law fixed a certain rate of interest as in itself a 
 sufficient reason for taking interest were " not to be 
 disturbed." l Contrast this with St Thomas Aquinas, 
 who distinctly lays it down that even if interest is 
 permitted by law, that does not make the action any 
 less guilty. 2 
 
 The defenders of this new departure in the direction 
 of commercialism have to account for the fact that it 
 belongs to a period admitted by Protestants and 
 Romanists alike to be corrupt, It was an age of 
 literalism which may be compared, for its sheer 
 futility, with the rigorist and literalist age which 
 preceded the coming of Christ. In both periods 
 religion had come to consist in detailed obedience 
 to ceremonial laws which had become meaningless. 
 In both ages the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, 
 saw to it that modifications should be made in favour 
 of those who were able to purchase them. The 
 monasteries were in their decadence; their later 
 alms-givings encouraged rascally idlers, and were not 
 of much help to the genuine poor. The motive of 
 alms-giving was even corrupted. People were to give 
 liberally, not because alms was a just debt and we 
 must hunger and thirst after justice, but because 
 heavenly comfort in the future could so be purchased, 
 and the pains of purgatory be lessened. Masses for 
 the dead, which in their essential idea are defensible 
 
 1 Churches and Usury, A. S. Rose, p. 31. 
 
 2 Cf. R. W. Carlyle, Economic Review, January 1894. 
 
THE REFORMATION 203 
 
 enough, were actually defended for the grossest 
 reasons. The Mass itself, the social meal which 
 had been the safeguard of the Catholic ideal of 
 fellowship, had been turned into a private, individual- 
 istic affair. Religion was becoming a question of 
 payment, and the pious were those who had the 
 longest purse. The liberal foundations of hospitals 
 for the relief of the sick and needy had been diverted 
 into the pockets of lazy and plutocratic priests, who 
 thus lived upon the bounty of the poor. Glaring 
 abuses in connection with the doctrine of indulgences 
 were but one of many signs of the general decadence. 
 It was all very well for a later canonist, John Major, 
 a Scotchman, 1 to urge the prohibition of vagabondage 
 and begging ; it was only part of his general policy, 
 for he had "shown himself open to the lessons of 
 practical life," in accepting Eck's 1 bold attempt to 
 justify the taking of interest in the modern sense; but 
 vagabondage and beggary had been enormously 
 increased by the agrarian changes which deprived 
 tenants and cottagers of their land and made them 
 wanderers on the face of the earth. The Blessed 
 Thomas More thus describes the results of the 
 evictions then taking place : 
 
 " By one means or other, either by hook or crook, they 
 must needs depart away, poor wretched souls men, women, 
 husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woful mothers 
 with their young babes, and their whole household, small in 
 substance and much in number, as husbandry requireth 
 many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known 
 and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All 
 their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it 
 
 1 A Papist writer, circ. 1600. 
 
204 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 might well abide the sale, yet, being suddenly thrust out, 
 they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And 
 when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what 
 can they then else do but steal, and then justly, pardy, 
 be hanged, or else go about abegging ? And yet then also 
 they be cased in prison as vagabonds, because they go about 
 and work not ; whom no man will set to work, though they 
 never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one 
 shepherd or hefdman is enough to eat up that ground with 
 cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many 
 hands were requisite." 
 
 The Act of 1533-34, limiting the number of sheep any 
 one man might keep, gives a similar account. Owing, it 
 declares, to the union of farms and the change from arable 
 to pasture, " a marvellous number of the people of this realm 
 ... be so discouraged with misery and poverty that they 
 fall daily to theft, robbery and other inconvenience, or 
 pitifully die from hunger and cold." 1 
 
 I have said that Protestantism has its expression 
 in economic practice, and that both in philosophy and 
 practice it is the opposite of that Catholic theory of 
 life to which the earlier Church was moving ; I have 
 suggested that in a very real sense the Roman Church 
 has narrowed down into an introspective Protestant- 
 ism, since the schismatic period of the Reformation. 
 It is curious to notice that the Council of Trent, 
 although it reformed many of the grosser external 
 abuses, tied the Papal communion down to rigorist 
 and anti-Catholic conceptions. Meanwhile, on the 
 Continent at least, religion was by the Protestants 
 being switched off the human democratic line, on to 
 lines which would not bring it into conflict with the 
 economic developments of the middle classes ; for 
 when one speaks of the economic expression of 
 
 1 Quoted by Ashley, vol. ii. p. 353. 
 
THE REFORMATION 205 
 
 Protestantism, one must remember that it is not 
 direct but indirect. For the Protestant religion, in 
 its clearest and most logical aspect, divorces body 
 from spirit, and preaches that our faith is alone con- 
 cerned with men's individual souls and with questions 
 of spirituality. There have been attempts made 
 to prove that Luther and Calvin were directly 
 concerned as religious teachers with social reform, in 
 that they contributed to a theory of the separate 
 functions of Church and State which the majority 
 of people nowadays have come to accept. Religion 
 they held to be concerned with the spiritual side of 
 man, statecraft with the material. This theory may 
 or may not incidentally have led to wise modern 
 views, but in its origins it only serves to prove my 
 point. By teaching that religion, as such, is not 
 concerned with politics, Protestantism has played 
 into the hands of plutocracy, and has rightly found 
 among plutocrats its keenest defenders. 
 
 Hence the Continental Reformation may, in some 
 senses, be considered to have completed the corruption 
 of the immediately pre-Reformation Church ; for 
 although the protest was on the side of honesty, as 
 against evasion and a ceremonialism which had once 
 lived, but had now stiffened into the rigidity of a corpse, 
 yet it was on the side of such honesty as that of 
 Molinseus,whom we have seen demanding that tortuous 
 evasions should be abandoned, not that men might 
 return to the earlier condemnation of usury, but that 
 they might frankly defend it by an honest break with 
 their traditions. If one would study Protestantism 
 in its essence, it is to Calvin rather than to Luther 
 
206 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 that one must go. Calvin hated indulgences, hated the 
 buying and selling of religion, hated the later evasions 
 of Canon law ; so did Sir Thomas More. Both were 
 honest, both attacked the corruptions of their age; 
 but where More desired an honest Catholicism, Calvin 
 desired an honest Protestantism ; it was not only 
 dead ceremonial he objected to, but ceremonial of 
 any sort; it was not only the petty evasions of 
 Canon law he minded, but the Canon law of which 
 they were the evasions. More was literally a reformer, 
 for he urged men to re-form an ancient Church by 
 understanding and being seized upon by the living 
 spirit of its tradition. More's reformed religion 
 would once more quite inevitably and quite naturally 
 have blossomed forth in sensuous and ceremonial 
 joy and in common fellowship. Calvin's religion was 
 essentially a denial of these things. 
 
 We find in Calvinism the peculiarly Protestant 
 theories that men are vile, that men's bodies are con- 
 temptible, that religion is a private affair, that man 
 cannot be saved through the mediumship and ministry 
 of men ; therefore no man shall come between " my 
 soul and my God." In Calvin's teaching we find that 
 genesis of Protestant individualism which regards 
 religion "as a little private transaction of a strictly 
 confidential character between a man and his God." 
 Henceforward the individualist plutocrats who are 
 greedily capturing the land and capital, and are 
 making everything private property, are inclined to 
 substitute individualist ideas of God for the common 
 Fatherhood of the Lord's Prayer and the Catholic 
 liturgies. One finds them continually, in their books 
 
THE REFORMATION 207 
 
 of devotion, talking of " my God " as if He were as 
 much their private property as their houses and their 
 servants. It was indeed providential for the middle 
 classes, who were then coming into existence, that 
 this individualist religion, both in the Roman, and 
 even more in the Protestant Churches, should have 
 been ready to their hand. Calvin became the 
 champion of plutocracy, and his doctrines were 
 eagerly espoused by those who were making a little 
 Heaven for themselves on earth by plundering the 
 people's possessions, and looked forward to a little 
 Heaven above, which was to be a close preserve for 
 a small aristocracy of the pious. Bossuet tells us 
 that Calvin was the first theologian to propound the 
 modern distinction between interest and usury; and 
 if this is doubtful, it is at least true that he first 
 popularised this modern distinction. Ashley's com- 
 ment is intensely significant : " The judgment of 
 Calvin was certainly of much influence in weakening 
 the old repugnance to usury ; especially as the great 
 commercial people of the next century, the Dutch, 
 chanced to be Calvinists. Moreover, it is at once 
 apparent that a justification of usury itself was far 
 more impressive than the allowance of any number 
 of exceptions. Calvin's teaching was, therefore, in a 
 very real sense a turning-point in the history of 
 European thought." It must, however, be added 
 that even Calvin shrank from a defence of interest in 
 its grosser forms, for, according to him, usury must 
 not be demanded from men in need, nor must any 
 man be forced to pay when oppressed by need or 
 calamity. In after centuries his authority is quoted 
 
208 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 for the later Protestant proposition that interest, so far 
 from being sinful, is in accord with the Word of God. 
 
 We must not look in those times of storm and 
 stress for strictly logical systems of religion. Even 
 Calvin, prince of logicians, left the Protestant system 
 incomplete ; the Neo-Calvinists filled up the gaps. 
 
 Lutheranism was far less logical, far more a protest 
 of the heart than of the head. It may be said to have 
 resulted in a compromise between Catholic and 
 Protestant ideas, Protestantism largly predominating. 
 More than one historian has contended that the 
 Lutheran Reformation was, in reality, a religious 
 reform in favour of the interests of the wealthy classes 
 in Germany. These classes were becoming powerful, 
 but were still excluded from political expression ; 
 their representation in State assemblies was merely 
 nominal. There resulted a bitter rivalry between the 
 feudal aristocracy and the rich industrialists, who 
 were supported by the lesser nobles. 
 
 In the meantime, the poverty-stricken rural population 
 rose up against their despoilers ; they burnt down the 
 castles of the nobles, and swore that they would leave 
 nothing to be seen upon the land but the cabins of the 
 poor. The rich middle class seemed at first to side with 
 them, and at Strasburg, Nuremburg, and Ulm the peasants 
 were encouraged, aided, and provided for. However, the 
 bourgeoisie soon grew alarmed at the spreading of insurrec- 
 tion, and made common cause with the nobles in 
 smothering the revolt in the rural districts. Luther, who 
 was then at the apex of his power, condemned the rising 
 in the name of religion, and proclaimed the servitude of 
 the people as holy and legitimate. " You seek," wrote he, 
 "to free your persons and your goods. You desire the 
 power and the goods of this earth. You will suffer no 
 wrong. The Gospel, on the contrary, has no care for such 
 
THE REFORMATION 209 
 
 things, and makes exterior life consist in suffering, sup- 
 porting injustice, the cross, patience, and contempt of life, 
 as of all the things of this world. To suffer ! To suffer ! 
 The cross ! The cross ! Behold what Christ teaches ! " 
 Were not these teachings given in the name of the faith to 
 a famishing people in revolt against the tyranny and avidity 
 of the ruling aristocracy, fatal to the future of the peasant 
 masses, whose very sufferings were thus legitimatised in the 
 name of the religion that should have come to their aid ? l 
 
 Luther's attitude is very puzzling. He admits that 
 the claims- of the peasants are not contrary to natural 
 law or to equity, but quotes Scripture to justify his 
 opposition to the rebellion. He does not seem ever 
 to have made up his mind upon the subject of 
 interest ; in his earlier writings he describes the 
 middle-class theory as a pretext, he denounces the 
 grip-monies, and exclaims : " Little thieves are put in 
 the stocks; great thieves go flaunting in gold and 
 silk." He is convinced that no form of usury is 
 Christian in which payment is demanded from the 
 deserving poor ; he goes further than Calvin in the 
 Catholic direction, for he absolutely condemns the 
 census per sonalis, i.e. the placing of a charge upon so 
 intangible a thing as an artisan's skill. In this con- 
 demnation he would seem to oppose, by implication, 
 the bulk of the share-holding and interest-mongering 
 of the present day. He allows, however, many 
 modifications of the stricter law, and is by no 
 means sound on the subject in the sense of the 
 early Church. 
 
 Melancthon is much more uncompromisingly in 
 favour of interest, his only reservation being that it 
 
 1 Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 75. 
 
 14 
 
210 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 should be moderate, according to the estimate of just 
 men. He was more violent than Luther in his denun- 
 ciation of the communistic theories of the Anabaptists. 
 He regarded with horror, the canonist doctrine that 
 property belongs essentially to God, and was in the 
 first place given to all men in common, and that if, 
 by an arrangement of human law, some possess more 
 property than others, they must regard themselves, 
 not as owners, but as clerks or stewards of the super- 
 fluity of riches, and that what human law has arranged, 
 human law can alter. According to Melancthon, 
 property exists by Divine right. To deny the rights 
 of private property is contrary to the laws of nature 
 and the precepts of the Gospel. 1 
 
 It would not, of course, be accurate to say that 
 there was no difference between the post-Reformation 
 Roman theories and practice and extreme Protestant 
 theory and practice ; and merciless as has been the 
 treatment of the poor in both Roman Catholic and 
 Protestant countries, this mercilessness has not been 
 so deliberately defended by Roman as by Puritan 
 apologists. It is generally admitted that the condi- 
 tion of the poor, even in the corrupt period immedi- 
 ately preceding the Reformation, was not so hopeless 
 as it became when the Church lost her estates. Nitti 
 describes the action of the civil power, after having 
 stripped the Church of her possessions, pressing an 
 iron hand upon the starving people ; the barons 
 oppressed their unhappy vassals, while the Church 
 feudatories, who had neither daughters to marry nor 
 courts to keep up, were very clement towards the 
 
 3 Melancthon, Opera t Breitschneider edition, vol. iii. 
 
THE REFORMATION 211 
 
 poor peasantry. While the unfortunate serfs of the 
 barons were harassed with continual vexations, the 
 vassals of the Church were treated with consideration. 
 The feudal aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie are 
 responsible for the despoiling of the Church. In the 
 kingdom of Naples, the extortions of the barons were 
 almost unendurable ; but the greatest abbey in the 
 south of Italy, the abbey of Cava, renounced all 
 right to the personal labour of its vassals, and 
 assumed the obligation of paying them adequate 
 wages. " The inhabitants of Cava," writes a liberal 
 historian, "enjoyed, under the protection of the 
 Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, immunity from 
 taxes, privileges in traffic, the use of an almost free 
 port at Vietri ; they cultivated fertile lands free from 
 burdens without the oppression of angheria or 
 perangheria, which had been abolished by Abbot 
 Philip in 1322, without any seigneurial vexations, in 
 a condition almost ex lege, not being subject to the 
 king, as were the cities of the demesne, nor to the 
 feudatories ; they prospered from day to day, till they 
 reached such a height of prosperity that even the 
 Neapolitans envied their flourishing commerce and 
 great wealth." 1 
 
 If the study of the Reformation generally is in- 
 tricate, the study of the particular course it took in 
 England is no less puzzling. As a protest against 
 Rome, both in England and on the Continent, 
 nations which adopted the Reformation had come to 
 the quite definite conclusion that the claims of the 
 Pope had grown to be a menace to the welfare of 
 
 1 Quoted by Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 78. 
 
212 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Christendom. Cranmer, at Cambridge, collected the 
 Papal assumptions ; here are some of them : 
 
 If any man denies that the Pope is ordained of God to be 
 Primate of all the world, he is an heretic and cannot be saved. 
 
