GIFT OF 
 
 - ^j- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
Jesus and Politics 
 
 An Essay 
 Towards an Ideal 
 
 By 
 Harold B. Shepheard, M.A. 
 
 With Introduction by 
 Vida D. Scudder 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 68 1 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
Copyright, 1915 
 BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 In the crisis through which the 
 civilised world is passing, the mere 
 title of this book arrests sad atten- 
 tion : for it would seem as if Jesus 
 had singularly little to do with poli- 
 tics in this year of His grace 1915. 
 Nor are people lacking, the au- 
 thor of this book would surely be 
 among them, to believe solemnly 
 that the absence of effort to square 
 the practice of nations with the law 
 of Christ is responsible for the fail- 
 ure of our gracious formulae, our 
 self-confidence, our culture, and 
 our morals. Civilisation was ad- 
 
 f\r\ 
 
iv INTRODUCTION 
 
 vancing so brilliantly, manners 
 were acquiring such suavity, sci- 
 ence was so increasing the conveni- 
 ences and penetrating the secrets 
 of life, learning was amassing so 
 superb an equipment! Commerce 
 throve, philanthropies were organ- 
 ised on a vast scale, fraternal senti- 
 ments were formulated in count- 
 less congresses and conventions, 
 international courtesies were pa- 
 raded the world over. And then, 
 the worst war in history burst 
 upon us! 
 
 And the man on the street, 
 shocked beyond measure, paralysed 
 with honest horror, learns that this 
 war is no sudden outbreak as he 
 fain would think it, but the result 
 
INTRODUCTION v 
 
 of long secret struggle, deliber- 
 ately foreseen and prepared for by 
 more than one of the warring pow- 
 ers; outward expression of an in- 
 ward state that has been existing 
 continuously under society's fair 
 surface. 
 
 What can he conclude but that 
 civilisation is powerless in itself to 
 destroy the brute in man? He re- 
 flects. He perceives that the nations 
 at their best have rarely looked be- 
 yond the limits of their own well- 
 being, to the benefit of the whole 
 world-order; that the sacrifice of 
 the strong for the weak, a princi- 
 ple which struggles desperately 
 for existence even in private lives, 
 has never even been fairly contem- 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 plated as an ideal for national con- 
 duct. And he begins to wonder 
 whether civilisation as such can 
 ever be expected to protect man 
 against his natural passions, or 
 whether perhaps that holy and keen 
 thinker, John Henry Newman, was 
 right in regarding it almost as 
 antichrist, as the arch-deceiver, the 
 great enemy of the soul. 
 
 So sharp is the question raised 
 that some sincere and brave Chris- 
 tian thinkers are beginning to as- 
 sert boldly in public that the 
 teachings of the New Testament 
 were never intended to apply to 
 corporate action, on the part of 
 nations or of economic groups ; that 
 they are meant purely for individ- 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 ual use, and that international 
 morality should not be expected 
 to rise above the Old Testament 
 law of equal justice, involving the 
 right to retaliation and self-de- 
 fence: an eye for an eye and a 
 tooth for a tooth. And surely this 
 frank position is better than a 
 facile assumption that the ideals of 
 the Sermon on the Mount are uni- 
 versal, combined with easy-going 
 connivance at the opposite policy. 
 The world-anguish through which 
 we are passing is a great disperser 
 of delusions. Since August, 1914, 
 it is no longer possible to entertain 
 the false and dangerous belief that 
 we are already members of a Chris- 
 tian world. It is good for us to 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 face the plain fact, that no nation 
 and no social class has yet even 
 dared pretend to shape its corpor- 
 ate policy by the words of Jesus. 
 It is better even to defend that fact 
 than to deny it! 
 
 Many of us, however, are not 
 ready to defend or to acquiesce in 
 it. We see that there is a re- 
 straining power in the world : a su- 
 pernatural power, one is inclined 
 in all simplicity to say, as one real- 
 ises the fierceness of the instincts 
 against which it has successfully 
 contended. This power has proved 
 itself by affording effective help to 
 hundreds, nay thousands of people 
 from generation to generation, in 
 the age-long struggle to substitute 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 love for desire, meekness for self- 
 assertion. So widely is it opera- 
 tive that any individual to-day who 
 acted as the nations are acting in 
 their corporate capacity would not 
 only be heartily ashamed of himself 
 but would be ostracised or boycot- 
 ted in general society. Seeing the 
 strength and tenacity of this power, 
 we can not help believing that it 
 can be extended in scope, and the 
 only salvation we see for the world 
 is in the application of it to politi- 
 cal and economic life as well as to 
 personal. Jesus and Politics! the 
 very phrase brings to our minds re- 
 lief. 
 
 We believe that we have good 
 reasons for this hope of ours, that 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 politics shall yet be saved by Jesus. 
 The great reason is of course that 
 He is our Master and that He 
 bade us pray that God's Kingdom 
 should come on earth. He would 
 never have told us to pray for an 
 impossibility. That Kingdom was 
 His social ideal. To found it was 
 the official purpose of His life, 
 from the day when He took up the 
 mission of the Baptist and went 
 about Galilee preaching the Good 
 Tidings, to the great Forty Days 
 when in the mystery of the Resur- 
 rection Light, He was with His 
 disciples preaching and teaching 
 the things pertaining to the King- 
 dom of God. To-day we realise 
 that ideal as men have not done 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 since the first Christian ages: it 
 shines against earth's stormy back- 
 ground with a heavenly radiance: 
 it is the Land of Promise whither 
 all true pilgrims must bend their 
 way. 
 
 But can any one now live per- 
 fectly the life of a citizen of that 
 Kingdom, according to its laws 
 laid down in the Beatitudes and 
 the following passages? No, we 
 find that we can not. It is useless 
 to hold before us the Counsels of 
 Perfection for private life, at the 
 same time telling us that society as 
 a whole in its corporate divisions 
 must not be expected to follow 
 them. For we find that the laws 
 of society at large determine our 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 own behaviour. What business 
 man can be meek to the uttermost 
 in his dealings with his competi- 
 tors ? Who can toss away all care 
 for the morrow, with families de- 
 pendent on him which would be 
 thrown back as a public charge, did 
 he reject the thrift, the efficiency, 
 the practical foresight, which the 
 world admires so much and which 
 are so ignored in the words of 
 Christ? What would happen if 
 the employer of labor turned the 
 other cheek to the labor-organisa- 
 tion, and went two miles with it in 
 the matter of increased wages 
 when they compelled him to go 
 one? . . . The experiment would 
 be interesting to try ! The truth is 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 that private and public activities 
 are so interwoven that it is impos- 
 sible to separate them, and we shall 
 fall into our present hopeless con- 
 fusion just so long as we continue 
 to apply the Beatitudes in the in- 
 timacies of personal life, but to let 
 quite opposite principles regulate 
 the large sections of our conduct 
 in which the corporate attitude of 
 class or nation is involved. 
 
 People have always realised the 
 paradox and the more honest they 
 were the more it drove them to des- 
 peration. There was an obvious 
 solution, however; it was, to run 
 away. That in part at least is 
 what monasticism meant. In the 
 cloister one could follow Christ 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 without reserve. Meanwhile it is 
 worth noting that from the fourth 
 century on, the large numbers of 
 men impelled by similar instincts 
 to seek conditions under which 
 they could literally obey their Mas- 
 ter, did not remain isolated. They 
 gathered into highly organised 
 communities, in which the laws of 
 the Sermon on the Mount were to 
 a large degree actually operative; 
 and from these great and produc- 
 tive centres of Christian commu- 
 nism we have to-day much to learn. 
 The monk of the best type did not 
 bury himself in a sterile peace when 
 he had fled from a predatory and 
 violent world; he gathered like- 
 minded hosts around him, and, 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 sharing all things in common with 
 his brothers, he built roads and 
 bridges, cultivated the land, and, 
 incidentally to saving his soul, pre- 
 served literature for Europe. We 
 shall not do ill to contemplate him. 
 Yet, attempts to revive monasti- 
 cism to-day hardly furnish us with 
 the solution that we need. 
 
 How suggestively Mr. Shep- 
 heard discusses these difficult mat- 
 ters, and how clearly rings his 
 voice! One welcomes in the first 
 place the deep and complete spirit- 
 uality of his little book. Like Car- 
 lyle before him, his distress over 
 modern poverty is not because it 
 entails suffering, and for improve- 
 ment in material comfort as an end 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 in itself, he cares never a whit. 
 In "this dying world," he is wholly 
 intent on the fate of "that stranger 
 companion, the soul," on his desire 
 that it should attain to the life lim- 
 itless. Our superficial philanthro- 
 pies often distract us from this in- 
 ward quest; they do not distract 
 him, nor can he listen to the siren 
 call of the more materialised so- 
 cialist schools. The manufacture 
 of souls, as Ruskin long ago put it, 
 is the only product he cares for. 
 But he sees that modern conditions 
 are unfavourable to this industry, 
 and that to give souls their due op- 
 portunity there is work to do, which 
 can be accomplished only through 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 political means. Charity is not 
 enough. "It can send the sick 
 child into the country, but it can 
 not plan healthy towns. Only po- 
 litical action can do that. . . . The 
 Christian can not even give all that 
 he has to the poor in charity. That 
 would be only to pauperise the few 
 whom he helps and to bring 
 himself down to their miseries. 
 Neither can pity lead him to go 
 and live in the slums, slum-fash- 
 ion; there would be only one man 
 the more living wrongly. . . . 
 There is only one way. . . . Only 
 the common will can ensure that 
 all shall be well-born. Only by po- 
 litical action can we give every soul 
 
xvm 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 its perfect opportunity; only as 
 politicians do our Christian duty 
 perfectly." 
 
 It grows strangely clear as he 
 proceeds, seeking with the humility 
 of the disciple to read the Master's 
 Mind. The deep distrust and fear 
 of riches as inimical to spiritual 
 well-being which breathes through 
 the utterances of Jesus, causes so 
 disinterested a Hebrew critic as 
 Montefiore to blame Him as a par- 
 tisan of the poor, almost as an em- 
 bittered agitator. This descrip- 
 tion no one of His followers could 
 endorse ; yet there can be no ques- 
 tion that Jesus does regard poverty 
 as a safer and more blessed state 
 than wealth. A generation that 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xix 
 
 says "Cursed are the poor," finds 
 it hard to understand the first Be- 
 atitude. These pages clear away 
 that confusion between the pov- 
 erty we try to abolish, and that 
 which Christ called Blessed, which 
 has so afflicted Christian thought. 
 People are known to invoke Christ's 
 words as excuse for hardening 
 their hearts against the misery of 
 the tenement-house; though one 
 observes them less often seeking 
 to inherit the blessing for them- 
 selves, by altering their mode of 
 life ! But in truth, poverty did not 
 to Christ mean mutilation, as it 
 does to the slum-dweller. "It is a 
 plain command, to be poor in 
 spirit, poor in fact but He did not 
 
xx INTRODUCTION 
 
 say, 'Blessed are the halt, the 
 maimed, the blind/ He spent His 
 life in healing them, and called 
 their disorders the work of devils. 
 He loved that poverty which deliv- 
 ers from the desire of possessions, 
 but He never praised the broken 
 life." 
 
 How then can we obey His com- 
 mands? What shall we do, we 
 Christians, who too many of us are 
 occupied in trying to grow rich 
 and, with our wealth, to secure for 
 ourselves good conditions? The 
 aim at least is clear: we have "to 
 discover the means to make the 
 right life possible without personal 
 possessions; poverty without dis- 
 ability." We moderns are rich 
 
INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 unnaturally or we are poor igno- 
 miniously. Our riches and our 
 poverty are both wrong; when we 
 are rich, keeping our wealth to our- 
 selves, how hardly shall we pass 
 through the needle's eye; when we 
 are poor, starvation of mind and 
 spirit beset us. Hundreds of con- 
 science-smitten people, caught in a 
 trap, restless, distressed, are help- 
 lessly aware of this dilemma. 
 They read wistfully about St. Fran- 
 cis, but if they have commonsense, 
 one of the more usual modern 
 virtues, they see that they would 
 do neither themselves nor anybody 
 else any good by imitating him. 
 They read about Tolstoy, and per- 
 ceive sadly that right instincts of 
 
xxii INTRODUCTION 
 
 love and duty toward his family 
 prevented him from obeying his 
 higher self and drove him broken- 
 hearted to his grave. 
 