 Princes' laws have no force against the Pope's decrees, 
 and to oppose such decrees is sin against the Holy Ghost. 
 
 The Pope may depose kings and release subjects from 
 oaths of obedience ; appeal to him is final ; he may use 
 force against anybody. He is above all councils. 
 
 Neither the French nor the English Churches, nor 
 any other integral portion of the Catholic Church of 
 Christ, was free of this tyranny. English benefices 
 were handed over to non-resident Italian priests or to 
 mere laymen. In spite of certain Acts of Parliament 
 and the protests of Archbishops Peckham,Langton,and 
 Grosseteste, the Canon law, by its corrupt additions, 
 made the Pope an imperialist autocrat, who claimed 
 absolute rights over the Ecclesia anglicana and other 
 national Churches. Roman controversialists would 
 have us believe that the cause of the English Reforma- 
 tion is to be found in the lusts of the English king. 
 It would be as difficult as it would be undesirable to 
 whitewash Henry VIII., but his divorce was merely 
 the match that set light to the gunpowder. The 
 Pope had over and over again legitimatised such a 
 union as was proposed ; but Clement was between 
 two fires, and thought he could rather afford to offend 
 the English king than Catherine's nephew. 
 
 That the Reformation primarily aimed at clipping 
 the Papal claws is clear, but the further objects of 
 the English Reformers and the desires of the English 
 people are by no means clear. It was a kind of 
 intellectual turmoil ; ideas and customs were thrown 
 
THE REFORMATION 213 
 
 into the melting-pot, and either the nation swung 
 round from Catholicism to Calvinism, from Calvinism 
 to Romanism, from Romanism to Anglicanism, 
 coming to some harbourage in the reign of Queen 
 Elizabeth, or this vacillation is only true of a few 
 prominent men, the bulk of the nation all the time 
 remaining indifferent. Whatever was the process, the 
 result seems to have been that the people of England 
 further lost hold of organised religion, although it is 
 not until the industrial revolution in the eighteenth 
 century that the Church almost entirely loses its 
 influence upon the people. Protestant historians 
 have attempted to minimise the importance of the 
 pilgrimages of grace ; these risings of the people, 
 however, were a formidable protest against the 
 Protestant changes. They would have been more 
 formidable if the corruptions of the Church, the 
 scandals of indulgences, the money-grubbing of the 
 higher clergy and the Papal court had not sickened 
 and wearied the ordinary man. He was genuinely 
 shocked at the divorce, in spite of the King's popu- 
 larity, but could not regard the curtailment of the 
 later Canon law with anything but satisfaction. 
 
 The Church of England, that is, the christened 
 people of England, were listless and disheartened. 
 Some time before the Reformation the pillaging of 
 their parochial property had been begun by the 
 monasteries : the worst was still to come. It has been 
 stated that pauperism came in, not by the suppression 
 of the monasteries, but by the disendowment of the 
 parishes. If the robbery of the monasteries in the 
 reign of Henry VIII. was disastrous, the robbery of 
 
2i 4 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the Catholic poor in the reign of Edward VI. was an 
 infinitely greater disaster. For about six years the 
 great pillage raged. 
 
 "The property of one kind or another owned by 
 the parish communities throughout England in the 
 first half of the fifteenth century must have amounted 
 to an aggregate which represented millions of money." 
 In the reign of King Henry VIII. the property 
 of monasteries, chantries, and hospitals was annexed. 
 There followed the spoliation of gilds, chapels of ease, 
 colleges, and more hospitals. And now in Edward 
 VI.'s reign "the plunder of the poor by the rich" 1 
 increased in volume. Religion had nothing to do 
 with the business ; " the richer classes went raving 
 mad with the lust of gain." l The Protestant super- 
 stition that would do away with sensuous worship 
 because it cast the body and its sensuous needs 
 outside the realm of religion provided a cloak for 
 plunderers, who passed an Act that the missals, 
 images, pictures, etc., should be destroyed or de- 
 faced. But the scramble had already begun. " In 
 three years it may be said that almost all the parish 
 churches in England had been looted, and before the 
 end of the king's reign there had been a clean sweep 
 of all that was worth stealing from the parish chests, 
 or the church walls, or the church treasuries." In the 
 next generation there were churches by the score 
 that possessed not even a chalice or a surplice. 
 Our parishes were ruined. In the homilies of 1 562, 
 the homilist exclaims : " It is a sin and shame to 
 see so many churches so ruinous and so foully de- 
 
 Cf. Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage. 
 
THE REFORMATION 215 
 
 cayed, . . . defiled with rain and weather, with dung 
 of doves and owls." Thus was accomplished "the 
 disendowment of all the parishes of England." 1 It 
 was not, in Dr Jessopp's opinion, the suppression of 
 the monasteries but the disendowment of the parishes 
 that created pauperism. Compare the churchwardens' 
 accounts of any county parish in the fifteenth century 
 with those of the same parish in the seventeenth or 
 eighteenth, and what a change has come over the 
 scene ! Where there was at one time interest and 
 vitality, there reigns squalor and meanness in the 
 assemblies, now shrivelled to three or four parishioners. 
 Then came the conscientious objectors and the abol- 
 ition of the church rate, followed by the last scene of all, 
 in which the Local Government Act of 1894 describes 
 the once glorious parish commune as "a place for 
 which a separate overseer is or can be appointed." 
 
 It is amusing to listen to some descendant of the 
 Cecils, Russells, Cavendishes, Seymours, Dudleys, 
 FitzWilliams or the like, denouncing as robbers 
 those who would restore the land and treasures of 
 the people to their rightful owners. Whatever may 
 have been the underlying motives of the Reformers, 
 the motives of these gentry were quite evident. 
 Even the anti-Catholic sceptic David Hume is obliged 
 to admit that the suppression of the monasteries was 
 very much regretted by the people, for the monks 
 had not equal motives to avarice with other men; 
 they were most indulgent landlords and residents on 
 the soil ; when their lands were annexed, the rents 
 were at once raised by rapacious stewards and spent 
 
 1 Cf. Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage. 
 
216 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 by the lords elsewhere, farmers were expelled, 
 cottagers robbed of their commons, and whole estates 
 laid waste; there was a great decay of the people 
 and a diminution of the former plenty. 
 
 The building up of modern landed estates and the 
 formation of new nobilities from the spoils of the 
 Church and the poor, mark each of the four great 
 epochs in the life of the Church of England. First 
 there was the dissolution of monasteries in the reign 
 of Henry VIII.; secondly, spoliation of the Catholic 
 poor in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth ; 
 thirdly, the abolition of the national episcopate and 
 the expulsion of those clergy who remained true to 
 Catholic tradition by the Puritan Parliament during 
 the Civil War; fourthly, the imposition upon the 
 people of the so-called Commonwealth by a military 
 oligarchy of Dissenters in 1649. Each of these 
 periods is marked by the " estating " of a greedy 
 nobility, old and new, at the expense of the Church 
 and its christened people. 1 
 
 Amid the rival theories and controversies of 
 Catholic and Protestant historians on the Reforma- 
 tion period, one or two things stand out clearly. The 
 English Reformers did not wish to build a new Church, 
 but to reform an old ; they did not wish to create a 
 schism, they had no intention of breaking with 
 Catholic tradition. The Anglo-Catholic theologians 
 maintain that it was the later mediaeval Church that 
 had broken with its Catholic past. Jewel and the 
 English apologists repudiate the imperialism of the 
 
 1 Cf. Thomas Hancock, Pulpit and Press, "Clergy of the Church 
 of England on Landlordism. " 
 
THE REFORMATION 217 
 
 Roman claim ; the Catholic idea had been the demo- 
 cratic idea of the General Council, the Pope claims 
 to dispense with councils. Gradually there had been 
 growing up in Europe, under the aegis and protec- 
 tion of the Church, independent nationalities. The 
 English nation had no desire to break the union of 
 Christendom ; it was the Papal autocracy and its 
 preposterous claims that would break Europe in 
 pieces. The English bishops have been accused of 
 Protestant insularity and independence. They 
 wished the Catholic Church to be independent of 
 autocracy. For the rest, they were not insular or 
 independent, for they appealed to ancient tradition 
 and to the decision of an international Catholic 
 council. Interdependence, the old Catholic ideal, 
 was theirs. If they were driven in upon themselves, 
 and if the Church of England became isolated and 
 self-sufficient, it was because the only international 
 unity possible in those days was despotic uniformity. 
 We have seen that the Church of Rome and the 
 individualist Protestant Churches were repudiating 
 Catholic ideals. The Church of England boldly 
 appealed to those ideals. The despotism of Rome 
 should no longer crush ancient tradition or the 
 liberties of English people; neither would the Church 
 submit to the despotism of the written word as 
 interpreted by the Protestant sectaries. Its watch- 
 word was not the Bible only, but the Bible as inter- 
 preted by the living traditions of the Church. Its 
 liturgy, largely adapted from ancient sources, its 
 calendar of saints and fathers, its insistence upon 
 sacraments are signs of its Catholicism. 
 
2i8 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 So absolutely is it true that one cannot, if one will, 
 divorce a good or bad theology from its economic 
 expression, that, just as Protestantism and Papalism 
 have been seen to have had individualistic expres- 
 sion, so the reformed Catholicism of the Church of 
 England at once expresses itself in protest against 
 the robberies of the aristocracy and plutocracy. 
 Even Cranmer, most vacillating of reformers, is 
 courageous in his opposition to landlords and 
 merchants of Kent in their attempt to rob the poor of 
 their common schools. Thomas Lever preaches over 
 and over again against the robbery of the people's 
 land as the greatest grief that had been done unto 
 the people of this realm. In a sermon before the 
 king he denounces the "covetous landlords" who, 
 " taking the ground in their own hands, turn all to 
 pasture." 
 
 Another Anglican theologian addressed to Parlia- 
 ment in 1551 "an information and petition against 
 the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm." 
 " Now I will speak," says he, " of the great and in- 
 tolerable usury which at this day reigneth so freely 
 this realm over all and chiefly in the city of London, 
 that it is taken for most lawful gains. Yea, it is well 
 most heresy to reprove it, for men say it is allowed 
 by Parliament. Well, the most part I am sure of the 
 godly assemble and Parliament do know that the 
 occasion of the Act that passed here concerning 
 usury was the unsatiable desire of the usurers, who 
 could not be contented with usury unless it were 
 unreasonable much. To restrain this greedy desire 
 of theirs therefore, it was communed and agreed upon 
 
THE REFORMATION 219 
 
 and by authority of Parliament agreed that none 
 should take above ten pounds by year for the loan 
 of one hundred pounds. Alas that any Christian 
 assemble should be so void of God's Holy Spirit that 
 they should allow for lawful anything that God's Word 
 forbiddeth. Be not abashed (most worthy councillors) 
 to call this Act in question again." l He denounces 
 those who would gloss over the plain commands of 
 Scripture and pretend that the taking of interest was 
 the counsel of the Saviour. An apologist for usury 
 is no less than " a membre of the devil and a very 
 anti-Christ." The Church protest was so strong that 
 for the time it carried the legislature before it, and the 
 statute of Henry VIII. was repealed in 1552 under 
 Edward VI., and the preamble to the repeal admits 
 that " usury is by the Word of God utterly prohibited." 
 In later times the comprehensive policy adopted by 
 the Elizabethan government may be shown to have 
 hindered the formation of a strong and persistent 
 tradition in this matter, but during the reigns of 
 Edward VI., of Elizabeth, James L, and Charles I. 
 ceaseless protest was made by bishops and priests of 
 the English Church against the robbery of the poor 
 by the nobles and gentry. No wonder that these 
 aristocrats espoused the cause of a more tolerant 
 Puritanism. There is a discourse upon usury in 
 dialogue form by Thomas Wilson, Doctor of the Civil 
 Laws, one of the Masters of Her Majesty's honourable 
 Court of Requests, probably written some little time 
 before the Act of 1571. It was printed in 1572, and 
 went through several editions. In this dialogue he 
 
 1 Quoted by Ashley, EC. Hist., vol. i. p. 465. 
 
220 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 refuses to draw any distinction between lending to 
 the well-to-do and to the needy ; he utterly condemns 
 the now prevailing distinction between biting and 
 fair usury. The imaginary opponent is made to 
 appeal to Molinaeus and the Calvinist divines, the 
 best of the age, as Bucer, Brentius, Calvin, and Beza," l 
 that is, to Papist and Protestant as against Anglo- 
 Catholics in this matter ; but the dialogue closes with 
 his conversion. 
 
 Bishop Jewel thunders against usurious practices, 
 saying: 
 
 If I lend ;ioo and for it covenant to receive .105, 
 or any other sum greater than was the sum I did 
 lend, this is that, that we call usury; such a kind of 
 bargaining as no good man or godly man ever used ; such a 
 kind of bargaining as all men that ever feared God's judg- 
 ment, have always abhorred and condemned. ... It is the 
 overthrow of mighty kingdoms, the destruction of flourishing 
 states ; the decay of great cities ; the plagues of the world 
 and the misery of the people. It is theft, it is the murdering 
 of our brethren, it is the curse of God, and the curse of the 
 people. This is usury, and by these signs and tokens ye 
 shall know it. 
 
 Mr Rose also quotes Bishop Sandys as follows : 2 
 
 By what means soever thou receivest more than was 
 lent, thou art a usurer towards thy brother, and God will be 
 a revenger against thee ; ... all reason and the very law 
 of nature are against it ; all nations at all times have been 
 against it as the very bane and pestilence of a common- 
 wealth. 
 
 Bishop Hooper says : " As for usury, it is none other 
 than theft." 
 
 Bishop Pilkington says : 
 
 1 Ashley. 2 Churches and Usury, by H. S. Rose, p. 36. 
 
THE REFORMATION 221 
 
 The usurer speaketh courteously and dealeth cruelly; 
 he defendeth his doing to be charitable when he eateth up 
 lands and goods, turneth infants abegging, and overturneth 
 the whole kindred. 
 
 Mr Rose concludes that there " is not the least 
 reason to suppose that these doctrines were not 
 representative of the views then held ... by the 
 fathers of the Anglican Church." 
 
 Jewel had been under no illusion as to the source 
 of interest. To the argument that a capitalist lends 
 money on usury to a merchant, and that the merchant 
 is able to pay him out of his gains, he replies : l " Who 
 then payeth the 10? . . . The poor people that buy 
 the corn. They feel it in every morsel they eat." The 
 only investment and interest he allows is an invest- 
 ment by those incapable of work, orphans, madmen, 
 diseased merchants ; and even in this case there 
 must be real risk. 
 
 So much for capitalism. We have seen how the 
 revolution in agriculture, which was turning arable 
 land into sheep-walks, and the despoiling of the lands 
 of the Church and the Catholic parishes was bringing 
 a greater misery upon the poor man than had ever 
 been. Bishop Latimer, described by a modern writer 
 as " the darling of the London poor," preaching before 
 the king, arraigns the nobles and court gentry in the 
 following words: "You landlords, you rent raisers 
 I may say you step lords, you unnatural lords, you 
 have for your possessions yearly too much ! " Him- 
 self the son of a small yeoman, he had witnessed the 
 decay of English agriculture and the expulsion of 
 
 1 Jewel's Works, Parker Society, vol. ii. 
 
222 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the poor from their holdings and the rack-renting of 
 farms. " Whereas there have been a great many 
 householders and inhabitants, there is now but a 
 shepherd and his dog." " All such proceedings do 
 intend plainly to make the yeomanry slaves." " He 
 that now hath my father's farm payeth 16 a year 
 (four times the former rent), and is not able to do 
 anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his 
 children, nor to give a cup of drink to the poor." 
 " The commons be utterly undone, whose bitter cry 
 ascendeth up to the ears of the God of sabaoth." 
 
 Latimer, for all his Protestantism against Rome 
 and against candles and images, is a strong anti- 
 Calvinist. God has come to save all mankind. 
 11 Christ shed as much blood for Judas as He did for 
 Peter." The works he objected to, the works without 
 faith that could never save a man, are the adorning 
 of churches, the going on pilgrimages, the decoration 
 of images which some men substitute for the works 
 of mercy. 
 
 The images are to be clad in silk garments and those 
 also laden with precious gems and jewels, as who should 
 say that no cost could be too great ; whereas in the mean- 
 time we see Christ's faithful and lively images, bought with 
 no less price than His most precious blood (alas, alas), 
 a-hungered, a-thirst, a-cold, and to be in darkness, wrapped 
 in all wretchedness, yea, to lie there till death take away 
 their miseries. 1 
 
 Later, we find Francis Trigg, an Elizabethan divine, 
 preaching in 1592 at Grantham : "All towns are 
 undone. Their common things and lands are taken 
 
 1 Quoted by Bishop Gore, Latimer as Christian Socialist (C.S. U.). 
 
THE REFORMATION 223 
 
 from them ; ... so now, where Christ's family have 
 been maintained, grow trees or nettles." 
 
 Hutchinson, an earlier theologian, had told the 
 same tale. Nothing can exceed the bitterness of its 
 repetition in 1609 by William Symons, of St Saviour's, 
 Southwark. Three years later, Thomas Adams, not 
 yet expelled by the Puritan Long Parliament from 
 his cure of St Bennet's, Paul's Wharf, preached in 
 St Paul's Cathedral, in the reign of James I., against 
 the landlords and their thieveries, and speaks of the 
 " poor's blood which they have sucked." These men 
 must restore the stolen lands to the towns, the churches, 
 and the poor. Preaching in his own church in 1616, 
 he likens the depopulator to the wild boar that will 
 forage and lay waste all if he be not restrained. 
 "Yea, he lays waste the commonwealth though he 
 encloseth to himself. He wasteth societies, com- 
 munities, neighbourhood of people ; he turneth them 
 out of their ancient doors and sends them into the 
 wide world to beg their bread." He concludes that 
 this kind of beast should be hunted down. 
 
 But as early as 1586 the Protestant individualist 
 leaven was at work. The Province of Canterbury in 
 that year ordered the younger clergy to obtain a 
 copy of Bullinger's decades, and make an abstract of 
 one sermon every week. Now, this Continental Re- 
 former was a good anti-Catholic, for he held that 
 certain forms of interest were not in themselves 
 unlawful, nor yet condemned in the Holy Scriptures. 
 Only biting usury is there condemned. Calvinism 
 was making headway within the national Church, 
 and became in this country an absolute Puritanism, 
 
224 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 developing its original doctrines in a more inhuman 
 direction than had been the case in Germany. For 
 instance, Calvin himself had been as free from 
 Sabbatarian views as Luther, who boldly pronounced 
 that if anyone wished to curtail a Christian man's 
 liberty in the matter of the Sunday, then he would 
 order them to dance on it, sing on it, ride on it, feast 
 on it, to do anything to maintain the ancient liberty. 
 This Puritanism was eagerly espoused by the land- 
 stealing class, who urged on the Nonconformist 
 against the bishops. The plutocrats often kept Non- 
 conformist chaplains in their houses, compelling their 
 tenants to attend their meetings and abstain from 
 communion with the mixed assembly in their parish 
 churches. These rich men were always preaching the 
 benefits of holy poverty to the clergy. Archbishop 
 Bancroft explains this to the people at Paul's Cross : 
 " They do greatly urge upon the ministry the apostolic 
 poverty to the intent that they may obtain the prey." 
 " I doubt not it is manifest to you that covetousness 
 hath thrust them into this schism." The monks at 
 their worst had been better than their plutocratic 
 successors. So says Prebendary Thomas Lever at 
 Paul's Cross, and tells the people they are stark blind 
 not to see it. Lever tells the king and the court 
 that the miseries of the people are due to the rob- 
 beries of the nobles, who have turned them from their 
 holdings ; " so now old fathers, poor widows, and 
 young lie begging in the mirey streets." 
 
 For the time, the rising tide of Puritanism is 
 stemmed by William Laud, the martyr archbishop, 
 who in season and out of season preached the doctrine 
 
THE REFORMATION 225 
 
 of equality before the law, against the Puritan theory 
 of immunity in the case of courtiers and gentlemen. 
 Heylin seems to have thought his life might have 
 been spared, if he had only been as willing as were 
 the Nonconformists that the rich should fill themselves 
 with good things, while the poor were sent empty 
 away. The Puritan lecturers and private chaplains 
 of the plutocrat twitted the archbishop with the 
 meanness of his birth. The Puritan Baxter sneers 
 at Laud and his suffragans as upstarts who had 
 sprung from the dregs of the people. These up- 
 starts enraged the landlords by administering to the 
 churchwardens of every parish in their dioceses the 
 following oath : " Swear that, all affection, favour, 
 hatred, hope of reward, gain, displeasure of great 
 men, malice, or other sinister respect set aside, you 
 shall deal uprightly, truly, and justly, presenting all 
 the truth and nothing but the truth, without partiality, 
 having God before your eyes." " Hath any neigh- 
 bouring great man encroached upon any part of the 
 churchyard, enclosing it to his garden, etc. ? Present 
 him or them so transgressing." " Is any maintenance 
 given to free and public schools detained or inverted ? 
 By whom is it practised ? " No wonder the Puritans 
 complained : " Many nobles and worthy gentlemen are 
 curbed and tyrannised over by some base clergyman 
 of mean parentage." The archbishop compelled the 
 worthy gentlemen to disgorge part of the plunder. 
 We have heard of the tyrannies of the High Com- 
 mission Court. He had powerful landlords brought 
 into that court for seizing almshouses, common lands, 
 the endowments of free schools, portions of the 
 
 15 
 
226 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 common churchyards, and for "walling up the ancient 
 ways." His enemy Fiennes charged him with being 
 the foe of " property and Puritanism." Laud stood 
 for the people of England. Cromwell stood for the 
 people of God in England. " Nothing angered Laud 
 so much as the claim of a great man to escape a 
 penalty which would fall upon others. Nothing 
 brought him into such disfavour with the great as 
 his refusal to admit that the punishment which had 
 raised no outcry, when it was meted out to the weak 
 and helpless, should be spared in the case of the 
 powerful and wealthy offender." 1 
 
 When the people of Lancashire complained to the 
 king that the Nonconformists were laying upon 
 their shoulders burdens too heavy to be borne, to 
 curtailing their ancient right of enjoyment on Sundays 
 and holy days, it was by Archbishop Laud's orders 
 that the English clergy were compelled to read that 
 most Christian of documents from every pulpit, which 
 proclaimed to the people their liberty of games and 
 dancing on what the old Christian Fathers called the 
 Day of the Sun. The title Nonconformist is here 
 used in its historic sense as meaning one who remains 
 in the Church of England while refusing to conform 
 to the Catholic faith. The action the archbishop 
 took in the matter seems to infuriate our Protestant 
 historians almost as much as his opposition to 
 plutocracy. They leave no stone unturned to blacken 
 his character and to describe as martyrs the favourite 
 preachers of the plutocrats, who were using the pulpits 
 of the Christian Church to disseminate their anti- 
 
 1 Gardiner. 
 
THE REFORMATION 227 
 
 Christian theories of the Sabbath and of private 
 property. These champions of liberty, expelled from 
 their cures for refusal to conform to the Christian 
 doctrine, carry with them their gospel of freedom 
 beyond the seas, and establish free Protestant States 
 in whose constitution the private property rights of 
 rich men are fully acknowledged, and their right in 
 slaves is proclaimed to be a precept of the Gospel. 
 
 When the Puritan Party gets the upper hand in 
 England, it demonstrates its love of liberty by boring 
 the saintly John Naylor's tongue through with a red- 
 hot iron, for daring to be a Quaker; abolishes the 
 festivals of the English people, Christmas, Easter, and 
 the like ; makes Sunday recreation penal, and generally 
 establishes that type of religion which has led a 
 revolted country into something not very far from 
 atheism. Meanwhile the Pilgrim Fathers in their 
 newly formed colonies were passing laws which 
 punished with flogging any man who should kiss his 
 wife on Sunday, and which reserved the death-penalty 
 for those who walked too far or played games on a 
 Sunday afternoon. Thus was liberty of the Protestant 
 kind fully established in this country and beyond the 
 seas. The Puritan lords had, as Clarendon says, never 
 forgotten " the shames which they called an insolent 
 triumph upon their degree and quality and a levelling 
 them with the common people." 
 
 Here is a newspaper report of the martyrdom of 
 Laud, published a few days after the execution : 
 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury was this day beheaded 
 on Tower Hill. The man did stand much upon his 
 integrity, and at his death did justify his innocence, 
 
228 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 expecting I believe some honour to be done unto him in 
 another age in whose almanacks he would shine in rubric 
 and be canonised for some saint or be crowned for a martyr. 
 
 The tendency of that Puritan age was to substitute 
 sermons for the Catechism. There was no document 
 in the Church of England that the innovators hated 
 half so much, for it must be remembered that the 
 Protestant Catechisms start with the assumption that 
 only an elect few can be saved out of the vileness of 
 common life, while the English Catechism starts with 
 the assumption that all christened people are members 
 of the one body in Christ, and every one members one 
 of another. This could not but shock the Puritans, who 
 held that God had created most of them for damna- 
 tion. They could not believe that God had cleansed 
 the common folk ; therefore they fought against " the 
 common creed, the common law, the common prayer, 
 and the common sacraments of Christianity." All 
 these things were to them common and unclean. 
 
 One of the complaints of Laud's adversary Henry 
 Burton against the Common Prayer was, "it cut short 
 sermons." The worship that is social strikes at the indi- 
 vidualism of the man in the pulpit; it is an apostolical 
 reminder to him not to think of himself more highly than 
 he ought to think. The pulpit, the symbol of individual- 
 ism, was the idol which they set up in place of the 
 Eucharist, the symbol of social unity and community, It 
 was held as part of the right relation of Church and State 
 both amongst the Nonconformists and Separatists that the 
 civil magistrate ought to compel "the mixed multitude," 
 as they called the one body in Christ, to "hear" their 
 sermons and lectures. 1 
 
 It has lately been contended by certain Roman 
 
 1 Cf. Thomas Hancock, "Archbishop Laud" (Pulpit and Press). 
 
THE REFORMATION 229 
 
 Catholic writers that the Papal communion is always 
 the champion of the poor against the plutocrat. 
 They bring-, as evidence, the spoiling of the Church 
 of England, which they call the Church of Rome, by 
 Protestant landlords and other wealthy men. They 
 contend that if we had not thrown over the Papal 
 dominion these griefs would never have come upon 
 us. It will be sufficient answer to remind ourselves 
 that in Queen Mary's reign the Pope made advances 
 to England, offering to receive the wealthy thieves 
 back into communion, assuring them of full absolu- 
 tion, and that they would not be expected to restore 
 any of the stolen property. 
 
 Since the days of the Commonwealth, Christ's 
 poor have been ground between the upper and 
 nether millstone of the landed aristocracy and the 
 monied plutocracy. The Restoration under Charles 
 II. calls forth no such sturdy champions as Arch- 
 bishop Laud, and not long after, the Puritanism 
 which had triumphed outside the Church wins a 
 more lasting victory by capturing its pulpits and its 
 wealthy congregations. 
 

IX 
 
 THE 
 NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 Decreasing faith and increasing misery Wealth increasing more rapidly 
 than population A bastard religion Christo-capitalists oppose 
 the Factory Acts The condition of the children in mills, mines, 
 and fields Cheaper than horses The chloroforming of the poor 
 The apostasy of Churchmen The Dorsetshire labourers A base 
 hymnology The work of Elizabeth Fry Revivalism Shaftesbury, 
 Maurice, and Kingsley Maurice and the Catholic revival Maurice 
 on baptism 1848 " Politics for the people." 
 