 For such people the direct frank 
 words of Mr. Shepheard would 
 seem to open an escape. It waits 
 at the end of a long vista of politi- 
 cal action : and the vista leads to a 
 state in which personal possession 
 shall be superseded by a common- 
 wealth. Well and wisely Mr. 
 Shepheard shows that we shall at- 
 tain this state, not by setting Na- 
 ture at defiance, but by following 
 the true law of natural evolution. 
 
 Only in such a state can the other 
 great precepts of the Gospels be- 
 come practicable. Only there can 
 
INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 we hope for freedom from that 
 care for the morrow which is so 
 untrue to the Master's mind, and 
 get rid forever of that corroding 
 apprehension which has precipi- 
 tated the great war of nations and 
 which among individuals eats like 
 a canker into all impulses of char- 
 ity and love. Corporate meekness, 
 the new law for industrial rela- 
 tions, will be competent to set us 
 free from the vicious circle of in- 
 dustrial competition. "To find 
 the political path by which mercy 
 and meekness may inherit the 
 earth," is not that an inspiring 
 summons to the Christian mind of 
 the next fifty years? Let us soci- 
 alise the virtues! So only will 
 
XXIV 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 they be found practicable to the 
 full. 
 
 Nor is the process unthinkable; 
 for it has already begun. This 
 book is splendidly hopeful. "I 
 suppose that it is a grave sin for a 
 Christian to pray, Thy Kingdom 
 come, and disbelieve that his 
 Lord's Will must revolutionise so- 
 ciety" . . . The great movement is 
 going on: the movement to tax 
 and limit our private possessions. 
 All we need is to make it more con- 
 scious, more deliberate, and to in- 
 stil into it a fuller spirit of Chris- 
 tian joy. "To complete what is al- 
 ready begun we shall indeed have 
 to give up still more of our per- 
 sonal possessions deliberately to 
 
INTRODUCTION xxv 
 
 the common wealth, but that is the 
 happy way of finding poverty. It 
 would be a poverty which is not 
 destitution, because the common 
 wealth would be ours as every 
 one's." This sounds practical: it 
 is practical! No one can wholly 
 obey the commands of Jesus to- 
 day, for the Sermon on the Mount 
 presupposes a fraternal society and 
 only in such a society could it be 
 followed perfectly. But we can 
 square our personal conduct to His 
 Will just so far as is possible with- 
 out hurting other people; and then 
 we can comfort our poor dissatis- 
 fied hearts and consciences, which 
 are full of pain because this takes 
 us such a little way and plunges us 
 
XXVI 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 into such constant inconsistencies, 
 by uniting with all like-minded dis- 
 ciples to press by definite political 
 means, determined through hard 
 thinking and praying, toward the 
 better day in which even in this dy- 
 ing world, we may all be free citi- 
 zens together of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. 
 
 And when that day has come, 
 "nation shall not lift up sword 
 against nation, neither shall they 
 make war any more." 
 
 VlDA D. SCUDDER. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I JESUS AND THE TWO WORLDS. 
 
 The Dying World and the Kingdom 
 of Heaven Life the concern of 
 the Soul What is the Soul? 
 Character or Possessions? . . I 
 
 II THE CHRISTIAN AND POLITICS. 
 The Soul and its Disabilities 
 Bad Conditions Charity or Pol- 
 itics? 24 
 
 III THE CHURCHES AND PARTY POLITICS. 
 Christians and Prejudices of Party, 
 
 Outlook, and Birth Sectarian- 
 ism The Study of the Mind of 
 Jesus 38 
 
 IV "BLESSED ARE YE POOR." 
 
 The Blessing of Poverty The 
 Healing of the Maimed and Halt 
 and Blind Poverty without Dis- 
 ability 49 
 
 V RIGHT POVERTY. 
 
 The Natural Life Personal Pov- 
 erty and Common Wealth 
 Their coming, and Christian 
 Logic 59 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 VI "BLESSED ARE THE MEEK." 
 
 Meekness in the City The Politi- 
 cal Economy of Jesus How 
 Rivalry disappears Self-interest 
 or Community? 75 
 
 VII "As THYSELF." 
 
 Ourselves and Others The simple 
 Eauality The Community as the 
 Arbiter of Neighbor-love The 
 inertia of Progress .... 90 
 
 VIII DUTIES. 
 
 The Spirit of Jesus in Private Life 
 Political Methods, Tests, and 
 Parties The Church Militant . 104 
 
 IX THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 Is the Church political ? Mortal 
 Ideals The Church witnessing 
 and explaining 131 
 
To Boanerges Anyone, Esq., 
 
 MY DEAR SIR : I hear that you 
 have entered politics, you who pro- 
 fess no religion. Do you not know 
 that a man must be either a poli- 
 tician and religious, or politician 
 and forgive me a fool? 
 
 I think I hear your roar of pro- 
 test But, will you glance through 
 this book? It is not some private 
 madness of my own, but a collec- 
 tion of things which are "in the 
 air," things which Christians are 
 beginning to rediscover in their 
 faith, about life and politics. I 
 venture to say that you have noth- 
 
 XXIX 
 
ing to put forward so much worth 
 while, and irrefutable and thor- 
 ough, as the politics of Jesus. 
 Respectfully yours, 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 XXX 
 
To Mr. John Well-Worker, 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND: You are 
 certainly a Christian your works 
 prove it but you seem to avoid 
 talking politics, I suppose because 
 you are so strong a party man and 
 fear disagreements; and you hate 
 social reform in the pulpit. But 
 are you right? Did not Jesus 
 mean us to agree together ? and did 
 He not perhaps give us, if we look 
 closely enough and honestly, a com- 
 mon programme in face of the pov- 
 erties and disabilities of others? 
 Have we been passing by on the 
 other side? I have tried to find 
 xxxi 
 
out what He meant. Will you 
 read this book and see whether we 
 cannot be agreed? 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 xxxii 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 i 
 
 Jesus and the Two Worlds 
 
 IT is no new thought that life is 
 the concern of the soul but I 
 suppose that those who live by it 
 are still few. When a man is so 
 busy in the shop at the front of 
 the house he has no time to remem- 
 ber that he was a pilgrim, on the 
 way to another land. "We have 
 all forgotten who we are." The 
 thought of a larger destiny may be 
 the wonder of a quiet moment, 
 
2 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 some comfort perhaps in mourn- 
 ing; but it does not go with us al- 
 ways. It is not so real to us this 
 clear consciousness of a spiritual 
 life and of the world passing away 
 as to lift our habitual outlook to 
 the plane where it is self-evident 
 that nothing is so much worth 
 while, for ourselves and others, as 
 spiritual attainment; that our sev- 
 enty years are not an end in them- 
 selves, but an adventure which 
 leads elsewhere. 
 
 I do not only mean that this is an 
 age which is absorbed in admira- 
 tion of wealth and power. I mean 
 that we Christians are in danger 
 of forgetting the message of Jesus. 
 I think we had lost sight of the 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 3 
 
 Jesus who lived ninteen hundred 
 years ago in Palestine. Would it 
 be too hard a thing to say that our 
 forefathers were more concerned 
 with what they believed about Him 
 than with belief in Him, with or- 
 thodoxy, more than with His mes- 
 sage? The pious founders of our 
 churches bound them to hold dog- 
 mas about Him; they set Him in a 
 plan God's plan of salvation they 
 called it of predestination, justi- 
 fication, eternal punishment, a plan 
 wonderfully unlike the spirit of 
 Jesus. I think they had lost sight 
 of Him. They knew Him through 
 a creed; not Jesus as He was, but 
 Jesus in a creed. But a new spirit 
 is rediscovering Jesus for us. 
 
4 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 Putting away for a time all the 
 dogma which had grown up about 
 Him it has gone back to the evan- 
 gelists and has tried to learn afresh 
 who Jesus was, what He said, 
 what He meant; and, with many 
 another rediscovery, it has brought 
 home again to us His thought 
 about the two worlds, about life's 
 meaning. Like ourselves, His 
 generation had forgotten its pil- 
 grimage. From their earth-ab- 
 sorbed outlook men were seeing life 
 falsely, setting their hearts upon 
 dying things, riches, honours, out- 
 ward observance, armaments; but 
 Jesus saw things as they are. He 
 saw the world passing away, and 
 another world, real, vivid, over- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 5 
 
 shadowing it, ready to break in 
 upon it; the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 at hand. The world's mortality 
 was so plain to Him He seemed 
 to look for it to roll away like a 
 scroll that He was always talking 
 of the end, and always praising 
 those whose hearts were set on the 
 Kingdom first, and crying woe 
 upon the falsehood which hoped in 
 power or praise; or enlarged its 
 wealth; or lost its soul to gain the 
 world. The spiritual life was the 
 centre and meaning of everything; 
 the treasure for which a man would 
 spend all; the refuge from mortal- 
 ity. We who lapse from that daily 
 atmosphere find it hard to hold His 
 point of view. The world comes 
 
6 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 to be first in our thought, the get- 
 ting and spending of our seventy 
 years; man becomes human, and 
 present ends sufficient. But Jesus 
 who never lost the consciousness of 
 the two worlds could pronounce 
 those truths which to-day search 
 our hearts : "Blessed are ye poor" : 
 "Blessed are ye that hunger now" : 
 "Blessed are the merciful": 
 "Blessed are ye when men shall re- 
 vile you." And unblessed are the 
 pushful, the unmerciful, those who 
 "make good" in the sight of their 
 generation; for they lay up treas- 
 ure in a dying world. 
 
 His good news was that there is 
 another life and order. Men are 
 the sons of God: and God is a 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 7 
 
 Spirit: and life is man's adventure 
 after spiritual gain. The fool 
 pulls down his barns and builds 
 greater, comforting himself with 
 his security; but Jesus lived and 
 thought and spoke on that plane 
 where nothing is so real as the soul. 
 He saw the truth death, and 
 man's possessions taken from him, 
 but his spirit gone out to the right 
 hand of God, or to the weeping and 
 gnashing of teeth. What, then, 
 should a man give in exchange for 
 his soul? 
 
 To some, few and fortunate, the 
 conviction of the supremacy of 
 spirit is natural, as though they 
 came into the world trailing the 
 cloud of glory. They are the 
 
8 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 "once-born" of the kingdom, the 
 men who know, and need no other 
 proof than their own life, which 
 climbs up the inward ascent, 
 through emotion and thought, in- 
 tuition and spirit, to heights which 
 rise always higher. That way lies 
 the life limitless: it is not like the 
 paths through the world which end 
 in disappointment of ambition, or, 
 if one wins the whole world, in fail- 
 ure of power, a drawing near to 
 death: the broken roads and the 
 final darkness are the plain warn- 
 ing that that way lies no thorough- 
 fare for man's soul. It may be 
 that the purpose of life is the re- 
 discovery of the right way, of the 
 impossibility of humanity's out- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 9 
 
 ward satisfaction. But to many, 
 not the fortunate and "once-born," 
 it is not easy to attune their faith 
 to the unworldliness of Jesus. It 
 needs a new conversion, an over- 
 turning of life-long habit, and 
 birth into another plane, to under- 
 stand His whole mind. Even to 
 the Christian the world may still 
 seem more real than spirit. For 
 we are like those Flat-land crea- 
 tures to use the old parallel like 
 pieces of paper moved across and 
 up and down over a table, and 
 round about each other, unaware 
 of the hand which comes down 
 from above, a hand they cannot 
 see because they have only two 
 dimensions and cannot look into 
 
io JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 the above. So we may be hardly 
 conscious of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, so real and vivid to Him, 
 may hardly know that we have a 
 soul, because it is hidden and we 
 have been all eyes and ears and 
 hands busy outwardly. 
 
 But there are many things, 
 nearer than hands or feet, which 
 are hidden from us until we search 
 for them. Our own body is one of 
 them. I live with my body; and it 
 is part of myself : and yet I do not 
 know all that it is doing: how I 
 walk, or digest; how the blood is 
 renewed in my breathing and cir- 
 culates through arteries and veins, 
 no one knew that in all the his- 
 tory of the world until a few years 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS n 
 
 ago nor how all day and all night, 
 growing and changing and build- 
 ing up nerves and brain-cells and 
 muscles, my body keeps me alive 
 and in health. It is myself, but a 
 hidden self. 
 
 We do not know all our mind. 
 As I write I need only to think of 
 what I am trying to say; but my 
 hand writes of itself, and the words 
 spell themselves. It must be I 
 who write and spell : but I am not 
 conscious of how I do it. As you 
 read, the words pass by like the 
 pictures of a cinematograph, each 
 one flashing up and gone by, and 
 somewhere within you they com- 
 bine into sentences and meanings; 
 but you are not conscious of how it 
 
12 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 is done. One runs downstairs in 
 the morning thinking of anything 
 but one's feet. Who brings me 
 safely downstairs? I do not; I 
 never think about it. One has to 
 stop and watch and become aware 
 with surprise that a self of which 
 we are not conscious is always 
 managing us; while we are think- 
 ing of other things it lifts our 
 hand, feeds us, leads us through 
 crowded streets, finds the right 
 notes on the piano while we are in- 
 tent on the page of music: it does 
 a hundred unnoticed things with- 
 out our help, while our conscious 
 mind is far away. It makes peo- 
 ple walk in their sleep. It thinks 
 and settles problems in the night. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 13 
 
 It invented quaternions, and com- 
 posed Tartini's "Devil's Trill"; 
 and can in a good bank-clerk add 
 up columns of figures with inhu- 
 man accuracy. It has its little 
 habits, taps our fingers on the table, 
 hums, fidgets, until some good 
 friend corrects us. A woman 
 sews, sews, and talks of fifty things, 
 unconscious of the stitching; her 
 other self is sewing. A child is 
 saying a long piece ; he seems to be 
 just listening, rather anxiously, for 
 any tangle, but the piece unwinds 
 itself out of memory. I forget 
 everything, but my hidden mind 
 never forgets ; it is that prodigious 
 memory of a lifetime from which 
 when I am old the little things 
 
14 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 which happened long ago will come 
 back. 
 
 In the same way we hardly know 
 that we have a soul. There is 
 something in us which is good or 
 bad ; but it is a hidden thing. Sup- 
 pose that you sit down to think out 
 whether you are a good man or not. 
 No answer comes from your direct 
 consciousness. You do not see 
 your soul in shining white nor be- 
 spattered black; you are not con- 
 scious of a saintly self, nor a sin- 
 ful; indeed, if you have any opin- 
 ion of your goodness most likely it 
 is sin, and many a saint believes 
 himself a great sinner. Your soul 
 is a stranger-companion. If you 
 would know the truth about it you 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 15 
 
 must needs sit still and wait and 
 see what comes up from within, 
 what desires, what interests, what 
 impulse to good deeds. You must 
 know your soul and judge your soul, 
 as you judge other people; not by 
 direct sight of their inner state, 
 but by their actions; if they do 
 good, then are they good, but if 
 evil, evil. No man has seen his 
 soul at any time : and yet it is there, 
 in the invisible dimension ; it is our- 
 self , because in us it does good or 
 evil. It follows with us always, a 
 spirit hidden in some depth of life 
 into which we cannot look. 
 
 But as we become aware of our 
 unseen bodily life by pain in ill- 
 health; and as the thoughts and 
 
16 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 memories which stream up from it 
 prove to us the existence of a hid- 
 den mental life, so do we become 
 conscious of our soul by the trouble 
 into which it throws us. We are 
 uneasy, remorseful; our soul hates 
 the thing we did and troubles us 
 about it. Or suddenly we have an 
 impulse to a kindness; our "better 
 self" sends us out upon the good 
 errand. Or we do evil against our 
 will; our sick soul overwhelmed 
 our judgment. Or, after years of 
 sin, in a moment, a new soul sweeps 
 up, a soul we never dreamed that 
 we possessed and carries us away 
 into a changed life where even the 
 desire of sin is buried for ever. 
 We feed our body with plain 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 17 
 
 food and fresh air and exercise, 
 and unseen, by hidden processes, it 
 becomes strong and healthy: we 
 feed our mind with thinking and 
 knowledge, and unseen too, by hid- 
 den processes, it becomes active 
 and rich. And we make our own 
 soul: I, the keeper at the gate of 
 Self, stand there and see all that go 
 by in the street of experience; and 
 some I call in and welcome; and 
 against some, if I am wise, the ugly 
 and base, I bar the door : for what- 
 ever goes in meets with the secret 
 Person in my house and does him 
 good or evil. And at the door I 
 see those that pass out of my 
 house, 'the messengers from the 
 Person within; some I do not like 
 
i8 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 and turn them back again; but 
 others I send forth gladly. So I 
 watch over my secret soul, as 
 though it were a dear child, or a 
 great lord, who may be hurt by 
 wrong-doers. For all the time 
 whatever goes in changes the soul, 
 unawares, by hidden processes, 
 and we discover suddenly that we 
 have grown better or worse. The 
 soul, in secret, changes every day. 
 It becomes Character, what We 
 are. It will go with us, as we have 
 made it, for ever. 
 
 Why do I say "for ever"? Be- 
 cause I know of nothing which can 
 destroy the soul. Death is the dis- 
 ease of the body. It is always the 
 destruction of bodily things by bod- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 19 
 
 ily; of flesh by wounds or disease. 
 But the soul in its bodiless dimen- 
 sion has no body to be hurt. One 
 cannot stab nor shoot even a 
 thought. An emotion cannot fall 
 sick of a disease. Death cannot 
 touch a soul. It may break down 
 the walls of the house of flesh, but 
 the soul lives safe beyond the world 
 where death is. 
 
 The hidden, spiritual life is our 
 reality, what we are ; our chief con- 
 cern therefore in all men. Char- 
 acter matters most, what men are, 
 not what they possess. We come 
 back to the note of Jesus, to the un- 
 worldliness about which He never 
 reasoned but spoke with authority, 
 the wisdom which grows upon 
 
20 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 every man who thinks out his life 
 with its outward blind alleys, and 
 its limitless inward progress; its 
 outward dyings, and spiritual in- 
 destructibility. For which then 
 should men live ? 
 
 If the inward life were only an 
 earthly thing of the two worlds it 
 would still be the more valuable; 
 for what a man is must be more to 
 him than what he has. Outward 
 accidents cannot spoil his life whose 
 strength is from within. Whether 
 it survives bodily death or not, 
 character is better than posses- 
 sions; the soul more precious than 
 the world. But, far more, if death 
 is only the dissolution of the body, 
 and if, should we live beyond bod- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 21 
 
 ily death, we must be still ourselves 
 how can we be anything else? 
 the same in character and desire, 
 then Jesus was right. What a 
 man is, what he is becoming, mat- 
 ters eternally. Was it not this 
 that He meant by " laying up treas- 
 ure in Heaven"? He did not say 
 that every good deed done and 
 every sin is entered up by the re- 
 cording angels in the Book of Life, 
 and our balance struck and paid in 
 heavenly enjoyments. That was 
 not His way of thinking. But He 
 meant, one imagines, that by every 
 good deed done a man becomes bet- 
 ter, and by every evil deed worse; 
 that we change our soul by every 
 thought and desire unrestrained; 
 
22 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 that so we prepare a spiritual fate 
 far more important than anything 
 which may befall us here; that 
 nothing therefore matters so much, 
 for ourselves or others, as spiritual 
 attainment. 
 
 Men have always sought a satis- 
 faction that will not change and 
 fail as earthly things do. The 
 saints lived in the presence of the 
 other world. They were so con- 
 scious of it that the natural world 
 lost all its claim, except for pity 
 and help of other lives; and lesser 
 Christians sing the simple hymns 
 of faith, about the heavenly home, 
 the sojourning and pilgrimage 
 here, of our citizenship of another 
 country, with an emotion they 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 23 
 
 hardly understand. Very often 
 they have proved the mystery true 
 by their lives changed to heroic 
 confidence; and when the words of 
 Jesus are understood the hearts of 
 the simple answer instantly, as 
 though they had known it before. 
 But He Himself saw clearly, as 
 noonday, that which to us is only 
 dim. He lived on the plane where 
 the two worlds are self-evident; 
 the one passing away; the other a 
 spiritual life. His talk was of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, beyond and 
 within us; of the prodigal and his 
 homeward longing. He was al- 
 ways unworldly. To Him life was 
 always the concern of the soul. 
 
II 
 
 The Christian and Politics 
 
 THOUGH it may seem at 
 first sight a paradox, the 
 very unworldliness which Chris- 
 tians learn from Jesus makes poli- 
 tics possible to them. In one sense 
 it might be true to say that Jesus 
 had no politics. He who could 
 have given men the perfect 
 government which had been so 
 long dreamed of refused the out- 
 spread kingdoms of the world. 
 That may seem strange to us who 
 
 are so busy with organised means 
 
 24 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 25 
 
 and parties, but to Him man's 
 social troubles were spiritually 
 caused, and spiritually healed. 
 "For from within, out of the heart 
 of man, proceed the evil thoughts, 
 thefts, covetousness," which are 
 the origins of social wrong; and 
 from within, out of the heart of 
 man, the Kingdom of Heaven 
 comes out into the world and 
 clothes itself, if you will, in Acts 
 of Parliament. But the spiritual 
 deliverance is first. The pure in 
 heart will vote right. But to begin 
 from without, to put politics first, 
 as though men were made good by 
 Act of Parliament, is to begin at 
 the wrong end. While there is 
 one covetous heart left social injus- 
 
26 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 tice will still be done. Again, it 
 was self-evident to Jesus, as it is 
 not always to us, that man does not 
 live by bread alone. Our politics 
 are liable to the false hope that if 
 only the disabilities and oppressions 
 of the people were removed and 
 every man had a living wage, short 
 hours, and healthy surroundings, 
 then should we all be happy. But 
 it would not be so. Obviously not ; 
 there are those who have every- 
 thing and yet are miserable. The 
 people are souls, restless until they 
 find rest in God, a truth which fools 
 may deride, but which proves itself 
 again and again, not only in the 
 experience of mystics, but in the 
 flow of life itself in generations, 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 27 
 
 like that which is passing now, 
 which have tried to find happiness 
 in prosperity and now are wonder- 
 fully, half unconsciously, moved by 
 ideals of peace and goodwill which 
 have their source in the pressure 
 of spiritual dissatisfaction. Un- 
 conscious with them, to Jesus and 
 to those who understood His secret 
 of the Kingdom it was self-evident 
 in experience that their power to 
 meet life was given them in those 
 hours, the long night of prayer 
 upon the mountain, or the prepara- 
 tion in retirement, when they came 
 near to the spiritual world, and 
 power flowed into them and the 
 contentment of a life which no out- 
 ward want could spoil. In that 
 
28 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 knowledge it seemed to them not 
 worth while to strive by outward 
 means; they only longed to bring 
 home to other men the truth, self- 
 evident to them, that we are rest- 
 less until we find our home, here, 
 and now, in the overshadowing 
 world of spirit. 
 