IX 
 THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 " A number of the hireling prophets, whom we have seen both Amos 
 and Hosea attack, gave their blessing to this social system, which 
 crushed the poor, for they shared its profits. They lived upon the 
 alms of the rich, and flattered according as they fed. . . . The false 
 prophet spoke, consciously or unconsciously, for himself and his living. 
 He sided with the rich ; he shut his eyes to the social condition of the 
 people ; he did not attack the sins of the day. This made him false 
 robbed him of insight and the power of prediction. But the true 
 prophet exposed the sins of his people. Ethical insight and courage, 
 burning indignation of wrong, clear vision of the facts of the day this 
 was what Jehovah's spirit put in him, this was what Micah felt to be 
 inspiration. 
 
 " The prophet speaks : 
 
 Thus saith Jehovah against the prophets who lead my people 
 
 astray, 
 
 Who while they have ought between their teeth proclaim peace, 
 But against him who will not lay to their mouths they sanctify 
 
 war ! 
 
 Wherefore night shall be yours without vision, 
 And yours shall be darkness without divination ; 
 And the sun shall go down on the prophets, 
 And the day shall darken about them." 
 
 GEORGE ADAM SMITH, The Twelve Prophets, chap. xxvi. 
 
 ' ' The condition of the labourers deteriorated from the time of 
 Elizabeth onwards, but in the middle of the eighteenth century it had 
 been materially improved owing to the increase of wealth from the new 
 agriculture and from the general growth of foreign trade. But then 
 came the great Continental wars and the industrial revolution ; and it is 
 
 "33 
 
234 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 a sad but significant fact that although the total wealth of the nation 
 vastly increased at the end of last century and the beginning of this, 
 none of that wealth came into the hands of the labourers, but went 
 entirely into the hands of great landlords and new capitalist manu- 
 facturers." GIBBINS, Industrial History of England, p. 186 (University 
 Extension edition). 
 
 WITH the decline of the Catholic faith the " Golden 
 Age of the labourer " passed away. There has been 
 since then a steady deterioration in the position of 
 the working classes, with the exception of a brief 
 period in the middle of the eighteenth century. The 
 argument that abject poverty was inevitable was met 
 in an earlier chapter by an examination of a hundred 
 years of English life which afforded a complete denial 
 to this statement. People who use this argument are 
 apt to shift their ground and admit that there really 
 was a comparatively golden age for labour, but to 
 account for it by pointing to the smallness of the 
 population in that period. The industrial revolution 
 of the early nineteenth century enormously increased 
 the wealth of the rich, but reduced the poor at the 
 same time to a more abject slavery than they had 
 known for hundreds of years. That this was not 
 accounted for by the increase of population is proved 
 by the fact that, although population has so vastly 
 increased since the fourteenth century, the output of 
 wealth per head has multiplied out of all proportion 
 to the increase of the population. 
 
 In the early nineteenth century you have on the 
 one hand "the idea of religion as a little private 
 transaction of a strictly confidential character between 
 a man and ' his God, ' " * and on the other hand an 
 
 1 Rashdall, Doctrine of Development. 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 235 
 
 economic state of affairs among the working classes 
 which historians dealing with the period do not 
 hesitate to describe as slavery. 
 
 Meanwhile, what had become of God's Catholic 
 Church, i.e. of the christened people of England ? 
 Puritan individualism had scourged them along the 
 road to Calvary, and now they find themselves crucified 
 between two thieves. The name of the one is " Next- 
 worldliness," the name of the other is Capitalism. 
 From its cross democracy cries, " I thirst," but the chief 
 priests and scribes deride Him, saying : 
 
 Nothing is worth a thought beneath 
 But how I may escape the death 
 
 That never, never dies ; 
 How make mine own election sure, 
 And when I fail on earth secure 
 
 A mansion in the skies. 1 
 
 Adherents of this bastard Christianity are never 
 tired of pointing the finger of scorn at socialism, 
 calling it atheism. None of the younger leaders of 
 the socialist movement in this country are atheists. 
 Many of the earlier leaders turned to atheism in 
 protest against the official religion of their day and 
 its monstrous consequences. Official Christianity 
 had brought the christened poor into chronic misery 
 and atheistic despair. Out of the depths the demo- 
 cracy cries : " My God, my God, why hast Thou 
 forsaken me ? " 
 
 These capitalistic Christians, who found the next 
 world so useful an asset in their war against God's 
 poor, chloroforming them into submission by threats 
 
 1 From a popular hymn of this period. 
 
236 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 of hell and hopes of paradise, did not really think 
 that the chief end of life was the mansion in the 
 sky ; unless, indeed, it was by the merest accident 
 that they had secured to themselves so many desir- 
 able mansions on the earth. How had it been done ? 
 The wages of the fathers had been reduced to starva- 
 tion level, so that the mothers were forced into the 
 mills, the children sold into slavery. In 1819 the 
 condition of the people had so far improved that the 
 Christian rich could no longer obtain children of 
 under nine years of age for more than fourteen hours' 
 daily labour in their factories. An Act of Parlia- 
 ment to this effect was violently opposed by the 
 majority of Christian employers, and the ruin of the 
 country was as usual threatened. Such an Act was 
 tyranny ; it threatened freedom of contract ; it was 
 robbing the rich and interfering with the right of 
 the poor parent to do what he liked with his own, 
 So the Christo-capitalist weeklies argued then ; so 
 they argue now. The editor of the Spectator is even 
 now put up at Church congresses to defend those 
 iniquitous times. He is proud to call himself the 
 champion of the Manchester school, a school of 
 thinkers who opposed the Factory Acts as being 
 socialism and snivelling sentimentality. 
 
 Before the passing of those Acts, the workhouses 
 and semi-starving parents supplied child-stuff for 
 the working of the system. The pauper children 
 were from time to time inspected and packed into 
 waggons and canal boats and sent to the mills. 
 Child-traffickers often took the children off the 
 guardians' hands and kept them in a factory dis- 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 237 
 
 trict in dark cellars until the mill-owners could send 
 their inspectors to examine them as to height and 
 strength and general bodily fitness. They then be- 
 came the property of the employer, who did not 
 trouble to feed them or clothe them too well, for 
 children were so cheap and the supply almost 
 unlimited. 
 
 The following quotations are from the University 
 Extension edition of Gibbins's Industrial History of 
 England-. 
 
 The hours of their labour were only limited by exhaus- 
 tion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly 
 applied to force continued work. Children were often 
 worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night. Even 
 Sunday was used as a convenient time to clean the 
 machinery. 
 
 Their life was literally and without exaggeration simply 
 that of slaves. 
 
 In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling 
 of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept 
 in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows 
 from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless over-looker, 
 and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punish- 
 ment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable 
 selfishness. * 
 
 They were sometimes literally fed with food that 
 the swine did eat. They slept by turns and in re- 
 lays in beds which were never cool, one set of 
 children being sent to bed as soon as the other had 
 gone ofT. The sexes were not always discriminated, 
 and disease and vice flourished. When the children 
 tried to run away, men on horseback were sent after 
 them and scourged them back into captivity. Irons 
 1 Page 179, etc. 
 
238 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 were then riveted to their ankles to prevent escape. 
 They died off like flies in summer, and were buried 
 secretly at dead of night lest the number of the 
 graves should startle the people. What is true of 
 the factories is also true of the fields. Slave-gangs 
 of children were hired out to the farmers, and 
 brutally ill-treated and overworked. Child-slavery 
 in the mines was even worse, Girls and women, 
 as well as boys, were used as beasts of burden under- 
 ground, dragging loads of coal in places where no 
 horses could go, harnessed and crawling along the 
 dark passages. 
 
 The condition of the children reflects the condition 
 of the general mass of English labour in the early 
 nineteenth century. Working people were stabled 
 worse than horses, for they were cheaper than horses. 
 They were treated worse than dogs, for they were 
 cheaper than dogs. 
 
 The profits of farmers, landlords, mine-owners, and 
 mill-owners increased at an almost incredible rate. 
 Every attempt and they were few enough on the 
 part of the poor to shake off their chains was 
 denounced by middle-class official Christianity as 
 atheism and treason. For the most part the people 
 had been so nearly bled to death by underfeeding 
 and overworking, and so thoroughly stupefied by the 
 religion of next-worldliness, that they hearkened not 
 unto Marx, Owen, and Kingsley for anguish of spirit 
 and for cruel bondage. To the christened poor of 
 England poverty and exploitation seemed " as inevit- 
 able as the coming of death." It is only when social 
 reform has won for the people a little bread and a 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 239 
 
 little breathing-space that they revive sufficiently to 
 begin to feel their wrongs. Starved and sweated 
 Haggerston votes Tory. Colne Valley votes for 
 Revolution. 
 
 Mr George Russell has collected some of the 
 results of the Protestant individualist religion, and 
 they form an interesting commentary on the condi- 
 tion of the English Church in the early nineteenth 
 century. In 1794 Sydney Smith became curate in 
 charge of a village on Salisbury Plain ; he found 
 the church empty and the villagers "aliment for 
 Newgate, food for the halter a ragged, wretched, 
 savage, stubborn race." Five years later he wrote : 
 " In England (except many ladies in the middle 
 rank of life) there is no religion at all. The clergy 
 of England have no more influence on the people at 
 large than the cheesemongers of England." William 
 Wilberforce, visiting Brigg in 1796, found no service 
 on Sunday morning, and all the people lounging 
 about the streets. He found Stamford in 1798 "a 
 sad, careless place ; . . . a shopkeeper said that none 
 of the clergy were active, or went among the poor." 
 Archdeacon Daubeny, vicar of North Bradley, just 
 before the close of the eighteenth century, found the 
 people so barbarous that they would pull down the 
 walls of the Church and vicarage, then rebuilding, 
 and cut and destroy the trees. In 1800 Bishop 
 Horsley said : " For the last thirty years we have 
 seen but little correspondence between the lives of 
 men and their profession ; a general indifference 
 about the doctrine of Christianity, a general neglect 
 of its duties." About the same time the Bishop of 
 
2 4 o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 London wrote that the state of the kingdom, 
 political, moral, and religious, was so unfavourable 
 as to excite the most serious alarm. In 1805 the 
 rector of Alderley, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, 
 found that the clerk used to go to the churchyard 
 stile to see whether there were any more coming to 
 church, for there were seldom enough to make a 
 congregation. The former rector used to boast that 
 he had never set foot in a sick person's cottage. 
 Mr George Russell shows that the official Church 
 had forgotten her mission to the poor and had be- 
 come the ally of the governing classes. So bitterly 
 were the clergy opposed to anything that could be 
 called socialism that the country parson was spoken 
 of as the black recruiting sergeant of the rich. 
 Mr Russell tells us that at that time the parson was 
 described as "a furious political demon, rapacious, 
 insolent, luxurious, having no fear of God before his 
 eyes " ; the popular cry in the villages was, " More pigs 
 and less parsons." 
 
 The bishops in the House of Lords incurred an 
 amount of hatred which only a perusal of their 
 votes can explain. 
 
 They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the 
 bloody penal code; they were the resolute opponents of 
 every political or social reform ; and they had their reward 
 from the nation outside Parliament. The Bishop of Bristol 
 had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London 
 could not keep an engagement to preach lest the congrega- 
 tion should stone him. The Bishop of Lichfield barely 
 escaped with his life after preaching at St Bride's, Fleet 
 Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for his 
 primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought 
 by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 241 
 
 of the mob. On 5th November the Bishops of Exeter and 
 Winchester were burnt in effigy close to their own palace 
 gates. Archbishop Howley's chaplain complained that a 
 dead cat had been thrown at him, when the Archbishop 
 a man of apostolic meekness replied : " You should be 
 thankful that it was not a live one." 
 
 In 1829 Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards the famous 
 bishop, wrote to a friend : " I think that the Church will fall 
 within fifty years entirely, and the State will not survive it 
 much longer." 
 
 The Rev. W. Nassau Molesworth says in his History of 
 England from the Year 1830 that he could himself recall 
 "the fierce shout of applause which rent the air at a large 
 public meeting in Canterbury when one of the speakers 
 suggested that the noble cathedral of the city should be 
 converted into a stable for the horses of the cavalry." x 
 
 Here is an instance of the procedure of Church and 
 State about this period. In 1832 six agricultural 
 labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their 
 class, George Loveless, in receipt of 95. a week each, 
 demanded the ios. rate of wages usual in the neigh- 
 bourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An 
 appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, 
 who decided that they must work for whatever their 
 masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at 
 first promised his help, now turned against them, and 
 the masters promptly reduced the wage to 75., with a 
 threat of further reduction. Loveless then formed 
 an agricultural union, for which all seven of them 
 were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to 
 the assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them 
 into submission. The judge determined to convict 
 them, and directed that they should be tried for mutiny 
 under an Act of George III. specially passed to deal 
 
 1 Right Hon. George Russell, The Optimist, p. 234, 1908. 
 
 16 
 
242 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 with the naval mutiny at the Nore. The grand jury 
 were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers ; 
 both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing 
 type. The judge summed up as follows : " Not for 
 anything that you have done, or as I can prove that 
 you intend to do, but for an example to others I 
 consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven 
 years' penal transportation across His Majesty's high 
 seas upon each and every one of you." 
 
 The sermons of that time were very models of 
 Christo-capitalism, and if one takes the trouble to 
 trace the more particularly individualistic and next- 
 worldly sentiments in our hymn-books back to their 
 source, their origin will almost always be found in 
 the period we are now considering. The religion of 
 a thousand per cent, is admirably expressed in the 
 following verse : 
 
 Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee, 
 Repaid a thousand-fold will be ; 
 Then gladly will we give to Thee, 
 Who givest all. 
 
 The spirit of the nineteenth century breathes in 
 the Protestant addition to an early Greek hymn, 
 " O Paradise ! O Paradise ! " : 
 
 O Paradise ! O Paradise ! I greatly long to see 
 The special place my dearest Lord 
 In love prepares for me. 
 
 One can hardly imagine that even God Himself 
 could forgive young people in robust health singing, 
 " 'Tis weary waiting here," unless it were on the plea 
 of their evident insincerity. We believe that Christ 
 was the revelation of the character of God, and He 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 243 
 
 did not go about the world encouraging young 
 people to seek an early grave, nor suggesting that 
 disease and premature death were His heavenly 
 Father's will. He had come that they might have 
 life, and He restored to the enfeebled material and 
 mental as well as spiritual vitality. Protestant 
 individualism flung back the gift of life into the face 
 of the Life-giver. 
 
 To about the same period belongs, " The rich man 
 in his castle, the poor man at his gate." It must not 
 for a moment be thought that this line is a relic of 
 feudalism, for the feudal system, whatever its faults, 
 never exalted the rich man or his estate of riches as 
 God ordered. It had its Orders of society, but it 
 was left to Christo-capitalism to preach the Divine 
 Right of vulgar plutocrats. 
 