 Nevertheless, and this is the 
 complement of the other truth, the 
 Christian life is not only contem- 
 plative, not content to wait always 
 upon its spiritual source, but ac- 
 tive. Jesus came down from the 
 mountains to heal their bodily dis- 
 eases. Life which does not go out 
 to others is dead. And it is their 
 very preferring of the spiritual be- 
 fore all else which makes politics 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 29 
 
 possible to Christians. Political 
 hopes which expect only earthly 
 happiness are impossible to those 
 who with Jesus have seen the 
 world passing away. The King- 
 dom is "in the Heavens/' of an- 
 other order; spiritual. But if life 
 is the concern of the soul it matters 
 a great deal that every soul should 
 have its opportunity. 
 
 It matters that it should be well- 
 born into a healthy body. If the 
 people were only so many hands at 
 work, so many mouths to feed, it 
 would be still vital, from any point 
 of view, military, industrial, aes- 
 thetic; much more if the inward 
 life is the precious and surviving 
 reality; the body is the house of 
 
30 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 the soul ; ill-born it may be the poor 
 soul's burden through all its experi- 
 ence here. 
 
 It matters that the people should 
 be well fed and housed. Starved 
 and in bad surroundings no man 
 can be himself. Harassed by the 
 care of finding somehow daily 
 bread not even the saint escapes 
 temptation and distraction from 
 God. "Brother Body," sick and 
 hungry, drives men to sin. And 
 for the sake of their eternal part it 
 matters that the people should be 
 educated, for the mind feeds the in- 
 ward life; and they must have lei- 
 sure, for some are so busy that they 
 never have time to rest, and dis- 
 cover that they had a soul. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 31 
 
 But to clothe the naked, and feed 
 the hungry, and set free the pris- 
 oned soul, means political action. 
 Charity is not enough. One has 
 heard it said, with a strange per- 
 version of thought, that the poor 
 are always with us, for the exer- 
 cise of our charitable virtues. As 
 though God created them for our 
 salvation! As though His chosen 
 few were to be perfected by the 
 sufferings of these sad vessels of 
 wrath ! Such words are the prod- 
 uct of religious vanity, or perhaps 
 an unconsciously convenient excuse 
 for keeping other people in the sta- 
 tion of life to which we say that it 
 has pleased Almighty God to call 
 them. The Christian's duty is 
 
32 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 something less agreeable; it in- 
 volves soiling our hands with poli- 
 tics and digging down to the roots 
 of the social evils which create the 
 objects of our charity; not neglect- 
 ing the easier virtue, but doing 
 justly and believing uncompromis- 
 ingly that any soul is worth as 
 much as our own. And one must 
 go beyond that; for Jesus never 
 commended bare justice, the eye 
 for an eye, the tooth for a tooth, 
 but the real charity which is not 
 puffed up with the sense of its vir- 
 tue, seeks not its own salvation, and 
 though it gives all its goods to feed 
 the poor knows that it profits noth- 
 ing without the love which is will- 
 ing to give away even its rights. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 33 
 
 One begins with charity for 
 every little child has a charitable 
 heart; when we first heard about 
 the ragged and hungry, we were 
 quick to give, a dinner to waifs 
 perhaps, or a precious penny in the 
 plate. It seemed the only way to 
 ease our heart. Or if later we 
 gave service and listened to the tale 
 of unfortunate and narrowed lives, 
 of wrongs and mistakes, and tried 
 to find a remedy in charity, whether 
 it were money or service, we grew 
 discontented. True, sufferings 
 were relieved and some were drawn 
 out of hopelessness and sent away 
 upon a new life. Charity was a 
 light in dark places. But the dark 
 places were still there. We were 
 
34 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 challenged to something greater 
 than charity. The sovereign 
 tinkled in the plate with a note of 
 mockery. What can money do? 
 Or service? We remember that 
 they paraded our streets with a 
 banner which damned our charity. 
 We saw that charity will never help 
 Lazarus to get up and go away 
 from the gate : he sits all the closer 
 waiting for another dole. But the 
 real evil which made him a beggar 
 we had not touched. Charity is a 
 palliative, not a cure; a salving of 
 conscience, not a complete Chris- 
 tianity. It eases the pain, but only 
 masks the disease. It can give the 
 unemployed food and clothing, but 
 cannot cure unemployment. It 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 35 
 
 can send the sick child into the 
 country to recover from the dis- 
 eases of over-crowding, but it can- 
 not plan healthy towns. Only po- 
 litical action can do that. Charity 
 can advise the poor man cursed 
 with a wife whose drunkenness 
 and unfaithfulness are destroying 
 his children that divorce will cost 
 him a sum which he is never likely 
 to possess; but only the conscience 
 of the community can bring the 
 remedy within his means. Char- 
 ity may turn the eyes of the suffer- 
 ing to a recompense above, but it 
 can never change earth into 
 heaven, nor even into a tolerable 
 purgatory for some. The Chris- 
 tian cannot even give all that he 
 
3 6 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 has to the poor, in charity. That 
 would be only to pauperise the few 
 whom he helps and to bring 
 himself down to their miseries. 
 Neither can pity lead him to go and 
 live in the slums, slum-fashion; 
 there would be only one man the 
 more living wrongly. There is 
 only one way. Does he believe 
 that every man should have the 
 good health which he enjoys? 
 Then for that they need open coun- 
 try. Only an Act of the Legisla- 
 ture can bring the people back to 
 the land. Or he believes that 
 every clever boy and girl should 
 have the chance of the best educa- 
 tion ? Only political action can set 
 up the secondary system which 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 37 
 
 leads from the Common Schools to 
 the University. Or, that every 
 soul should have an equal chance? 
 But the race is unequally handi- 
 capped. No charity nor private 
 effort can start the low-born where 
 the gentleman begins. Only the 
 common will can ensure that all 
 shall be well-born. Only by politi- 
 cal action can we give every soul 
 its perfect opportunity; only as 
 politicians do our Christian duty 
 perfectly. 
 
in 
 
 The Churches and Party Politics 
 
 BUT now we Christians have 
 to accuse one, another. 
 Ours is one faith, the faith of our 
 Lord. We are all for the King- 
 dom of Heaven. We all believe 
 that life is the concern of the soul : 
 we would all understand our Lord's 
 will and do it. But we are divided 
 politically. There are men who 
 worship in the same church with 
 us to whom we cannot talk politics, 
 except jokingly, because of our 
 38 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 39 
 
 divisions. They believe in every 
 political thing which we abhor, and 
 are estranged from us; and yet 
 they have the same Lord, and the 
 same pity at heart. 
 
 We came by the political preju- 
 dices which separate us ignorantly 
 and ingloriously. How many of 
 us are Republicans for instance be- 
 cause we have studied the thing for 
 ourselves? Have we ever read 
 the history of the former Republi- 
 can Party and how it came into 
 existence and was transmuted. 
 Much more, have we ever referred 
 the G. O. P. to our Christian prin- 
 ciples? Are we Tariff Reformers 
 because we are Christians? or did 
 we take up Progressivism or Tar- 
 
40 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 iff Reform or Votes for Women 
 because the party bosses made it a 
 party cry and we discovered argu- 
 ments for our beliefs from the 
 party newspapers afterwards, with 
 their suppressions and half-truths ? 
 Or, our political prejudices are 
 the result of our circumstances. 
 If I am the son of a God-fearing 
 land owner and have seen him deal 
 justly with his tenants because he 
 was a Christian, how can I really 
 understand the Christian Socialist ? 
 If I have been brought up in a New 
 England and strongly anti-Catho- 
 lic home, the head of the Mormon 
 Church and Cardinals of Rome 
 seem to me very strange kinds of 
 Christians. Yet I dare not deny 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 41 
 
 their Christianity. Or, if I am a 
 Syndicalist there seems to be a 
 great gulf of misunderstanding be- 
 tween me and the Christian em- 
 ployer. My prejudices of party, 
 or of outlook, cut me off from other 
 Christians. Yet many of them 
 have given up more for their faith 
 than ever I did. 
 
 Our Lord prayed that we might 
 be one, but we are broken into par- 
 ties. The Enemy has known how 
 to divide us and rule. It may be 
 hard to fix our eyes steadily upon 
 the vision of one creed, common in 
 all its detail and implication, but 
 we have no excuse that we have not 
 together healed the sick and com- 
 forted the miserable. Long ago 
 
42 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 the Church, reunited in action, 
 might have overcome the world. 
 
 Not that we are so little-minded 
 as to believe that our political op- 
 ponents are rogues. The Chris- 
 tian thinks no evil. But the mote 
 in our brother's eye is so obvious, 
 and it must interfere with his sight, 
 and it is our duty to tell him of it. 
 The Baptists, for instance, think 
 so much of John Smyth, the Pres- 
 byterians of Calvin, and the Meth- 
 odists of Wesley. If we could 
 have a sectarian holiday, only for 
 a year, we should be a long way 
 towards peace. There are still 
 disabilities; in England they still 
 think that a "dissenter" is not fit 
 to hold a doctor's degree in divin- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 43 
 
 ity at Oxford, but such wrongs are 
 not mitigated by recalling a bitter- 
 ness two hundred and fifty years 
 past; nor by hard words about 
 bishops; nor by self-praise of the 
 voluntary system. Too eloquent 
 virtues offend friendship; and we 
 are told to turn the other cheek. 
 Our church, Church Catholic or 
 Little Bethel, must not grow to be 
 the false figure of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, lest we become partisans 
 first, the Sons of the Kingdom by 
 after-thought. 
 
 The danger is greatest in politics 
 because no constant reminder is 
 found there of a spiritual purpose. 
 It is thought to be bad taste to 
 speak of religious conviction on the 
 
44 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 platform, as though it savoured of 
 cant, and as though politics were 
 irreligious. That is perhaps why 
 there is a revolt against "politics 
 in the pulpit," a feeling that some- 
 how politics are lo*wer in motive, 
 incongruous almost in those who 
 stand for the highest ideals. And 
 it is true that in political contro- 
 versies Christianity has lost its] 
 charity; we have drawn apart 
 guiltily, doubting whether we do 
 not need a new consciousness of 
 the forgotten life; a rediscovery of 
 the common ground, instead of 
 hard words. While we were fall- 
 ing foul of one another the world 
 has been wondering how these 
 Christians love one another. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 45 
 
 What can we do to remove our 
 divisions? We can examine and 
 suspect our strongest party convic- 
 tions and ask ourselves how we 
 came by them ; what ground in our 
 faith we have for them; and 
 whether that faith excludes the 
 opponent's view. And is our mo- 
 tive pure, or is it complicated with 
 business interests ? Or are we fol- 
 lowing a cry? In the end, do we 
 support this measure or that, this 
 party programme or another, only 
 because it is for the advantage of 
 the Kingdom? Are ours those 
 spiritual politics which lay up eter- 
 nal gain, or have they only a mortal 
 ideal? 
 
 We can encourage in ourselves 
 
46 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 and others the open mind and heart, 
 to try and understand the outlook 
 and convictions of others, and 
 never to hate nor despise those who 
 differ from us. The open mind 
 and heart will mean open speech. 
 We shall not be afraid to talk poli- 
 tics with the Christian of the other 
 party, nor be ashamed to let him 
 see that politics are more to us than 
 party spirit, though simply and 
 without suspicion of cant: neither 
 shall we be pharisaical. We shall 
 not be disappointed. The Chris- 
 tian in him responds ; we shall come 
 to understand each other, at last it 
 will end in common action. 
 
 We shall not be afraid of our 
 own party, though they call us 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 47 
 
 lukewarm and unpractical. Only 
 spiritual results are practical. 
 Death makes all other ends fool- 
 ishness. Besides, the Kingdom is 
 first and last for us. There must 
 always be parties, but we have no 
 use for the spirit which in practice 
 admits no good ; not even in the bet- 
 ter man, on the other side. 
 
 We can pray and talk together, 
 whatever our politics may be, or 
 our social condition. When men 
 pray together in simple sincerity 
 there can be no bitterness in their 
 talk; underneath the outward dif- 
 ference the inward community 
 makes us sure of one another. 
 There is one life, though it express 
 itself in many forms, and for all of 
 
48 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 us the Kingdom is at hand. We 
 would discover together how to 
 make it a real presence. As we be- 
 come sure of one another there will 
 grow up a common will among 
 those who have seen the two worlds 
 and believe that politics are the 
 quest of character and not of pos- 
 sessions. 
 
 It is not a dream: it has been 
 proved strangely easy for Chris- 
 tians of opposite extremes to come 
 together under a common loyalty 
 to Jesus and work out their social 
 duty. Perhaps it is still too early 
 for programmes; but we know 
 what we have to face together. 
 
IV 
 
 "Blessed are Ye Foot" 
 
 BUT is there in the teaching 
 of Jesus any foreshadow- 
 ing of a social ideal? What had 
 He to say about how men should 
 live rightly together? 
 
 Consider what He taught, about 
 poverty and riches. "Blessed are 
 the poor in spirit" : happy are they, 
 whether rich or poor, who have no 
 heart for riches, whose spirit is at 
 liberty for the inward life. Un- 
 happy are they, whether poor or 
 rich, whose soul falls under the 
 
 49 
 
50 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 glamour of possessions and is 
 turned away from God. 
 
 But there is another rendering 
 of the same saying "Blessed are 
 ye poor": "Blessed are ye that 
 hunger now": as though Jesus in- 
 tended an even higher counsel of 
 perfection; that even if a man can 
 be sure of his own heart, yet it is 
 best to be poor in fact ; as He Him- 
 self was, and as the great saints 
 were. It is a hard saying, but the 
 Christian needs above all to per- 
 suade himself and the world of the 
 truth which Jesus taught, even as 
 it seems to us to extravagance, that 
 man's whole life must be centred 
 in the soul; that what he has is 
 nothing to be compared with what 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 51 
 
 he is; for what we have death 
 takes from us, but what we are 
 goes with us always; it is the 
 treasure laid up in Heaven. He 
 meant, simply and really, what He 
 said. Happy are the poor, in 
 spirit and in fact, because they have 
 only the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 We have been afraid to profess 
 His teaching, or half-hearted about 
 it. We have told the children to 
 get on in life, and by getting on 
 have meant getting money, or mak- 
 ing a name for themselves. When 
 little Anne, passing through Cav- 
 endish Square, wished that she 
 might be very rich like the great 
 lady in the chariot, if we had only 
 told the truth and said that the 
 
52 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 charioted lady was no happier than 
 little Anne ! little Anne would have 
 begun to give up wanting chariots, 
 to her eternal advantage. Happi- 
 ness is not having, but being. We 
 used to commend self-help to the 
 poor, but never made it plain that 
 self-help does not mean helping 
 yourself to whatever you can lay 
 your hands on, but helping your 
 soul, yourself. Nor yet have we 
 raised up a saner generation with 
 an ambition to be somebody in 
 themselves, not somebody in the 
 newspapers, not misled into scram- 
 bling to the top of the heap anyhow. 
 We have no right to read His 
 comfortable sayings and turn over 
 the page at the sixth chapter of St. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 53 
 
 Luke's Gospel; nor pass it by as a 
 counsel of perfection. He bade us 
 be perfect. We may not say that 
 it can never be; He Himself was 
 very poor, and many others in His 
 example. It is a plain command, 
 to be poor in spirit, poor in fact. 
 
 To be poor in spirit, poor in fact 
 but He did not say : Blessed are 
 the halt, the maimed, the blind. 
 He spent His life in healing them, 
 and called their disorders the work 
 of devils. He loved that poverty 
 which delivers from the desire of 
 possessions and turns men to God, 
 but He never praised the broken 
 life. He would not have com- 
 mended the condition of those who 
 to-day are crippled by inefficient 
 
54 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 bodies or overcrowding and long 
 hours of work, who, but for the 
 grace of God, are incapable of 
 abundant life. They are like the 
 blind whose eyes He opened, be- 
 cause they can have no eyes nor 
 heart for the things which He 
 said were more than meat and 
 drink. They can never hope for 
 the opportunities which make men 
 whole, but go under and die and 
 stand before the throne of God and 
 tell Him that they never had a 
 chance. With us it is a matter of 
 money, and they have no money. 
 There are eight million men in 
 Great Britain, for instance, whose 
 average wage is only twenty-five 
 shillings (six dollars) a week; and 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 55 
 
 it is a fact, surely unrealised,- that 
 only one-ninth part of the popula- 
 tion of that country belongs to fam- 
 ilies whose income is more than 
 170 ($850.00) a year ; not to speak 
 of the destitute sixteen per cent, 
 of the people of Glasgow living in 
 one-room tenements or the men 
 and women sleeping under the rail- 
 way arches and in the parks of the 
 cities every winter night, "naked 
 and sick and in prison." 
 
 He did not say: Be poor, and 
 ignorant and unhealthy, but : "Be 
 thou made whole. 7 ' If we make 
 war upon ignorance and disease, 
 much more did He; but the differ- 
 ence is that we try to deliver our- 
 selves by forgetting His other ideal, 
 
56 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 of poverty; by growing rich, and 
 out of our wealth buying good con- 
 ditions; while He always remem- 
 bered the deceit of possessions, the 
 fate of the man who pulled down 
 his barns to build greater. An 
 added evil is no cure: to escape 
 from want to riches is to pass from 
 one danger to another. While we 
 rightly demand good conditions, we 
 have to keep always in mind every 
 man's need of poverty. That was 
 His thought, however strange it 
 seems; that men should be whole, 
 and poor. Somehow, if we are to 
 stand fast in His thought, we have 
 to make the right life possible with- 
 out personal possessions; poverty 
 possible without disability. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 57 
 
 It is not so now: poverty to- 
 day is a curse and not a blessing. 
 We compel men, if they would be 
 whole, to struggle for the personal 
 possessions which He forbade, and 
 we deny the best of life to those 
 who obey His command to be poor. 
 Our life is wrong; for, quite 
 plainly and I do not see that there 
 is any honest escape to His mind 
 the ideal is a poverty which enjoys 
 the right conditions which to-day 
 only wealth can win ; for the soul's 
 sake: and, though it seems all but 
 impossible, it must be the Chris- 
 tian's ideal if it was His. Our 
 politics must look to that seem- 
 ing impossibility as their goal. 
 Strange it may be, but then He saw 
 
58 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 life as we do not often and His 
 ideals become ours only at those 
 highest moments when we forget 
 what at other times we call our 
 common sense and rise nearer to 
 the level of His consciousness. 
 Jesus went to the heart of the mat- 
 ter : it is good to be poor, to be de- 
 livered from the desire of dying 
 things, for the soul's sake : and, for 
 the soul's sake, no man must live 
 the broken life. We must be poor 
 without starvation of body or mind 
 or spirit; poor without disability; 
 somehow so change our ideals and 
 ways that it shall be possible to 
 have no personal wealth to lead us 
 astray, and still to lack nothing that 
 is necessary to the perfect life. 
 
V 
 
 Right Poverty 
 
 AFTER all, that is the nat- 
 ural condition of God's 
 creatures; of the birds, for in- 
 stance, whom He bade us consider. 
 Theirs is the holy poverty which 
 had no personal possessions. But 
 the robin who nests in the corner 
 bush has no disabilities ; she is free 
 of the wealth of all my garden and 
 my neighbour's. In the early sum- 
 mer, when her fledglings are hun- 
 gry and she forgets to be afraid, 
 she invades my house, hops on the 
 
 59 
 
60 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 breakfast table, and helps herself to 
 the butter. She has no idea of de- 
 privation. She is as God made 
 her, and as, I suppose, He made 
 man to be, poor, without personal 
 possessions; but she lacks nothing. 
 The whole world is free to her. 
 
 But I am rich unnaturally. 
 There is a fence all round my gar- 
 den and no human being ventures 
 in without my permission. Nature 
 never built a fence in all the history 
 of the world, but she gives every- 
 thing, land and water and air, to 
 every creature. When I buy con- 
 sols the Bank of England is pre- 
 pared with a ritual administered by 
 a multitude of obstructive clerks all 
 to prevent any other person from 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 61 
 
 coming near the little bit of riches 
 which I have appropriated; but 
 there is no such exclusion and pos- 
 session in nature, nor, I suppose, 
 among the angels of God in the 
 seven heavens. Every natural 
 creature, though it possesses noth- 
 ing, enjoys the whole world. Man, 
 in his societies, alone tries to be 
 rich, and has ended in making him- 
 self for the most part miserably 
 poor. 
 
 In fact humanity has turned 
 down a blind alley of social evolu- 
 tion away from nature's path. 
 Long ago nature learned all that is 
 to be known about perfect social 
 conditions. She has often made 
 happy communities. The bees, 
 
62 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 who live by instinct, and therefore 
 by the direct impulse of life, long 
 ago created the communities of 
 which we dream, where every mem- 
 ber in perfect personal poverty en- 
 joys the whole hive. But we are 
 still involved in difficulties because 
 we have not yet rediscovered the 
 paradox of the natural life; of al- 
 lowing to every man, not personal 
 possession, but the common wealth. 
 Doubtless it is our original sin, the 
 desire to possess the creatures for 
 oneself, of which the mystics speak 
 as the origin of the soul's fall from 
 Heaven. But whether we ascend 
 into Heaven for origins or not, at 
 least our social conditions are con- 
 trary to life's practice; and con- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 63 
 
 trary to the thought of Jesus ; and 
 no one will say that we have made 
 of them anything but a failure : for 
 our riches and poverty are both 
 wrong; when we are rich, keeping 
 our wealth to ourselves, how hardly 
 can we pass through the needle's 
 eye; and when we are poor good 
 conditions are forbidden us. Each 
 for himself is forced to get what he 
 can of the world's opportunities. 
 Life becomes a struggle ; an uncon- 
 scious enmity with other men; un- 
 happiness to the Christian who has 
 found out the fact and knows 
 how poverty makes men halt and 
 maimed and blind of soul. Every- 
 where his failure meets him : every 
 man he meets is a reproach. 
 
64 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 Early astir in the morning is the 
 boy who goes from door to door de- 
 livering newspapers. He is an ex- 
 ample which walks in every day 
 through our gate, not an extrava- 
 gant case, but a fair instance, of 
 how under this fate of personal 
 possessions life is crippled. His 
 clothes are poor, his boots rather 
 worse. He himself looks healthy, 
 but not well-grown, and only com- 
 paratively washed. He hurries, 
 when he catches our critical eye, be- 
 cause he should get home to go to 
 the Public School. He is not one 
 of the outcasts of the world by any 
 means, but he will never have the 
 chance which our richer children 
 have. At sixteen he will go to 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 65 
 
 work, after receiving an incomplete 
 education at a school where he will 
 not have met the best boys whose 
 company we others buy for our 
 sons if we can, and where he will 
 not have learnt those manners 
 which we believe in so strongly. 
 He will become perhaps an office- 
 boy, doing dull work, meeting all 
 kinds of men, some foul-mouthed, 
 some gamblers and drinkers, and 
 getting home too tired to have much 
 interest in anything else. Pres- 
 ently he will rise to be a clerk, with 
 better wages and hours, but sink- 
 ing into that narrow outlook which 
 is the inevitable result of the lives 
 of so many thousands like himself. 
 The half of his possibilities will 
 
66 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 never be aroused. He will never 
 be what he might have been if train- 
 ing at the great school and the 
 university, where life and thought 
 are set before us, had been free to 
 all, and not the privilege of per- 
 sonal riches. True, there are some 
 who do a great deal for him. He 
 belongs to a boys' brigade or a club, 
 where they give all their spare time 
 to teaching him responsibility and 
 discipline and straight living; all 
 good indeed, but only charity; and 
 perhaps his worst fate is that he 
 will not rebel, will take it as a mat- 
 ter of course that he had no better 
 chance; or perhaps will fall into 
 that last evil of the middle class, 
 will look down on those less for- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 67 
 
 tunate than himself, and become a 
 snob in his own way. A narrow 
 life, and there are thousands who 
 live like that. 
 