 It may be considered fanciful to suggest that the 
 slightest tendency towards a Catholic democratic 
 revival would find its expression in the deletion of 
 these capitalist and next-worldly sentiments from 
 our hymn-book, and in a pro-socialist tendency among 
 the clergy and people. But what are the facts? 
 The English Church Hymnal contains none of these 
 versions, includes retranslations of old Catholic 
 hymns, reinserting the social sentiments, which were 
 carefully omitted in nineteenth-century hymn-books, 
 and includes a considerable number of hymns sung at 
 socialist gatherings. This particular hymn-book is 
 daily gaining in popularity, and bids fair to oust all 
 others in the future. The new Nonconformist 
 " Fellowship " hymn-book is even more outspoken. 
 
 Among Nonconformist bodies, the least individual- 
 
244 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 istic have been "the Friends." Their belief in the 
 Living Spirit has to a large extent counteracted 
 their undervaluation of the outward and material 
 form, and the Society has given us Elizabeth Fry, 
 a great pioneer of prison reform, and other social 
 reformers. 
 
 There has been little short of a revolution in 
 the thought and spirit of the Church of England 
 within the last fifty years. Eighteenth-century indi- 
 vidualist Deism left the nation cold and indifferent. 
 Evangelical revivalism for the most part attracted 
 people of the upper and middle classes. Even 
 Wesleyanism, tinged at first with Catholic democratic 
 sentiment, and therefore with some slight enthusiasm 
 for social reform, soon became frankly individualistic, 
 next-worldly, and middle-class. Perhaps revivalism 
 of any sort, however perverted its theory of religion, 
 was preferable to the deadness of the eighteenth 
 century, for it meant an awakening of the heart, and 
 men once awakened sometimes prove better than their 
 creed. It would be hard to imagine a narrower faith 
 than that of Shaftesbury ; it would be hard to find a 
 more generous-hearted man than this great Evangelical 
 leader. The logic of his creed should have driven 
 him to the anti-socialism of Calvin and Charles 
 Wesley, but his heart escaped from the nets of his 
 intellectual creed into the glorious liberty of the 
 Gospel of Christ, and he became the champion of 
 the children of the poor. He had against him the 
 dead-weight of a huge Christo-atheist majority, but 
 his indomitable perseverance spelt ultimate victory. 
 But it is to Kingsley and Maurice, rather than to 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 245 
 
 Shaftesbury, that we must look for the rebirth of 
 that Catholic democratic theology which inevitably 
 translates itself, and in their own time began to 
 translate itself, into practical socialism. It is a 
 significant comment on contemporary teaching that 
 Maurice writes of himself, referring to his childhood, 
 as " a being destined to a few short years of misery 
 here as an earnest of, and preparation for, that more 
 
 (enduring state of wretchedness and woe." Clumsy 
 critics will always describe Maurice and Kingsley as 
 broad Churchmen, but in fact they protested against 
 broad Churchism as being almost as anti-Christian 
 as Puseyism or popular Protestantism. Their lives 
 were devoted to the revival of the Catholic democratic 
 Faith. Maurice was a profoundly original Catholic 
 theologian, not bound by the letter of tradition, but 
 developing its spirit. I might instance his teaching 
 on the Eucharist, on the sacrament of marriage, on 
 confession, on prayers for the dead, on many other 
 points of faith and morals; but perhaps his exposition 
 of baptism is most characteristic. 
 
 Maurice rejected the Protestant theory of an in- 
 visible Church, and the Romish theory of a vicarious 
 Church, in favour of the Catholic theory of the Church 
 as a visible society ordained by Christ to bring about 
 the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is the 
 world of men and women as planned in heaven, in the 
 ideal world of God's mind, will, intention. It is in 
 the truest sense the actual world, because it is the 
 world as divinely and eternally constituted in the will 
 of God. Over against it are the temporary " kingdoms 
 of this age" i.e. of the competitive age in which men 
 
246 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 are at sixes and sevens which the Church has to 
 translate into the kingdom of unity or at-one-ment, 
 into the Kingdoms of God and of His Christ, into the 
 Kingdom in which each, by serving all, best serves his 
 eternal self and grows into full, eternal, or overmaster- 
 ing life. The underlying fact is the kingdom or 
 solidarity of men, the fact of God's Holy Family. 
 That fact is so blurred by egoism, impurity, and other 
 deadly sins and deadly ignorances, that men arrange 
 their lives, domestically, politically, commercially, as 
 if the fact did not exist. The Church is a body of 
 men converted to the fact and sworn to convert 
 others to the fact, and to frame the social life upon 
 the fact. 
 
 Broad Churchmen said that baptism declared the 
 fact. Maurice added that it not only declared the 
 fact, but helped you to effect it, by effecting something 
 for you i.e. by translating you out of the false, 
 unnatural soil of barren individualism (your birth soil) 
 into the richer, more natural grace soil of a common 
 fellowship, a "common salvation," by incorporating 
 you into a visible fellowship established to bring into 
 practice and actuality the latent unrecognised fact of 
 men being God's family. Such a transplantation 
 constitutes a new chance, a new start, a new birth, 
 and hence is most accurately called Regeneration. 
 
 By this regeneration into a socialist fellowship the 
 individual may lose his egoistic soul or life " for My 
 sake and the Gospel's," and save it unto life eternal 
 i.e. unto full, generous, robust, overmastering life. Of 
 course the partial apostasy from fellowship of the 
 local congregation, into which the child is immediately 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 247 
 
 received, impoverishes the new soil ; but so long 
 as the Church has the fellowship tradition, social 
 liturgy, and living socialistic sacraments, the part 
 apostasy of the local congregation, though appalling, 
 is not fatal, nor can it totally destroy the effect 
 of baptism. 
 
 Neither Maurice nor Kingsley were economic 
 socialists in our modern sense. Maurice, indeed, 
 was as pro-monarchy a man as Ruskin, but modern 
 socialism owes a considerable debt to both these 
 prophets of the nineteenth century. He speaks of 
 the dense commercial strength which one encounters 
 even in religion as a more overpowering nightmare 
 upon the soul than any bad influence ever felt. In 
 1840 Lord John Russell told the House of Commons 
 that the people of England were in a worse condition 
 than the negroes in the West Indies. By some curious 
 twist of the mind, common enough in the history 
 of religion, many of the Christian capitalists were 
 so filled with indignation against black slavery 
 abroad that they had no time to consider the white 
 slavery at their doors which was securing them their 
 enormous fortunes. The state of society in England, 
 wrote Dr Arnold to Carlyle, was never yet paralleled 
 in history. Cobden, champion of individualism and 
 opponent of Shaftesbury, yet inflamed the first 
 agitation of the anti-corn law league with story after 
 story of the tragedy of rural labourers; women 
 pawning their wedding rings to buy food, people 
 living on boiled nettles or decayed carcases of dead 
 cattle. 
 
 The great emigration was flinging numbers beyond 
 
248 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 the sea, inflamed with revolt and despair and bitter- 
 ness against their own land. 
 
 In want, in terror, and with a sense of the crushing 
 injustice of the times, they cursed the land in which they 
 had been born. . . . The Reform Bill had disappointed 
 them, all their trade conflicts had ended in failure. Even 
 the resounding attacks against the Corn Laws, then begin- 
 ning to fill the country, excited little interest among the 
 working classes, and so they gave little response. The 
 betrayal and failure had made them sad and hopeless. 
 
 In 1848 the storm burst. The long period of European 
 sleep and silence suddenly flared into resonant action. 
 Lamennais, back " amongst realities once again " after the 
 experience of his fortress-prison, was called to represent the 
 people in a republican assembly. " A great act of justice is 
 being done," was his cry; "cannot you feel the breath of 
 God?" Mazzini, after years of obscure poverty in the 
 back streets, "the hell of exile" in London, was soon to 
 find himself raising the red banner of God and Humanity 
 upon the wall of Rome. Every throne in Europe tottered, 
 and most were thrown to the ground. The barricades 
 were up in Berlin, in Milan, in Paris. The air was filled 
 with the clamour and havoc of change. The revelation of 
 the coming of terrors seemed at last realised in the ways of 
 men; with the sun becoming black as sackcloth of hair, 
 and the moon blood-red, and the stars of heaven falling to 
 the earth, as a fig-tree when she is shaken by a mighty 
 wind. 1 
 
 Maurice's method is well illustrated in his applica- 
 tion of the Bible, and especially of the Revelation, 
 to the interpretation of the moment. In Prussia, in 
 Hungary, in Lombardy, in Poland, the people were 
 up and were fighting in the streets. The Republic 
 was proclaimed in Paris. In all this Maurice and 
 
 1 Leaders of the Church, 1800-1900, p. 60, " F. D. Maurice," by 
 C. F. G. Masterman. 
 
THE NIGHT OF CHRISTENDOM 249 
 
 Kingsley recognised the end of an epoch and the 
 coming of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 If any preacher had tried to impress you with the 
 belief that some signs and wonders were near at hand, if 
 he had tasked his imagination or his skiir in interpreting 
 the hard sayings in Scripture to tell you minutely what 
 those signs and wonders would be, are you not sure that 
 his anticipation would be poor and cold when compared 
 with the things which you have heard of and almost 
 seen? . . . Do you really think that the invasion of 
 Palestine by Sennacherib was a greater event than the 
 overthrowing of nearly all the greatest powers, civil and 
 ecclesiastical, in Christendom ? l 
 
 On 6th May 1848 was published the first number 
 of Politics for the People, under the editorship of 
 Kingsley. Physical force methods were repudiated ; 
 a passionate appeal was made to the Church. The 
 editor writes : " We have used the Bible as if it were 
 a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose 
 for keeping beasts of burden patient while they 
 are being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor 
 in order." Maurice was often alarmed at the 
 vehemence of the party he had created, but he stood 
 by his friends. Kingsley was like a flame. He 
 writes : " I will speak in season and out of season. 
 My path is clear and I will follow it. God has made 
 the Word of the Lord like fire within my bones, 
 giving me no peace till I have spoken out." 
 
 It is quite possible that Maurice and Kingsley and 
 their like would have drawn back from the develop- 
 ment of economic socialism as espoused by Church- 
 men to-day ; but just as the abolition of slavery is an 
 
 1 Quoted by Masterman, ibid. 
 
2 5 o SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 inevitable deduction from Pauline philosophy, and 
 the Lollard revolution from the teachings of the 
 theologian who repudiated it, so Church socialists of 
 the present owe much of their socialist make-up to 
 these Catholic Fathers of the nineteenth century. 
 In them the voice of the Catholic Church, so long 
 silenced, had once more been uplifted. 
 
X 
 BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 The low-water mark in theology and life The coming of dawn The 
 passing of Christo-capitalism Whateley and other bishops of 
 mammon The Tractarians and Newman Manufactured indi- 
 vidualistic revivals Ritualism and social reformation Father 
 Dolling The Guild of St Matthew The teaching of Stewart 
 Headlam The Christian Social Union The 1908 Pan-Anglican 
 Congress Lambeth Conferences of 1867, 1878, 1888, 1908 
 Episcopal socialism and the 1907 report Temporary reaction 
 Socialistic Nonconformity A Christo-capitalist newspaper The 
 Roman apostasy Uncatholic Puseyism The autocracy of Rome 
 Newman and Manning on the right of the starving to help them- 
 selvesAn Italian manifesto A Roman socialist and the Catholic 
 Socialist Society Modern heretics and their newspapers The 
 condition of England, a slight improvement on 1840 The Church 
 in chains International federation versus imperialism and com- 
 petitionThe common bond of socialism The opportunity of the 
 Church of England The Church Socialist League. 
 
X 
 BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 "I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem; they shall 
 never hold their peace day nor night ; ye that are the Lord's 
 remembrancers, take ye no rest, and give him no rest, till he establish, 
 and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. The Lord hath sworn 
 by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength, Surely I will no 
 more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies ; and strangers shall 
 not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured : but they that 
 have garnered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord ; and they that have 
 gathered it shall drink it in the courts of my sanctuary." ISAIAH Ixiii. 
 
 IT is generally admitted that the years 1800-1830 
 show the low-water mark of the Catholic democracy 
 both in theology and daily life. Perhaps neither 
 commerce nor religion can ever be so cruel or evil 
 again. The popular religion of our day is weak and 
 nebulous, the condition of the people miserable ; 
 but the worst is past, and we are witnessing the 
 faint streaks of dawn. Bishops no longer openly 
 justify the more monstrous forms of usury and slavery. 
 Christo-capitalism is dying. Its defenders are 
 almost silent. The Editor of the Spectator and 
 the Rev. Lord William Cecil receive an importance 
 altogether out of proportion to their intellectual 
 strength, because they appear to be the sole survivors 
 of ultra-individualism at Church Congresses and 
 
254 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 other official gatherings. This curious creed lingered 
 on into the early eighties. By 1838 the plutocrats 
 had so gained in social and political power as to have 
 become formidable rivals of the landed aristocracy. 
 The bishops appointed by plutocratic governments, 
 and as yet untouched by the Oxford Revival or the 
 Catholicity of Maurice, reflected the Christo-capitalism 
 of their patrons. We find Archbishop Whately 
 teaching : " The Israelites were forbidden in the law of 
 Moses to lend to their brethren on usury, that is, 
 interest. But they were allowed by God's law to 
 receive interest on the loan of money lent to a 
 stranger, and this shows that there can be nothing 
 wrong in receiving interest"^ The Bishop of Man- 
 chester in 1880 wrote : " The great Founder of Christi- 
 anity recognises and implicitly sanctions the practice 
 of lending money at interest. ' Thou oughtest to have 
 put my money to the exchangers, and then at my 
 coming I should have received mine own with usury.' }>1 
 About the same time the Bishop of Rochester writes : 
 " Money, like every other talent, is to be made the 
 most of; and it is our duty to see that we do make 
 the most of it ; ... but making the most of it does 
 not necessarily mean the highest possible return for 
 it ; simply the highest interest compatible with good 
 security." 1 
 
 To what extent, it may be asked, did the Oxford 
 Revival of 1833 contribute to that revolution in 
 thought and practice which is bearing the English 
 Church along in the direction of Catholic democracy ? 
 Its leaders were altogether opposed to what may 
 
 1 Cf. The Churches and Usury, pp. 41, 42. 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 255 
 
 be called the Manchester School in theology and 
 economics. One of them at least recognised that 
 there were political implications in the Christian 
 faith. If the fundamental philosophy of socialism 
 involves the worth of the body and the sensuous life 
 and the doctrine of fellowship, the Tractarians, insist- 
 ing on the outward and visible Church and the 
 ministry of men, the Incarnation of God and the 
 Communion of the Saints, sensuous worship and the 
 need of man's forgiveness, were helping to lay the 
 foundation of Catholicism in religion and socialism in 
 practice. 
 