 What is it that closes the world 
 against the newsboy? The privi- 
 lege of personal possessions: the 
 system which prevents a man mak- 
 ing the best of himself unless he 
 breaks our Lord's command to be 
 poor ; the loss, even from our politi- 
 cal dreams, of the natural ideal 
 of poverty without disability. In 
 plain words, under present social 
 conditions a man can hardly be a 
 Christian. He must offend, how- 
 ever much against his will, the 
 greater commandments of Jesus. 
 If he is rich, how hardly can he 
 
68 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 escape the absorption of wealth, or 
 be blessed by poverty. If he is 
 poor, he may be forced to starve 
 the mind and heart with which men 
 serve and love God. Our social 
 system compels him to failure. 
 
 Consider again: what we have 
 been saying may seem extravagant, 
 but it is a matter of spiritual life, 
 and they were not strange ideas of 
 our own which we were using, but 
 the thoughts of Jesus about how 
 men save their souls. He often 
 spoke of the danger of riches; the 
 anxiety for to-morrow; that we 
 may not lay by enough for old age 
 and bring up our children well. 
 He knew how that trouble grows 
 into an absorption of the whole self 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 69 
 
 and leads a man unconsciously to 
 live as though life were a matter of 
 getting rich; as though the posses- 
 sions which every man must one 
 day leave behind were more than 
 character. Or at least that fear of 
 wronging and disabling those near 
 to us prevents the indifference to 
 riches which He praised. If only 
 we could be poor without fear! 
 
 But, now, if it were possible, if 
 good conditions were free to the 
 poorest, the care for riches which 
 distracts men from God would be 
 past. If it were possible to build 
 up a society where these things 
 were not bought and sold but were 
 ours and every man's as common 
 wealth, then we could live the life 
 
70 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 He praised; in perfect personal 
 poverty, like His other creatures. 
 
 It is not impossible. It is al- 
 ready realised in part. Some com- 
 mon wealth, of bare necessities, 
 already exists among us, and in- 
 creases; there are not a few good 
 things which we enjoy .together, 
 however poor we are. We have 
 only to go on as we have begun, 
 but with a fuller consciousness of 
 purpose. For whether we desired 
 it or not, the spirit of Jesus has been 
 abroad and has been speaking in 
 unexpected places. The ideal of 
 personal wealth is a little shaken 
 now. It occurs to us that the pur- 
 suit of it is not so admirable. The 
 eager money-getter is conscious of 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 71 
 
 it himself, and defends himself on 
 the ground that his wealth employs 
 and benefits others. He finds it 
 necessary to excuse himself, and 
 there are some always ready to de- 
 mand his defence. He cannot say 
 simply that his wealth is his and 
 he can do what he likes with it. 
 Personal possessions are no longer 
 sacred. There is the income-tax, 
 for instance, and death duties : they 
 take away our personal possessions 
 and pay them into a common 
 wealth. The rates and taxes pro- 
 vide that part of the world and its 
 privileges which is open to every 
 one; the right to personal safety, 
 through the military and police 
 forces; the means of communica- 
 
72 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 tion, through the Post Office and 
 highways; and some education, 
 through primary and secondary 
 schools. These are the things 
 which already any man may enjoy 
 however poor he is, created by the 
 limitation of personal riches. The 
 established principles of taxation 
 tend towards the ideal which 
 seemed so far off, and the move- 
 ment which may have been uncon- 
 scious is becoming deliberate. 
 There is talk of increasing the com- 
 mon wealth, of extending public 
 education, and housing reform, and 
 provision for old age and against 
 sickness and want of work, by the 
 establishment of public funds and 
 by nationalisation, or by increasing 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 73 
 
 the powers of the community to in- 
 terfere with personal property. 
 The common wealth, the possibility 
 of enjoying good conditions, and 
 still being poor, grows always 
 larger. As the ideals of to-day 
 come to realisation we shall be very 
 near conditions under which we 
 shall be poor without disability. 
 
 The movement is obvious, but we 
 need to make it conscious, deliber- 
 ate. The Christian logic of it is 
 clear. Only by taxing and limiting 
 our private possessions and by pro- 
 viding a common wealth with 
 which to establish healthy condi- 
 tions and wider education, and op- 
 portunity free to the poorest, can 
 the world be opened to the less for- 
 
74 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 tunate of our fellows. To com- 
 plete what is already begun we 
 shall indeed have to give up still 
 more of our personal possessions, 
 deliberately, to the common wealth ; 
 but that is the happy way of finding 
 poverty. But it would be a pov- 
 erty which is not destitution, be- 
 cause the common wealth would be 
 ours as every one's. And if we see 
 the two worlds as Jesus did, and 
 realise that for the soul's sake 
 which lives beyond bodily death it 
 matters immensely whether men are 
 starved in body or mind, or full- 
 grown to live out the best in them, 
 then we are not guiltless until we 
 are glad to be poor with all men, 
 and rich, with them, in common. 
 
VI 
 
 "Blessed Are the Meek" 
 
 AGAIN, He said: "Blessed 
 are the merciful"; 
 "Blessed are the meek" the sons 
 of God, and the inheritors of the 
 earth and disclosed a political 
 economy altogether revolutionary. 
 The meek tradesmen goes into the 
 bankruptcy court : the merciful em- 
 ployer makes little profits. If big 
 men and small men in the City of 
 London were all meek and merciful 
 together, and every lawyer turned 
 the other cheek and agreed quickly 
 
 75 
 
76 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 with his adversary while in the way 
 with him, and if every stock-broker 
 mercifully told every other broker 
 all that he knew about a stock, the 
 foundations of commerce would be 
 shaken. And yet these few words 
 mean that and more. With the 
 simplicity of those who have seen 
 the heart of things, Jesus pro- 
 claimed a morality contradictory 
 to the fundamental laws of evolu- 
 tion. This world was made, not by 
 mercy and meekness, but by nature 
 red in tooth and claw ; by the sur- 
 vival of the strongest, and by fierce 
 competition; and human' society has 
 grown up out of battle and murder 
 and sudden death: the miracle is, 
 not that there is so much that is un- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 77 
 
 merciful and fierce in the earning 
 of our bread, but that there is in 
 it any pity and love at all. What 
 there may be began from Jesus. 
 Hardly could our faith venture to 
 believe in a new economy unless we 
 had already seen His work upon the 
 world. 
 
 More immediately our commer- 
 cial system is the outcome of the 
 last century of laissez faire. Lib- 
 eralism sixty years ago held that 
 every man must be free to exercise 
 his abilities and wealth unre- 
 strained, except from crime: give 
 men liberty, it was said, and the 
 deserving will rise to the top. But 
 so did the cruel and hard of heart. 
 They compelled young children to 
 
78 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 work in factories, and women to 
 haul coal all but naked in mines. 
 And there was room for only a few 
 in the high places ; the rest went un- 
 der; until the merciful could bear 
 it no longer and a great agitation 
 forced the community to become, in 
 the person of the factory inspector 
 or arbitrator of trade disputes, the 
 visible conscience of Christian 
 morality. But we are still com- 
 pelled, lest we starve, to live by the 
 loss of others. As we go up, they 
 go down: as we get custom, they 
 often lose it. Our good bargains 
 are their failures. We win our 
 suit and they pay the costs ; every- 
 where there are people struggling 
 for the same small job. If we 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 79 
 
 were really merciful we should for- 
 give every debtor his debt as God 
 forgives us; should never go to a 
 bargain-sale ; never try to cut out a 
 trade rival ; never do the very many 
 things which every one does, and by 
 the not doing of which the real 
 Christian stands convicted as an ec- 
 centric. The world has still very 
 little use for His perfect men, ex- 
 cept perhaps in the monastery or 
 the workhouse. 
 
 The Christian who sees life as 
 the concern of the soul can only 
 say: So much the worse for the 
 world ; that way man goes down to 
 the beasts. He hates every form 
 of war and is eager to find the 
 escape from individualism and 
 
8o JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 from the old law of the survival of 
 brute strength and cunning, in com- 
 merce and business, because he is a 
 Christian and not the slave of the 
 world. 
 
 The immorality of the com- 
 mercial system is a common-place 
 theme, and I am not trying to per- 
 suade the convinced. But there 
 are Christians to whom the bless- 
 ing of mercy and meekness still 
 seems only a domestic matter; a 
 commendation of gentleness in con- 
 duct and restraint of temper; say- 
 ing kind words and kindly doing. 
 But the Christian life is not so par- 
 tial and tame. It is heroic. It 
 saves the world, man in all his rela- 
 tions : in business, as at home ; and 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 81 
 
 no one can be perfectly Christian 
 in an unchristian world, nor divide 
 his life and be safe. Mercy must 
 become possible in every relation. 
 
 How that may be has, of course, 
 long occupied men's thoughts. 
 The root evil is known to be in- 
 dividualism, the "each for himself." 
 One need not insist upon it: it is 
 the necessity of looking after one- 
 self against others which makes 
 men merciless and violent. We 
 feel that we have to live; and to 
 live must hustle; and if we hustle, 
 some one goes to the wall. 
 
 But now, it is possible, under cir- 
 cumstances, to be diligent in busi- 
 ness, to do with all our might what 
 our hand finds to do, and still not to 
 
82 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 hurt any one else. For example, in 
 any large concern, every manager 
 and clerk, from the top to the bot- 
 tom, may work with all his might 
 at his particular duty and do no in- 
 jury to another clerk at his differ- 
 ent duty. On the contrary, the 
 good work of one helps the other; 
 and the good work of all prospers 
 the business: and if the business 
 prospers all share in its prosperity, 
 for wages rise and there are 
 bonuses or a share in profits for 
 each. Internally a business need 
 never be a strife, but is often a mu- 
 tual benefit. It is an organism, a 
 single life; a body and members 
 who enjoy its good health. The 
 concern in itself may have a real 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 83 
 
 Christian morality : a score of men, 
 or even hundreds, living together 
 in one interest. Only externally, 
 in the rivalry of business with busi- 
 ness, does the struggle continue. 
 
 But now once more, the business 
 may combine, by agreeing prices 
 and outputs, with other concerns, 
 to limit their rivalry; or a trust is 
 formed to control perhaps several 
 combinations. While the trust 
 may still be at war with the public 
 or with another trust, the little 
 group has been enlarged into a mul- 
 titude; all released from the fiercer 
 forms of competition, by a com- 
 munity of interest. Not, maybe, 
 with any conscious Christian im- 
 pulse, the movement indicates a 
 
84 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 way of salvation. Not long ago 
 the Scotch railways were in keen 
 rivalry, cutting rates, racing, and 
 damaging each other's profits. 
 Now, under a measure of under- 
 standing, conference of managers, 
 and a general railway policy, their 
 competition ceases. As by absorp- 
 tion in a common concern it is pos- 
 sible in the small business for a few 
 men to live together Christianly, so 
 for a greater number in a greater 
 organisation; and for a very large 
 number under the largest combina- 
 tions. 
 
 Then, to bring about the same 
 release from the evils of un- 
 restrained individualism in all busi- 
 ness, to create a commercial mercy 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 85 
 
 national in extent, there needs only 
 the last, and logical, and seemingly 
 inevitable, step to a general control 
 of trade, a combining of all com- 
 binations, every business combina- 
 tion and trust, in their ascending 
 order, under one ultimate direction 
 making the trade of the country, 
 not a battlefield of contending in- 
 terests, but an organism in which 
 each plays its part, its good work 
 helping the good work of every 
 other, and the common success be- 
 coming the common profit, as al- 
 ready it is in each lesser concern. 
 We wait only for the extension of 
 the principle upon which every busi- 
 ness is worked to trade as a whole ; 
 for the last conquest by the spirit 
 
86 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 of community as against unmerci- 
 ful self-interest. 
 
 That may appear distant and too 
 simple to be true. But commerce 
 moves that way. Competition is 
 compelling combination. Unre- 
 stricted individualism has worked 
 itself out during the last hundred 
 years until it has become unwork- 
 able. It is dying of its own re- 
 sults. Everywhere there is either 
 a looking for a change, or already 
 a new method; where the traveller 
 finds it always harder to get orders 
 against cut prices, and the Courts 
 are full of small trade-debtors : and 
 on the other hand, where the capi- 
 talist forms his great amalgama- 
 tions, or the workman talks of Syn- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 87 
 
 dicalism; both that they may put 
 an end to disastrous competition, 
 for different purposes no doubt, in 
 a community of interests. The 
 business man has begun to expect a 
 change and to use new methods. 
 The last step may still be far dis- 
 tant; but it is not difficult to see 
 the coming of commercial com- 
 munism, through combinations, 
 working arrangements, trusts, syn- 
 dicalism, co-partnerships, munic- 
 ipal trading. All are signs of the 
 search for mercy. 
 
 But they say: If you destroy 
 the each-for-himself, you remove 
 the impulse which forces the best 
 man to the top: you are flying in 
 the face of nature, which made the 
 
88 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 world by the survival of the fittest. 
 The reply crowds in: The strong 
 man works because he must, be- 
 cause his force of character must 
 have its outlet; because his ability 
 carries him to command. But he 
 will work as thoroughly for the 
 community as for himself; at the 
 head of a national army or navy, as 
 well as in his private interest. It 
 is not self-seeking, but force of 
 character which makes him great. 
 The Christian morality does not 
 wish him weak and careless, but 
 strenuous for the community. Put 
 it to a very simple test: Is your 
 best work done for money, or be- 
 cause you love it ? And if it is true 
 that the natural law requires men 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 89 
 
 to fight for their own hand and con- 
 verts society into a jungle of wild 
 beasts, if that is the law of the 
 world, then Jesus said: "My 
 Kingdom is not of this world/' 
 "Thy Kingdom come," and Chris- 
 tianity has to bring another law 
 into real expression here. It has 
 to find the political path by which 
 mercy and meekness may go to 
 inherit the earth. Individualism, 
 self-interest, is its enemy: the 
 growing spirit of community its 
 hope. 
 
VII 
 "As Thyself" 
 
 "T|^LESSED are ye poor" and 
 JD "Blessed are the meek" 
 both seem to imply common wealth 
 and common control, and so does 
 that third saying, "Thou shalt love 
 thy neighbour as thyself," in which 
 He agreed that the whole duty of 
 man to man is summed up. "As 
 thyself" then there must be abso- 
 lute equality between myself and 
 my neighbour in all opportunity. 
 The two words kill every privilege, 
 of birth or class. How can we be 
 
 loving him as ourself while we con- 
 go 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 91 
 
 sent to his lack and to our unequal 
 excess? As myself, bred in sun- 
 light and gentleness, while he was 
 nursed on the door-step in ugly 
 streets ? And if we look back upon 
 the shining days on the field, the 
 great hours with books, the talk in 
 common-rooms where we grew to 
 ideals and saw visions which have 
 always gone with us; the things 
 which so many others never saw 
 nor heard ; the things we never con- 
 nected with such as they are, until 
 afterwards we found them and 
 knew them and realised their lack 
 of what is precious to any man ; we 
 begin to think that our life, uncon- 
 sciously, was an indifference, little 
 better than hate of our neighbour. 
 
92 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 "As thyself" is fundamental and 
 simple: a love which walks equally 
 with the fisherman and the rich 
 ruler : a will that any man should be 
 as we have been at our highest ; the 
 determination to disperse those old- 
 worldly vanities which love them- 
 selves without even a sense of hu- 
 mour, as though, really, Heaven 
 and Earth and the Waters under 
 the Earth were created as a stage 
 for the little family on the edge of 
 "society," or for the bundle of 
 sables driving down Fifth Avenue. 
 
 "As thyself"; then every man 
 must have the health, and housing, 
 and education -which we have had. 
 But when we come to work for it 
 how can it be? We are not rich 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 93 
 
 enough, nor influential enough, to 
 provide a life like the best for all. 
 Even if we subscribe to funds the 
 money is poured into a bottomless 
 sea. Even if half society set about 
 lifting up the have-nots to an equal 
 level of privilege, the other half 
 would still bear them down. No 
 individual however powerful and 
 generous is equal to the task of re- 
 making the sad conditions of the 
 unprivileged. It can never be the 
 work of private living nor effort. 
 If we are ever to love our neigh- 
 bour as ourself, really and practi- 
 cally, it will only be by creating a 
 public opinion which can make the 
 Christian ideal a reality, as we in 
 our individual weakness never can. 
 
94 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 It will only be by creating, and sub- 
 mitting to, the paramount power of 
 a Christianised state, which shall 
 give every one freely all that isi 
 necessary for the full development 
 of his life. Neither you nor I 
 alone can ever set up the new condi- 
 tions under which we could feel 
 that others were in fact living as 
 ourselves. But we can work and 
 compel the community towards a 
 common wealth, where I shall have 
 no more privilege than another, 
 and he no more than I. 
 
 I am not one of the Utopia-build- 
 ers. They have all been false 
 prophets, because the world grows 
 its own way. Society is not a ma- 
 chine of which one lays down a 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 95 
 
 plan and builds to it, but an organ- 
 ism, which grows, like a tree, by 
 the spirit in it; which indeed we 
 may feed and cultivate well or ill, 
 according to our understanding of 
 its life, but whose form in perfec- 
 tion no one can foretell. While, 
 then, one may see the progress and 
 tendency of social life, how it is 
 passing from individualism to- 
 wards community, it is not possi- 
 ble to describe its final form; how 
 exactly we shall be governed, how 
 live together ; how work out the de- 
 tail of our salvation. The tree of 
 social evolution puts forth a branch 
 here and a leaf there. New Acts 
 pf Parliament or Congress open up 
 a larger liberty; fixing a minimum 
 
96 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 wage; freeing a larger education. 
 It grows here a little, and there a 
 little. But until it is full-grown no 
 one knows what it will be, alto- 
 gether and complete. Only there 
 seems to be a becoming, a growing 
 into the general likeness of our 
 hope. The next advance will re- 
 veal itself, and the final perfection, 
 in its own time. 
 
 I suppose that it is grave sin in 
 the Christian to pray "Thy King- 
 dom come" and disbelieve that his 
 Lord's will must revolutionise so- 
 ciety. But, in darker moods, our 
 slowness of heart makes the hope 
 all but incredible. Perhaps for a 
 hundred who are ready a thousand 
 live by catch-words and prejudices, 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 97 
 
 reheard and repeated, while God's 
 truth goes by unnoticed. To shake 
 the sleeper only rouses him to ill- 
 temper. So often one hears the 
 bitterness of those who will not 
 wake. Or comforts drag men 
 back. Perhaps the money is breed- 
 ing money in business, and they be- 
 gin to spend and give, and, with no 
 consciously selfish motive, resent 
 the pushing and overturning of 
 others; their heart hardens, with- 
 out their knowing it, against what 
 may behind it have the spirit of 
 Jesus. The thorns spring up and 
 choke them. Or some would be 
 still fighting the old battles, fought 
 and won already, and are not 
 easily drawn on to other fellow- 
 
98 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 ships. The old ways which 
 brought them stern victories seem 
 more manly than the newer ap- 
 proaches and understandings in the 
 churches or politics; seem suspect, 
 and a little disloyal in their eyes. 
 Or, the dead-weight of customs, 
 and inbred attitudes of class and 
 tradition which only die out with 
 the generation which lives by them, 
 hold back the current. It must sap 
 imperceptibly and even then the 
 stream flows thinly. It is as 
 though it were the nature of life 
 to tire and harden into immovable 
 forms as its outbursts die away. 
 Or, there is that impenetrability of 
 mind, with its excuses, in hosts, 
 bad and indifferent, against the ex- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 99 
 
 tension of privilege: The poor 
 are all drunken blackguards : Any 
 man by industry and thrift can rise 
 to the top : Why spoil the children 
 with pianos, and the immigrant la- 
 borers with baths? Why make 
 men discontented? Why stir up 
 class hatreds? Why talk about 
 the good of the soul when no one 
 knows anything about God and Im- 
 mortality and spirit? a favourite 
 unreason of those who never tried 
 to learn. Why busy oneself about 
 such things, when life can be lived 
 comfortably? The spirit of prog- 
 ress has to contend against so many 
 ignorances and insensibilities. 
 Sometimes it seems incredible that 
 society can become Christian. 
 
ioo JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 Yet anything is possible to faith : 
 and faith is not believing in the ob- 
 viously impossible, but an energy 
 from an inexhaustible source. It 
 is will and mind inspired of God. 
 It does move the mountains of in- 
 ertia. When belief penetrates a 
 life it is very ready to spread, and 
 begins to work itself out into rea- 
 son, and so to desire and will; and 
 presently the man of faith finds 
 himself speaking of it; and, per- 
 haps to his surprise, others respond, 
 and the company grows and or- 
 ganises and becomes a great power 
 which gathers up all kinds of peo- 
 ple, so that to-day in nearly every 
 civilised country or in worlds lately 
 heathen a belief in a new brother- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 101 
 
 hood, equal and pacific, undermines 
 the old order and shakes men out 
 of their comfort. The new spirit 
 is overturning the world. Call it 
 what you will it may be mixed 
 with bad motives, dangerous in its 
 excesses but if this thing were not 
 from God He would have brought 
 it to nought. And if the coming of 
 the Kingdom tarries because of the 
 hardness of our hearts, God's pa- 
 tience is the sign of final assurance. 
 If He were not sure of victory He 
 would not have spared the world so 
 long. 
 
 But if it still seems incredible 
 and impossible that our faith 
 should compel us to rebuild so- 
 ciety upon another foundation, if it 
 
102 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 startles us as an immediate politi- 
 cal aim, then have we indeed suf- 
 fered the great change of mind 
 which subverts the whole world? 
 Maybe we have become converted 
 towards God; but is our mind 
 changed towards men? Have the 
 words of Jesus about loving one's 
 neighbour as oneself burnt them- 
 selves into life, as though Jesus 
 really meant what He said, that we 
 are to love our neighbour, really 
 and practically, as ourself, no soft 
 amiability Jesus was not a senti- 
 mentalist but a will of the whole 
 man to insist, by overturning so- 
 ciety, if need be, that every one 
 shall have all that the Christian 
 knows to be lovable and good for 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 103 
 
 himself? That Jesus meant, with- 
 out qualification, that there must be 
 actual equality in every good thing 
 between ourselves and the most 
 unfortunate of men? Has His 
 thought so gone with us always, so 
 changed the world for us, that the 
 practical failure of our neighbour- 
 love troubles us all day long and 
 we cannot rest until society is re- 
 made and it is possible to be com- 
 pletely Christian? And do we 
 really want to be poor and earn that 
 blessing? And really want to 
 share the best of life with all? If 
 not, is our Christianity more than 
 sentiment? Have we dared to 
 fathom the whole mind of Jesus 
 and to make it our political ideal? 
 
vin 
 
 Duties 
 
 THE teaching of Jesus seems, 
 then, to look towards com- 
 mon wealth; the condition under 
 which it will be possible to be poor 
 without starving life; to be merci- 
 ful in business; and really to be 
 loving our neighbour as ourself. 
 For when society has taken the con- 
 trol of wealth so far into its own 
 hands, men could live out their life, 
 live out their soul, be neither halt 
 nor maimed nor blind, and still be 
 
 poor : and when it has so controlled 
 104 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 105 
 
 trade that every worker serves, not 
 himself, nor a private master, but 
 the community, self-interest in 
 trade would cease an ideal, very 
 distant no doubt, but we are none 
 the less conscious of a trend that 
 way. The Liberal, putting for- 
 ward the reforms which the occa- 
 sion seems to require, is no longer 
 the individualist of earlier days who 
 left personal liberty and competi- 
 tion to work out their social results ; 
 experience has shown him the 
 necessity, in some measure, large 
 or small, of state control, over 
 hours of work, and conditions and 
 wages; over the possession of 
 wealth itself. He is in the stream 
 which moves towards common 
 
106 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 wealth. So conservatism has be- 
 come a troubled consciousness of 
 the real existence and power of the 
 same movement. Whether we fear 
 it, or whether we see in it the sign 
 of the coming of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven upon earth, it is the pre- 
 occupation of political thought to- 
 day. 
 