 But the virus of individualism had not been 
 expelled, and even Newman, the genius of the 
 movement, remains in many respects a Protestant 
 to the end of his life. Mawkish introspection and 
 disproportioned next-worldliness still mark their 
 hymns and their books of devotion. Their mission 
 preachers, though touched with the Catholic spirit, 
 are not always clearly distinguishable from Christo- 
 capitalists of the Torrey-Alexander type. The 
 religion of these latter persons is now so unable 
 to revive Christian thought, that their boasted 
 revivals are rather to be seen on the hoardings 
 than in the hearts of men. The "ritualist" 
 movement of to-day tends towards social-demo- 
 cratic ideals, partly because it is the practical 
 development of Tractarianism, but largely owing 
 to the fact that it is infused with the spirit 
 of Maurice-Kingsley Catholicism. Father Dolling 
 is a good instance of this ; he was not a socialist, 
 but his sympathies were extremely democratic 
 
256 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 and socialistic. He had probably never read a 
 word of Maurice, but in the preparation of his 
 sermons and of his theological defences against the 
 attacks of the bishops he generally turned to a 
 brother priest who was working with him and was 
 one of his greatest friends. This priest was a 
 thorough-going Maurician. 
 
 The Guild of St Matthew, under the fearless leader- 
 ship of Stewart D. Headlam, carried on the work of 
 the Catholic Democrats of 1848. This Guild claims 
 to be the first socialist society in England, pre-dating 
 even the Social Democratic Party. Its socialism is 
 certainly more uncompromising than that of Maurice, 
 but in one fundamental it differs from Maurice, and 
 in another from the economic Church socialists of 
 to-day. Maurice taught that the Church was the 
 mouthpiece of the Kingdom of God, and that the 
 Mass was the witness to the fellowship of that 
 Kingdom. Stewart Headlam teaches that the Church 
 is the Kingdom of God, and sometimes even appears 
 to teach that the Mass is the fellowship of men. In a 
 recent speech, he told the Guild that, if they could 
 not get people to be socialists, they could at least get 
 them to go to Mass, and he suggested that the more 
 or less universal substitution of Mass for Matins would 
 almost mechanically work out into an economic 
 revolution. Italy and Spain do not quite bear out 
 this contention. The Church socialists teach that 
 land and industrial capital must be in the hands of 
 the whole people ; the Guild would tax land in the 
 hope that the capitalists' power would be gone when 
 the value of the land was deflected from private 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 257 
 
 pockets to the pockets of the community. Mr 
 Headlam himself does not seem clear upon this point, 
 for he has for many years been on the executive of 
 the Fabian Society, who have pronounced clearly for 
 the public ownership of both land and capital. The 
 younger members of the Guild are invariably on the 
 side of Mr Headlam of the Fabian Society, and 
 against Mr Headlam of the single tax. But what- 
 ever be the economic position of this little Guild, its 
 theological and political influence on the thought of 
 Churchmen has been incalculable. 1 
 
 The Christian Social Union, which includes many 
 bishops, and has a membership of over six thousand men 
 and women, is to some extent the child of the Guild of 
 St Matthew, but the Guild is not proud of its offspring. 
 It glories in its indefiniteness, and seems to consider 
 it a crime to arrive at any particular economic con- 
 clusion. It flings a wide net, gathering both good and 
 bad. An unkind critic has described it as for ever learn- 
 ing, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. But 
 whatever be its defects, it has convinced a large mass of 
 English church-goers of the importance of social ques- 
 tions. It has persuaded them that the Christian religion 
 essentially involves social righteousness in some form 
 or other. The danger of Social-Unionism is that its 
 leaders, arriving at no clear dogma in theology or poli- 
 tics, and being for the most part political undenomina- 
 tionalists, have no fixed standard by which to judge the 
 value or otherwise of any suggested social reform. 
 
 1 Readers should make themselves familiar with Mr Headlam's works, 
 and especially with his Laws of Eternal Life, an invaluable commentary 
 on the Church Catechism (Verinder, 376 Strand, W.C. ; 3^.) 
 
258 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 The Pan- Anglican Congress of 1908 was a triumph 
 for Christian Social-Unionism. The idea of social 
 responsibility, and of a close union between politics 
 and religion, dominated the huge meetings at the 
 Albert Hall. The socialist tendency in the Church 
 of England cannot be doubted, for if even the bishops, 
 appointed by anti-socialist governments and recruited 
 from the ranks, not of the ablest, but the safest men, 
 are becoming influenced by socialist thought, the 
 socialist current among the rank and file must indeed 
 be vigorous. 
 
 Nor can it be said that the bishops are becoming 
 collectivist because it pays, for any tendency in this 
 direction is at once met by alarming diminution in 
 capitalistic subscriptions to home and foreign missions 
 and other diocesan funds. It is more difficult now 
 to be a socialist than it was ten years ago. People 
 are beginning to fear and hate us, for they have nowa- 
 days to take us seriously. 
 
 The socialist wave in episcopal quarters must be 
 attributed to another cause. 
 
 There is a great increase in the ranks of those 
 clergy who have felt the converging influence of the 
 Oxford Movement and the Maurice-Scott-Holland- 
 Headlam Movement. Their ranks have swollen so 
 enormously that it is impossible even for our enemies 
 to choose all their bishops from schools of thought 
 entirely uninfluenced by them. Therefore it comes to 
 pass that many of our prelates believe in the redemp- 
 tion of the body, in the sacredness of man's material 
 sensuous life, in a Divine kingdom of justice to be 
 set up here and now, and in original goodness. 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 259 
 
 Where there is this philosophy there will be the 
 possibility of socialism. 
 
 But where is this socialist tendency to be found 
 among the bishops ? Let us look at the facts. 
 
 At the first Lambeth Conference, in 1867, social 
 and economic questions were not so much as 
 mentioned. The same may be said of the Lambeth 
 Conferences of 1878 and 1888. Eleven years ago 
 bishops from all parts of the English-speaking world 
 again assembled at Lambeth, and the Lambeth 
 Encyclical of that year reports that many think the 
 present industrial system unjust, urges the application 
 of the principle of brotherhood ; for, as result of such 
 application, " many of the mischiefs of this system 
 would ultimately be prevented." 
 
 The rich must be warned that it is more difficult 
 for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than the 
 poor. The poor have their own temptations and 
 troubles. It is especially the duty of the Church to 
 lessen these troubles ; but they themselves must exert 
 themselves to acquire character and act on high 
 principle. Some are particularly in need of help, 
 e.g. the unemployed. Sympathy and study are 
 asked of Church people. The letter concludes lamely 
 enough : " Help in individual cases of need is the task 
 the Master gives us." The appended resolution 
 commends the report of the Lambeth Committee. 
 The bishops of the committee are glad to see increased 
 interest of Church people in economic questions. 
 They recognise that the Church represents Christ 
 here and now, and must set up the Kingdom of God 
 here in our midst, and must redeem the bodies as well 
 
260 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 as the souls of men. Nevertheless, it is the duty 
 rather of laity than of clergy to concern themselves 
 with this side of the work, discretion is needed, and 
 the primary duty of the Church is, after all, to the 
 soul. The Church must not pronounce on the relative 
 merits of socialism and individualism, except in so 
 far as it is bound to drive in the following fourfold 
 wedge : 
 
 (a) Brotherhood : as counterpoise to relentless 
 competition. 
 
 (U) Labour. Every man of every class is bound to 
 serve mankind. Idleness is not permissible. 
 
 (c) Justice. While on the one hand " inequalities 
 are inwoven with the whole providential order of 
 human life," and would seem to be recognised by 
 Christ, yet on the other, the social order " must not 
 ignore the interest of any of its parts, and must be 
 tested by the degree in which it secures for each, 
 freedom for a happy, useful, and untrammelled life, 
 and distributes as widely as possible social advantages 
 and opportunities." 
 
 (d] Public responsibility. " Certain conditions of 
 labour are intolerable." We repudiate and condemn 
 " open breaches of social justice," as also " the belief 
 that economic conditions are to be left to the action 
 of material causes uncontrolled by moral responsi- 
 bility," for "A Christian community is responsible for 
 the character of its own economic and social order > and 
 for deciding to what extent matters affecting that order 
 are to be left to individual initiative, and to the un- 
 regulated play of economic forces" 
 
 So far and no further had the official Church moved 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 261 
 
 by 1897. But I know of no official statement of the 
 bishops since that date which does not fully recognise 
 that the mission of the Church is to set up a Kingdom 
 of God on earth. This mission is insisted upon in the 
 present Archbishop's sermon at the opening of the 
 1908 Pan-Anglican Congress at St Paul's Cathedral. 
 The Church " must strive more valiantly to mend 
 what is ignorant and amiss in the world around us, 
 and to hasten on earth the coming of our Lord's 
 Kingdom." 
 
 Of course, utterances of individual bishops go much 
 further. The Bishop of Birmingham tells us that the 
 socialistic ideals of the Master and of the early Church 
 included the living wage, the right to work, support 
 for the weak, the aged, and the children ; we must 
 return to those ideals " if possible without violence, 
 but in any case return." The Bishop of Utah frankly 
 urges Marxian socialism and return by the method 
 of revolution. The Archbishop of Melbourne criticises 
 the practicability of certain socialist proposals, but 
 asserts that socialism in his country is founded on 
 Christian principles. The Bishop of London, in 
 words almost identical with those of the new Arch- 
 bishop of York, speaks of the ideals underlying the 
 Labour Movement, "Justice, Fellowship, and Equality 
 of Opportunity." They are his own ideals. The 
 Bishop of Carlisle urges drastic land reforms and the 
 equality of opportunity. The Bishop of Hereford's 
 collectivist radicalism is well known. The Bishop 
 of Truro demands sympathetic study of economic 
 socialism, and the Bishop of Wakefield has taken 
 the chair for Mr Keir Hardie. 
 
262 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 It is also significant that the son of Archbishop 
 Temple, and sons of the Bishops of Manchester and 
 Southwark, and many others coming from episcopal 
 families, are socialists, while the son of a late Arch- 
 bishop of York has spoken from I.L.P. platforms. 
 
 The individual utterances of bishops do not perhaps 
 count for much. Some prelates are apt to hedge on 
 other occasions and destroy much of the force of their 
 previous words, but there are few of them who would 
 not now endorse Bishop Westcott's eulogium on the 
 underlying principles of Socialism : 
 
 Individualism regards humanity as made up of dis- 
 connected and warring atoms; socialism regards it as an 
 organic whole, a vital unity formed by the combination of 
 contributory members mutually interdependent. It follows 
 that socialism differs from individualism both in method 
 and in aim. The method of socialism is co-operation ; of 
 individualism, competition. The one regards man as 
 working with man for a common end; the other regards 
 man as working against man for private gain. The aim of 
 socialism is the fulfilment of service ; the aim of individualism 
 is the attainment of some personal advantage, riches, or 
 place, or fame. 
 
 After the " socialist field-day " of the Pan- Anglican 
 Congress, 242 "archbishops and bishops of the 
 Holy Catholic Church, in full communion with the 
 Church of England, assembled from divers parts 
 of the earth at Lambeth Palace, in the year of our 
 Lord 1908." They issue an Encyclical, which 
 defines the Church as ordained for the welfare 
 of mankind and the true happiness of all. The 
 democratic movement presents an opportunity for 
 Christian service, for its ideals are the Christian 
 ideals of " brotherhood, liberty, and mutual justice." 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 263 
 
 For these ideals underlying social democracy the 
 242 bishops claim Christ's sanction, and the teach- 
 ing of the ancient prophets. " We call upon the 
 Church to consider how far and wherein it has 
 departed from these truths. . . . In so far as the 
 democratic and industrial movement is animated by 
 these ideals and strives to procure for all, especially 
 for the weaker, JUST TREATMENT AND A REAL 
 OPPORTUNITY OF LIVING A TRUE HUMAN LIFE, 
 WE APPEAL TO ALL CHRISTIANS TO CO-OPERATE 
 ACTIVELY WITH IT." This appeal is then in- 
 corporated in the formal resolutions, which conclude : 
 " The social mission and social principles of Christi- 
 anity should be given a more prominent place in the 
 study and teaching of the Church, both for the clergy 
 and laity." 
 
 The 242 archbishops and bishops assembled at 
 Lambeth urge upon Church people the consideration 
 of the report of their own committee of twenty- seven 
 bishops, and of the report of a committee of Convoca- 
 tion published in 1907. 
 
 These documents of the National Church will prob- 
 ably be looked upon by future ecclesiastical historians 
 as by far the most important pronouncements of 
 Anglican bishops since the beginnings of the 
 Reformation. 
 
 Their object is to consider "the tidal wave of 
 democracy, flowing in the direction of social recon- 
 struction." They note with satisfaction "the new 
 prominence given to the wage-earners," " the growing 
 sense of dissatisfaction," "the claim increasing in 
 intensity for justice in the distribution of the proceeds 
 
264 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 of industry," as also the universality of the movement. 
 They continue as follows : 
 
 " It is the privilege of the Church to welcome this 
 movement as one of the great developments of human 
 history, which have behind them the authority of 
 God. It follows that it is the mission of the Church 
 to help to keep the spirit of democracy true to the 
 Divine purpose. Its aim, therefore, will be to assert 
 a claim, and to recognise an obligation." 
 
 " The Claim. That the whole sphere of human life, 
 material as well as spiritual, must be consecrated to 
 the highest purpose ; that every human aspiration, 
 that every natural human desire, is meant to find 
 its legitimate satisfaction, while all human wills 
 and activities must be brought under the sway of 
 Christian law." 
 
 " The Obligation. That it is the duty of the Church 
 to apply the truths and principles of Christianity, 
 especially the fundamental truths of the Fatherhood 
 of God and the brotherhood of man, to the solution 
 of social and economic difficulties, to awaken and 
 educate the social conscience, to further its expression 
 in legislation (while preserving its own independence 
 of political party), and to strive, above all, to present 
 Christ before men as a living Lord and King in the 
 realm of common life." 
 
 "An attitude of aloofness on the part of the 
 Church, or timidity in facing its obligation, can only 
 mean a serious failure in its work and a hindrance to 
 its influence, and must tend to strengthen the feeling 
 amongst the wage-earners that the Church is the ally 
 of the comfortable rather than of the poor, and that 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 265 
 
 it identifies itself with the interests of wealth and 
 property ; with the result that the people become 
 indifferent to the Church, distrustful of its interest in 
 their lives, and persuaded that it is out of sympathy 
 with their hopes and aims." 
 
 "The question inevitably arises, Why does the 
 Church fail to win the sympathy and regard of those 
 who seek an ideal so largely in accord with the Lord's 
 own principles, since it is plainly wrong to suppose 
 that this democratic movement is in itself atheistic 
 or antichristian ? " 
 
 The answer is to be found on the one hand in the 
 shameful divisions of Christendom, in the lack of 
 practical fellowship, in autocratic methods of Church 
 government ; and on the other hand in elements of 
 individual and class selfishness and an inadequate 
 perception of the need of individual redemption from 
 the dominion of sin. 
 
 They reprove the Church for being too slack in 
 establishing groups everywhere for the study of social 
 and economic questions (groups suggested by them 
 in their 1897 report). Such groups of Christian men 
 and women should " make it their aim to bring the 
 sense of justice . . . which is common to Christianity 
 and to Democracy to bear upon matters of everyday 
 life in trade, in society, etc." 
 
 " We need Christian men and women who will give 
 serious study to social problems and make the best 
 of their opportunities of training in social service ; 
 who will then be qualified to take their place on 
 public administrative bodies, both local and national ; 
 who will protest both by word and example, both in 
 
266 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 public and in private, against anything that is 
 immoral or unjust ; who will call into action any 
 legislative machinery which already exists for the 
 public welfare, and stir up public opinion on behalf 
 of the removal of wrong wherever it may be found, 
 thus making an earnest endeavour to share in the 
 transforming work of Christianity ' for their brethren 
 and companions' sake.' " 
 
 " In other words, the Church must concentrate its 
 resources on recreating, inspiring, and using its own 
 Demos, making of it a truly elect people, a laity, an 
 instructed and disciplined ' people of God.' But this 
 Church 'laity' is to be raised up for service to the 
 whole nation and to the world, and not for merely 
 denominational interests ; men of all classes of 
 society united as comrades to fight the battle of the 
 Lord against sin, the world, and the devil by virtue 
 of their baptism." 
 
 "This will lead on to a more general revelation 
 of brotherhood in the Church itself, without which 
 it is hopeless to expect to be able to win the 
 confidence of the people." 
 
 " On matters of public morality and social reform 
 Christians of various denominations can and do co- 
 operate, and it is therefore hoped that in this way 
 also the common service of men will increasingly 
 draw together those who are otherwise grievously 
 divided." 
 
 The Church must be active in proclaiming national 
 and international justice, the laws of health, the 
 importance of self-education, and in warning the 
 rich of the sin of idleness, the incompatibility of 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 267 
 
 selfish luxury with professing Christianity, and " the 
 duty of substituting justice ... for a condescending 
 and thoughtless benevolence." 
 
 They then insist on a thorough overhauling of 
 Church government in a democratic direction, the 
 upholding of material good and of spiritual vision 
 as both necessary to the development of the people, 
 for this is the dual ideal of "the ever-present 
 Kingdom of God." 
 
 The Lambeth Conference further urges the careful 
 study of the report of 1907 issued by the bishops, 
 deans, etc., assembled as a committee of the Con- 
 vocation of Canterbury. 1 The Report commences 
 with a root-and-branch repudiation of Manches- 
 terianism or individualist commercialism, and approves 
 the teachings of "those deep-seeing men, Carlyle, 
 Maurice, and Ruskin." Modern economists are right 
 when they assert that 
 
 " The majority of men are found to be not free to 
 bargain, or to pursue their own interests. They are 
 too weak and ignorant. They are exploited by the 
 strong. . . . The real end of industrial organisation is 
 to combine efficient production with such a distribu- 
 tion of the commodities produced as will enable the 
 greatest number of people to find a full opportunity 
 of self-realisation and joy." 
 
 "The true riches of a nation are vigorous and 
 happy men and women, willingly and intelligently 
 co-operating for the good of the community." 
 
 The report proceeds to show that the Christian 
 
 1 Cf. S.P.C.K. 2d. Report of Committee of Convocation on 
 Economic Questions, 1907. 
 
268 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 religion is a development from that of the Jews, 
 whose Old Testament legislation insisted on a just 
 wage, prohibited interest, and secured the land to 
 the people, denouncing the exploitation of the poor. 
 In Old Testament times private gain was restricted 
 by public well-being ; manual labour is the necessary 
 basis of society. We are not bound by the letter 
 and detail, but we are bound by the moral prin- 
 ciples underlying this legislation. Christ deepened 
 and universalised Old Testament conceptions. Now, 
 the neighbour is "everyone who has need." The 
 pursuit of riches is condemned. " Each is to work 
 with his own hands to support the weak, that he may 
 have to give to him that needeth." These principles 
 apply not only to the Church, but also to the State. 
 " Individual salvation . . . has been disastrously 
 isolated . . . from the social idea of original 
 Christianity and the teaching of brotherhood." 
 
 " Christ, our Master and severe Judge, holds us 
 responsible for every one of His members whose life 
 has been wasted by our common neglect." " Idle- 
 ness, whether it is that of the rich or the poor man, is 
 an offence against God and man." 
 
 " It is intolerable that any part of our industry 
 should be organised upon the foundation of the 
 misery and want of the labourer." 
 
 The doctrine of the " living wage " is then insisted 
 on, and the duty of consumers considered. Private 
 action must be pushed as far as possible, but " un- 
 doubtedly the individual by his private action is able 
 to do little to alter what is amiss. The law must 
 help that is, the expressed will and power of the 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 269 
 
 \ 
 
 whole community." Churchmen must insist on 
 carrying out the present Factory, Truck, and Sanita- 
 tion Acts ; but, furthermore, although the committee 
 do not think it wise for the Church as a society to 
 identify itself with any one particular political party > 
 and while they urge fairness in preaching justice and 
 goodwill to all men, and particularly warn preachers 
 against mere flattery of and toadying to the artisan 
 class, yet they are compelled "to urge that the 
 Christian Church should make clear to itself the 
 nature of the demand for the reconstruction of society 
 which is at present urged upon us. Behind the more 
 technical (industrial and political) proposals lies a 
 fundamental appeal for justice, which the Christian 
 Church cannot ignore. It is bound to make a much 
 more thorough endeavour than it has yet made to 
 appreciate this appeal in all its bearings; and to 
 consider whether the charge made against the present 
 constitution and principles of the industrial world, 
 and the present division of the profits of industry, 
 is a just charge. Certainly the Christian society is 
 competent to deal with the fundamental moral 
 question, and is bound to press upon its members the 
 duty of facing it." 
 
 Then, in consequence of such deepened reflection 
 upon the fundamental moral issue, it is undoubtedly 
 the case that we shall need an advance in our present 
 law touching social and industrial problems. " It is 
 time, we think, that the Christian conscience of the 
 country voted urgency' among parliamentary and 
 municipal questions for all the group of problems 
 which concern the grossly unequal distribution of 
 
270 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 wealth and well-being ; the waste of life and capacity 
 through lack of proper nourishment and training ; 
 the sweating of women's and children's labour ; the 
 deficiency, in the surroundings of so many, of those 
 things which are the ordinary essentials of physical 
 and moral well-being." 
 
 " We are convinced that the Church has a teaching 
 which it ought to give on all matters which concern 
 the acquisition and distribution of wealth, in its 
 bearing on human lives; and that this teaching 
 involves not only private effort, but municipal and 
 political reforms. Thus we want the Church as a 
 body to come forward to the support of such legisla- 
 tion as embodies or tends to render more practicable 
 the Christian view of the worth and meaning of human 
 life, and the belief in the Divine principle of justice." 
 
 Church people who are dominated by this ideal 
 must come forward as voters and candidates for 
 parliamentary and municipal elections ; for although 
 the older systems of alms-giving and the like must 
 not be neglected, " something more is wanted than 
 improvements in our methods of administering chari- 
 table relief. We have to go deeper to the grounds of 
 the existing misery and want and unemployment ; 
 and while we do our best to deal with the present 
 distress, direct our chief attention towards furthering 
 the reorganisation of society on such principles of 
 justice as will tend to reduce poverty and misery in 
 the future to more manageable proportions." 
 
 This, then, is the official teaching of the National 
 Church, as seen in the most recent deliberations of 
 her bishops on the subject of social democracy. 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 271 
 
 A reaction has set in since the Lambeth pronounce- 
 ments. The Archbishop of Canterbury that same 
 Archbishop who bids us do all in our power to bring 
 in God's Kingdom here on earth, and who refuses a 
 five minutes' interview with the Leicester unem- 
 ployed, after their tramp to London under the leader- 
 ship of Lewis Donaldson, a loyal priest of the 
 National Church seems bent on perpetuating the 
 heretical divorce between things spiritual and things 
 material. 1 The Archbishop of York, dissociating 
 himself from economic socialists, defends them from 
 their baser assailants, supports their ethical assump- 
 tions, and certain of their political proposals. The 
 forces of plutocracy are doing all in their power to 
 stifle the bishops and prevent a repetition of the 
 Lambeth pronouncements, but the episcopal reaction 
 can only be temporary. 
 
 The revolution in thought is not confined to the 
 Church of England. The movement known as the 
 New Theology expresses itself politically in many 
 cases in socialistic schemes. The Rev. R. J. Campbell's 
 Progressive League, which numbers many thousands 
 of members, although it does not tie its people to 
 economic socialism, is largely socialist in tendency. 
 Not only the new theologians, like Mr Campbell and Mr 
 Rhondda Williams, but older- fashioned theologians, Mr 
 Rattenbury, Mr Kirtlan, and Dr Clifford, are socialists 
 and belong to some economic socialist society. An 
 undenominational international body known as " The 
 Christian Socialist Fellowship," urging the national- 
 
 1 Cf. the reason given by the Archbishop of Canterbury for not voting 
 on the Budget proposals of the Liberal Government of 1909. 
 
272 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 isation of land and capital, is making rapid progress ; 
 while the Free Church Socialist League, formed in 
 1909, has considerable chance of success, although we 
 have yet to learn the nature of its economic basis. 
 This socialist movement among Nonconformist 
 bodies is the expression of their abandonment of 
 their original reasons for schism from the National 
 Church. Most of the leaders frankly state that they 
 have no particular quarrel with the English Church, 
 and see no essential value in separation from her. 
 The term Catholic has no longer any terrors for them, 
 and, though their theology is often hazy, such as it is, 
 it is an approach to the Catholic faith in the value of 
 fellowship and of outward life, and a frank denial of 
 Calvinism and the capitalistic religions of the recent 
 night. Sensuous worship is no longer held up to 
 ridicule, some form of liturgy is often adopted, Catholic 
 views of the next world often held. It is not a very 
 far step from all this to the recognition of one outward 
 and visible fellowship among men. 
 
 Official Dissent stands outside this Catholic move- 
 ment among Nonconformists. The most popular 
 Nonconformist journal still stands frankly for the old 
 Christo-capitalism. It is always ready to whitewash 
 a plutocratic sweater, so long as he shows the necessary 
 interest in missionaries, is severe about Sunday, and 
 sufficiently lavish in his donations to chapel building 
 funds. Some months back I was taken over the 
 worst slums in Glasgow perhaps the worst in 
 Europe and we had waded through darkness, filth, 
 and misery, and come out at the other end with sore 
 hearts and sore throats. The wages of this slumdom 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 273 
 
 were in some cases i6s. lod. a week ; the hours of 
 work and the rents were monstrous. The workers 
 are the victims of a loathsome skin disease arising 
 from the chemical vapours in which they are compelled 
 to labour. At one time no meal-hours were allowed, 
 and the regime was a twelve-hour day and a seven- 
 day week. When the pious employer who was 
 responsible for this state of things was attacked, and 
 a Nonconformist minister had sent back a cheque for 
 a chapel building fund, saying he did not like to 
 partake in the price of blood, the journal in question 
 came to the defence of the princely philanthropist, 
 and was particularly insulting to his critics. At the 
 time of his death, a writer in this same journal gushed 
 over the wonderful city, Glasgow, with its " numbers 
 of men of commercial standing and repute . . . who 
 cling to Evangelical principles, and while diligent in 
 business find in religious work for the benefit of their 
 humbler fellow-creatures the romance of their lives." 
 Referring lightly to the attack on the conduct of his 
 business, the writer suggests that it did not weaken his 
 influence among business men, " for he kept straight 
 on his course, and people bethought them that a man 
 of such obvious goodness could not consciously be 
 guilty of injustice to others." Fever-ridden slums and 
 poison-infested works are too close to the Christo- 
 capitalists and too necessary for their existence for 
 them to trouble much about them ; but, says our 
 eulogist, ' at one time, hearing of the danger of typhoid 
 fever in Livingstonia, he gave ^"4000 to provide and 
 send out several miles of steel piping to bring pure 
 and unadulterated water into the mission station." 
 
 18 
 
274 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 Is it any wonder that, so long as this journal 
 calls itself Christian, Mr Robert Blatchford should 
 prefer to call himself agnostic ? 
 
 It has been suggested in a former chapter that the 
 schisms in Europe at the time of the Reformation 
 narrowed down the Church of Rome as much as any 
 other body. A study of her popular books of de- 
 votion, sermons, and hymnology would suggest that 
 she has been visited with neurotic introspection and 
 intellectual barrenness. The Catholic faith is more 
 completely denied in the official Roman body than 
 among certain English Dissenters. The High Church 
 Puseyite, in spite of his many social virtues, has done 
 his best to perpetuate or revive certain evil tendencies 
 in early Church history. He treats the Christian 
 ministry as a separate class receiving its authority, 
 not from the whole priestly democracy, but from 
 some distant planet. He calls this the authority 
 " from above," and describes democratic authority as 
 " from below," thereby destroying the Catholic idea of 
 the Church. Papal Catholicism is, however, the logical 
 development of High Church sectarianism. In this 
 system, not only is the priestly body of the people 
 ignored, but it is counted anathema that even the 
 priest-caste and their bishops should be considered 
 authoritative. The groundwork of modern! Romanism, 
 and to some extent of Puseyism, is that God is really 
 absent from the world. Their doctrine of the Real 
 Presence is a corollary of the Real Absence. God is 
 the occasional visitor, who must be brought down 
 into the world in Mass wafers and Papal encyclicals. 
 Nowadays the issue is Vaticanism versus Catholicism. 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 275 
 
 The Pope claims to be, not only above, but apart 
 from the bishops, priests, and councils, sole emperor 
 on earth representing the Sole Emperor in heaven. 
 The following are typical pronouncements of modern 
 official Romanism : 
 
 The proposition which defines that power has been 
 given by God to the Church to be communicated to pastors 
 who are its ministers for the salvation of the soul ; under- 
 stood in the sense that the power of ecclesiastical ministra- 
 tion and government in the pastors, is derived from the 
 body of the faithful ; heretical. 1 
 
 Moreover, the proposition which defines that the 
 Pontiff is the Administering Head ; explained in the sense 
 that the Roman Pontiff receives his administrative authority, 
 not from Christ in the person of St Peter, but receives from 
 the Church his power of administration, by which as the 
 successor of Peter, the true vicar of Christ and head of the 
 whole Church, he rules in the universal Church ; heretical. 1 
 
 Papal and High Church journals alike condemn 
 the Catholic democrat for holding that the inter- 
 national Christian democracy is a royal priesthood, 
 and that, for the sake of Holy Orders, bishops, priests, 
 and deacons are appointed from the whole priestly 
 body for different functions and administrations, and 
 that the official priesthood is the mouthpiece of the 
 Christian democracy. As a Roman modernist has 
 recently said, " the theocratic conception of ecclesias- 
 tical authority is incompatible with democracy, 
 whether the authority be Papal, Episcopal, or 
 Sacerdotal. If ecclesiastical authority is to justify 
 itself, it must be of the people, for the people, by the 
 people. The Church must be democratised, or it 
 
 1 Encyclical on Modernism, " Pascendi," footnotes. 
 
276 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 cannot survive ; and after all, in democratising itself 
 it will but return to its first principle." Cardinal 
 Newman, who is sometimes claimed by modernists 
 as their precursor, would have shrunk from such 
 sentiments. Cardinal Manning was theologically 
 narrower than his rival ; but his heart outran his 
 intellect, and although he was incapable of thinking 
 out a fundamental Catholic theology or of coming to 
 any clear economic conclusions, he put himself at 
 the head of the movement among the dockers and 
 other unskilled labourers, and wrote bravely in 
 defence of what was called the New Unionism. 
 Especially bold was his defence in the Fortnightly 
 Review of the right of starving men to steal. 
 The Archbishop of Toronto, in a letter to the 
 Chicago Times, defended Manning, asserting that 
 there was never any doubt, from the point of view of 
 the Catholic tradition, about the duty of stealing 
 rather than starving. Archbishop M'Hale also 
 supported them. 1 Compare their contention with 
 Cardinal Newman's note to the Apologia, where he 
 admits as indisputable the right of starving men to 
 help themselves. 
 
 There is considerable plain speaking on social 
 subjects on the part of a small section of the French 
 clergy to-day, but the recent claims of the Papacy 
 and its anti-socialist attitude make their position one 
 of great difficulty. The clergy during the period of 
 the Revolution for the most part sided with the 
 aristocracy, but Lamennais and a vigorous minority 
 of priests and lay people brought new life into the 
 
 1 Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 381. 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 277 
 
 Church of France from 1840 to 1848. In the thirties 
 the Catholic cause was almost universally thought to 
 be lost. In 1843 tne Church had only one friend 
 in Parliament. In 1846 the one had become one 
 hundred and forty-six. In 1848 the Church party 
 was equally successful. 
 
 There is in Italy a Catholic democratic move- 
 ment, anti-clerical and anti-papist, which in many 
 respects recalls the action of priests, monks, and 
 laity under Garibaldi. Its adherents published in 
 1908 a manifesto entitled Why we are Christian 
 Socialists, which quotes with approval one of the 
 speakers of the Pan-Anglican Congress where he 
 says : " The Church should open her doors to this 
 new current of Christian life which is bursting forth 
 from the troubled conscience of the masses." The 
 time will come in which " Christian brotherhood 
 will triumph completely," but this will only be "when 
 the chains of servitude, which have been forged by 
 property and the wage system, shall have been broken, 
 and society shall have become a union of equals, each 
 of whom shall fulfil his own task and be able to 
 honour fully the claims of his own spiritual person- 
 ality." Mr A. L. Lilley quotes this remarkable 
 document as saying that, " if the dogma of original 
 sin has a meaning for us, it is in so far as it may be 
 regarded as the theological symbol of the origin of 
 private property. Indeed, on the day that man first 
 said, Mine and thine, with regard to the means of 
 production, the curse of God fell upon the human 
 race and its uninterrupted disaster began." "The 
 Gospel flourishes anew in this dawn of democratic 
 
278 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 expectation. For Christ against the Vatican that 
 is our motto ; for socialism against all the parties of 
 reaction and conservatism." l 
 
 A faithful band of Roman Catholic socialist laymen 
 in Scotland and England find themselves in a painful 
 dilemma. One of their most progressive bishops tells 
 them that it is no more possible for a Catholic to be 
 a socialist than it is for him to be a Wesleyan. A 
 Roman Catholic writer in the Clarion, March 1909, 
 fears that the Papacy now claims infallibility in 
 matters political as well as in matters of faith and 
 morals. The Catholic Times, the most influential 
 Roman weekly in this country, declares socialism to 
 have been condemned in the Encyclical Rerum 
 Novarum of I5th May 1891, and the Encyclical on 
 Christian Democracy of i8th January 1901. Despite 
 these denunciations from headquarters, there are a few 
 brave Roman priests in Europe and in America, and 
 many laymen, who are Catholic in their economic 
 ideas as well as in name. The Rev. John A. Ryan, 
 D.D., argues in the Catholic Fortnightly Review^ an 
 American publication, that the teaching of Leo XIII. 
 was aimed at communism rather than socialism. 
 According to this theologian, a Roman Catholic may 
 quite properly believe and advocate that 
 
 The instruments of production and exchange should be 
 owned and managed by the community, but the private 
 owners of these instruments should receive fair compensation. 
 
 Landowners should receive from the State as much as 
 they have paid for their land, and should be permitted to 
 retain permanently and to transfer or transmit the land that 
 
 1 Quoted by A. L. Lilley, Church Socialist Quarterly, Jan. 1909. 
 
i 
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN 279 
 
 they cultivate or occupy, but should be compelled to pay 
 to the State annually its full rental value, exclusive of 
 improvements. 
 
 Since the great industries managed by the State would set 
 the pace, small industries which an individual could operate 
 by himself or with the help of two or three others might 
 remain private. This would involve private ownership of 
 the simple machinery and tools used in such industries for 
 example, agricultural implements and the sewing-machine of 
 the custom tailor or dressmaker. 
 
 The incomes of persons employed by the community 
 should be regulated by needs, efforts, productivity, the social 
 welfare, and not merely by the principle of equality. 
 
 All goods which immediately satisfy man's wants, such as 
 food, clothing, dwellings, furniture, utensils, etc., should be 
 privately owned, and subject to full power of disposal by the 
 proprietor. 
 
 The integrity of the family and parental control over the 
 children should be as secure as Catholic teaching desires. 
 
 Until recently, as has been said, the construction 
 of modern socialism has been undertaken for the 
 most part by men who, though they are often 
 Churchmen by the fact of their baptism, have repudi- 
 ated the theology and practice of the Church as it 
 presented itself to them. The Agnostics are just as 
 much Christian heretics as the Puseyite and the 
 Evangelical ; each holds strenuously by some portion 
 of the Catholic faith, each denies some other equally 
 essential aspects of it. Calvin and Dr Pusey believed 
 in God and not in man. Marx and Belfort Bax 
 believe in man and not in God. Many High Church- 
 men believe in original sin, but not in original right- 
 eousness. Many Atheists believe in original righteous- 
 ness but not in original sin. Mr Bernard Shaw 
 believes in God's goodness, but not in His power. 
 
280 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 The Revivalists believe in God's power, but not in 
 His goodness. The editors of the Church Times, 
 the Clarion, the Guardian, the Agnostic Annual, and 
 the British Weekly respectively believe and respec- 
 tively repudiate integral portions and implications 
 of the Catholic faith. We might well exclaim 
 with St Paul, thinking of our own people 
 and of our own times, " He hath included all 
 under sin, that He might have mercy upon all." 
 There is in Agnosticism a real movement nowadays 
 towards the Catholic religion ; there is in " Ritualism " 
 as evident a movement in that direction. The Neo- 
 Evangelicals have abandoned their irreconcilability; 
 Nonconformists have abandoned the very reasons of 
 their schism. Modernist Romans are joining hands 
 with democratic Anglicans, Agnostics, Presbyterians, 
 and Dissenters. The socialist movement is bringing 
 all these forces together on a common platform, and 
 in our own day we see the revival of the Catholic 
 Church in its embryo stage. 
 
 The condition of the people is appalling. A Prime 
 Minister has told us of twelve million people on the 
 verge of starvation. We still send hundreds of 
 thousands of children to school in an underfed 
 condition. Sweating still flourishes in our towns, and 
 is little altered for the better since the time in which 
 Kingsley wrote his Alton Locke. The half-time 
 system for children still flourishes in the North, and 
 in the South of England child-labour is also excessive, 
 sometimes amounting to sixty hours a week. Our 
 industrial system still results in the overwork and 
 underfeeding of the many, and the underwork and 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 281 
 
 overfeeding of the few. Adulteration in trade is 
 everywhere prevalent, hours of adult labour are 
 generally excessive, overcrowding is too common, 
 and a large class of people seem to have learnt 
 untruly, by means of rent and interest, to get some- 
 body else's living in that rut of death in which it 
 has pleased the devil to leave them. 
 
 Yet for all this there has been change, not only in 
 thought but in conditions. Evil as are the conditions 
 of the twentieth century, terribly as they contrast 
 with the conditions of the fourteenth or even the 
 seventeenth, there is some slight improvement since 
 what we have called the low- water mark of 1800 
 to 1830. 
 
 It is significant that this improvement in outward 
 conditions should be concurrent with the embryo 
 revival of the Catholic religion. I have sketched the 
 part that bishops and clergy of the National Church 
 have played in this revival, and have traced the 
 various lines Romanist, Anglican, Nonconformist, 
 Agnostic that are converging towards this Catholic 
 religion. 
 
 In England the Church is fettered, as are its Non- 
 conformist offshoots, by reliance on the subscriptions 
 of the capitalist. Not only are bishops appointed by 
 capitalist governments, but the people have been 
 robbed of their rights in the parishes, and the private 
 patron appoints to the most important cures. On 
 ecclesiastical bodies, Convocations of Canterbury and 
 of York, ruridecanal meetings, diocesan committees, 
 the artisan class is almost wholly unrepresented. 
 For, in spite of all we have said, the official Church is 
 
282 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 still the ally of the rich against the poor. For all 
 this, secular socialists are turning to the Church of 
 England for clear and forcible pronouncement on the 
 social question, and perhaps those of them who study 
 this book will find in it some answer to their own oft- 
 repeated question : " Why is it that definite Church- 
 men make better socialists than members of other 
 religious bodies ? " 
 
 The Church of England stands at the parting of 
 the ways; her own peculiar position should help her to- 
 wards socialism. The socialist is anti-imperialist and 
 anti competitive in the economic sphere. Is not that 
 precisely the attitude of the English Church in the 
 religious sphere? She criticises and repudiates the 
 imperialism of Rome and the competitive theories of 
 Dissent. Her ideal is one of national Churches, but 
 these national Churches are not to be insular and 
 self-sufficient; they are but democratically governed 
 provinces of the International or Catholic Church of 
 God. She herself appealed for an international 
 council in the troubled days of the Reformation. 
 For such an international council she still longs. Is 
 it inconceivable that the Church of England should 
 learn to be more flexible in things non-essential, 
 more firm in Catholic fundamentals ? There are not 
 wanting indications that she will allow a little more 
 liberty of prophesying to her nonconforming sons and 
 daughters, and might be persuaded to provide along- 
 side of her liturgies for extempore prayer and other 
 types of service dear to the nonconformist mind. Is 
 it outside the bounds of possibility that the service of 
 the Eucharist, symbol and bond of fellowship, should 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 283 
 
 once more become the common service of the parish, 
 and that all Christians uniting in that common 
 worship should be allowed considerable liberty in the 
 matter of other services and addresses? What is 
 most urgently needed is a reinterpretation of the 
 creeds and their application to the practical life of 
 men, the democratisation of the Church, an effective 
 desire to meet both Nonconformists, Atheists, and 
 Agnostics, listen to their criticisms, and, with their 
 help, rebuild the national religion, without sacrificing 
 a single essential principle. At the same time, 
 forgetting our insularity, we must hold out the right 
 hand of fellowship to those comrades in the Eastern 
 and Roman communions who love Catholicism more 
 than they love Pope or Czar. All this we must 
 do, after unreserved acknowledgment of our own 
 national crimes and blunders, cloaking nothing, con- 
 fessing everything. To have the strength and the 
 flexibility of tempered steel that is the task of the 
 Church of England, in both the spiritual and the 
 material realm. To recover and to develop the 
 Catholic faith in every sphere physical, mental, and 
 spiritual, that is the work that lies ready to our 
 hands. 
 
 There is one body within the National Church 
 which has not yet been mentioned. The Church 
 Socialist League is the most vigorous champion of 
 Catholic democracy that has yet taken the field. Its 
 power is already out of all proportion to its numbers; 
 its growth has been phenomenal ; its activities are 
 numberless. It alone has the unreserved confidence 
 of the secular movement. A colossal work lies before 
 
284 SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 it. If the League has the energy and the wisdom, it 
 may act like leaven upon the sluggish conscience of 
 the age. It may be that God is raising up its 
 members for the revival of the national religion and 
 for the hope of an international Catholicism. The 
 Church Socialist League may prove itself one of God's 
 chiefest instruments for translating " Christianity " 
 into the religion of Jesus Christ, and the kingdoms of 
 this world into the Kingdom of Heaven. For we are 
 witnessing in our own times the fulfilment of an ancient 
 prophecy : " And it shall be in the last days, saith God, 
 I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh : and your sons 
 and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young 
 men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream 
 dreams : yea, and on my bondmen and bondmaidens 
 in those days will I pour forth of my spirit ; and they 
 shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the 
 heaven above and signs on the earth beneath ; blood, 
 and fire, and vapour of smoke : the sun shall be turned 
 into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the 
 day of the Lord come, that great and notable day : 
 and it shall be that whosoever shall call on the name 
 of the Lord shall be saved." 
 
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