 Self-interest enters largely into 
 our feeling. An income dimin- 
 ished by the taxation which is 
 building the common wealth makes 
 the movement a personal concern. 
 Perhaps there is some relief to 
 reluctance in the thought that the 
 Kingdom of Heaven grows like the 
 little yeast in the loaf. Not sud- 
 denly will it overturn society, and 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 107 
 
 maybe there is always room for 
 those who dread to go too fast. 
 They are the brake which prevents 
 the speed which overturns the car 
 of state. But yet, to hang back 
 too much, to be too little willing, has 
 its great dangers. "The wind 
 bloweth where it listeth, and thou 
 nearest the sound thereof, but 
 canst not tell whence it cometh, 
 and whither it goeth." The force 
 is always gathering, the pressure 
 rising; in discontents, strikes, mur- 
 murings : and if there be no outlet 
 the explosion will wreck all that 
 caution wished to save. For it is 
 obvious, very disquieting, that the 
 discontent of those who have dis- 
 covered that they might have much 
 
io8 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 that the rich man enjoys grows 
 louder, with a note of anger, and 
 that it becomes always more con- 
 scious of its power. To beat back 
 the tide is foolishness: besides, we 
 may be fighting against God. He 
 may this way be leading us back 
 from our fallen selfishness to the 
 original unity. 
 
 But if willingly, or unwillingly, 
 sooner or later, the Christian hon- 
 estly trying to understand the mind 
 of Jesus is forced to think that his 
 political idea must be some such 
 condition as this, then there are im- 
 mediate duties before him. First, 
 to see his own property and a com- 
 mon wealth, with mercy and neigh- 
 bour-love, steadfastly and clearly as 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 109 
 
 the ideal; to become accustomed 
 to. the thought until, losing all its 
 strangeness and fear and gathering 
 its proof from daily events and the 
 better understood life and words of 
 Jesus and His nearer followers, it 
 grows welcome and reasonable, as 
 old habits of thought fall away: 
 then, to be himself poor in spirit, 
 poor so far as possible now in fact ; 
 merciful too and loving; and, last, 
 to put himself right politically. 
 
 Of the first little perhaps need be 
 further said. A new thought, a 
 thought perhaps unwelcome, when 
 it has become familiar, changes its 
 appearance. Because it is hard it 
 is all the better as an ideal. Liv- 
 ing much with us it grows strangely 
 
i io JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 simple. We begin to say: Of 
 course He meant it, and, if it is dif- 
 ficult, what more likely? "How 
 very hard it is to be a Christian." 
 
 Of the second duty there can per- 
 haps be no perfect fulfilment now. 
 Any Christian may be poor in 
 spirit, having no heart for riches; 
 the note of his life may be simplic- 
 ity and disregard of personal ad- 
 vantage. So far he fulfils the 
 ideal now. For it comes home to 
 him with a pang of conscience, 
 what right has he to his gay house 
 and good cheer while there are 
 women earning three dollars a week 
 working fourteen hours a day in 
 one unhealthy room ? In them the 
 Christian sees Him, hungry and 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS in 
 
 naked and in prison, and if he shuts 
 his eyes there is that fierce con- 
 demnation of those who said, 
 "Lord! Lord!" and went on en- 
 joying their wealth. Perhaps we 
 do not pray unctuously and live on 
 slum rents; we have not crushed 
 out trade rivals; nor said in our 
 hearts that business is business; 
 ours may not be the life which 
 makes men hate and rail at the 
 churches: but there is the plain 
 command to be poor in spirit, poor 
 in fact. But is it possible while 
 society is still unchanged? If a 
 man has children and divests him- 
 self of the means to provide them 
 jvith a reasonably healthy home 
 and the best education he can af- 
 
ii2 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 ford, he sins, surely, against his 
 nearest neighbour. They are his 
 to care for, not in luxury; but he 
 must comfort them and prepare 
 their spiritual life with those suf- 
 ficient things which he would have 
 all men enjoy. Must they grow 
 up ignorant and narrow-minded, 
 maimed, halt, blind? That would 
 be his sin. If he has not the means, 
 as no man has, of giving to all men 
 what is best, at least according to 
 his power he must do his duty to 
 the few of his own household. 
 That indeed is less that the perfect 
 ideal of poverty: to some it may 
 seem like consenting to evil ; a bow- 
 ing down in the house of Rimmon; 
 like being content with less than 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 113 
 
 full salvation. But is not this the 
 true thought, that no one can be 
 perfectly saved alone; that we can 
 never do the will of God utterly 
 until it is done everywhere on earth, 
 as in heaven: that indeed we have 
 no right to be over-concerned that 
 we may be released from the temp- 
 tation of the world until the same 
 salvation is possible to all? For 
 men are one ; we stand and fall to- 
 gether ; we cannot be perfect Chris- 
 tians singly, but as the body of 
 Christ ; and until the whole body is 
 perfect, the single members remain 
 in imperfection. Few of us can 
 live rightly in utter poverty, until 
 society is changed. But meanwhile 
 if he cannot yet be poor in fact, 
 
ii 4 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 delivered altogether from the temp- 
 tation of dying things, the Chris- 
 tian can attain the spirit of poverty. 
 He has no excuse for luxury; for 
 preoccupation in money-making; 
 for blindness towards the soul. 
 And he has no excuse for forget- 
 ting the larger duty. It must be al- 
 ways upon his conscience ; the sense 
 of the presence and pressure of the 
 ideal, though it seems unfulfilled 
 now. He has to make it possible, 
 for every one, some day soon. 
 
 So he is led to his third, and 
 political duty, in the knowledge 
 that it is not all so much a matter 
 of his own gain, but that the spirit 
 of Jesus comes as a social salvation, 
 not of one nor a few, but of society 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 115 
 
 as a whole. And that can only 
 be by political action. Parliament 
 alone can set up the common wealth 
 which will take away the disabilities 
 that make poverty unholy now, and 
 establish mercy in business, and 
 neighbour-love. The Christian 
 has to go down with his ideal into 
 the political fight. 
 
 It is easy to say hard things about 
 party politics and politicians, and 
 that it is a common theme is a good 
 sign of general repentance. We 
 are growing tired of politics for 
 party's sake, of the fire without 
 light which comforts no one except 
 those who receive their reward. 
 Politics are becoming more real; 
 less oratorical ; less of a career, and 
 
ii6 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 more of a service: and with the 
 change and discounting of ambition 
 the personal bitterness decreases. 
 Perhaps we still wish for our 
 opponents a gentler heart, or a 
 brighter wit, deliverance from in- 
 vincible ignorance; but we hardly 
 think of them as personal enemies. 
 If they cannot see humanity beyond 
 patriotism, they are still patriots; 
 if they do not see the soul beyond 
 material prosperity, the larger vi- 
 sion may yet be theirs. The only 
 enemy is the man who isolates him- 
 self in self-interest, who breaks up 
 the unity of men ; who is not a bro- 
 ther, but a traitor, in the state. 
 The last division is between self- 
 interest and love. It strikes down 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 117 
 
 to the root of good and evil. Love 
 and pride divide heaven from hell ; 
 and here, in politics, it is the ulti- 
 mate and irreconcilable division. 
 One seems to foresee that the last 
 battle, the political Armageddon, 
 will be fought out between love and 
 pride. But among those that have 
 the goodwill there is room for the 
 tolerance of many temperaments, 
 conservative, liberal, socialistic, if 
 at least they all pity and love. 
 
 The Christian's immediate test 
 of man and measures political is 
 simple then: this man who seeks 
 my vote, is he with us or against 
 us? We do not ask whether his 
 creed is ours, nor even whether he 
 has interpreted the mind of Jesus 
 
n8 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 as we did that would be very well 
 if it were so but at least has he 
 pity and love? Or is he looking 
 for a judgeship or a senatorship, 
 or a chance of sitting at the dinner- 
 tables of the rich and powerful? 
 Even if his politics seem right he is 
 not for us, for self-interest in the 
 end will master his politics. But 
 how whole-heartedly could we fol- 
 low the strong, practical man, who, 
 seeing the two worlds as Jesus saw 
 them and knowing that character 
 in the people, the soul which sur- 
 vives, is the object of all well-being, 
 said so, boldly, and asked our vote 
 on that ground only ; the man whose 
 religion is all his policy. 
 
 So with the measures of the day. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 119 
 
 Do they run with the thought of 
 Jesus? Is there love in them and 
 pity ? Are they only for party ad- 
 vantage, appealing to self-inter- 
 est? No further question is need- 
 ed to divide right from wrong; 
 and when between two good meas- 
 ures we look for some nearer test, 
 then the Christian's last ideal, that 
 personal poverty and neighbour- 
 love made perfect and real in a com- 
 monwealth, starts up to try which 
 is the better. If in the words of 
 Jesus we have found the implica- 
 tion of such an ultimate society 
 then it must be always there, the 
 touchstone of all things ; of a new 
 bill or the latest political move. 
 So tried by a constant ideal, politics 
 
120 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 become easy; the Christian knows 
 what he wants; what Jesus wants 
 of him. 
 
 But there remains this, perhaps 
 the most difficult question between 
 the Christian and his politics. Cer- 
 tainly he can join himself to an ex- 
 isting party, and there is always a 
 misfortune in multiplying means; 
 but can he give himself whole- 
 heartedly to Conservatism, or Pro- 
 gressivism, or Prohibitionism, or 
 Suffragism, or Socialism ? Do they 
 not all, in one vital need, fail him? 
 No one of them openly and frankly 
 bases its programme upon a spirit- 
 ual hope; and those to whom that 
 hope is everything can never be at 
 ease until they have taken their 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 121 
 
 stand together upon the true 
 ground. If the Christian too near- 
 ly identifies himself with other 
 ideals; if he finds in his adopted 
 party no expressed and open Chris- 
 tian bond, nor declaration first and 
 foremost of a more logical and 
 practical motive than any desire 
 satisfied here, he may forget his 
 ground, or come to neglect it, and 
 so fall into the unreason of the 
 world. He needs a fellowship, not 
 at war with other parties, nor 
 spoiled by party spirit ; ready indeed 
 always to join with others in com- 
 mon purposes; but a fellowship 
 which before the world professes, 
 in its politics, a faith which no 
 other party has yet acknowledged. 
 
122 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 When he has made the unworld- 
 liness of Jesus his own, and turned 
 the world upside down, and car- 
 ried its centre beyond dying things, 
 has wholly abandoned, as he must, 
 all other perishable hopes and let 
 the true hope invade all his 
 thoughts, no lesser faith can sat- 
 isfy him. Even if many in other 
 parties are on the right side, still 
 their party cries are not unworldly : 
 to him they are incomplete, illog- 
 ical, unsafe. 
 
 Then, again, does any party go 
 to the length of the Christian ideal? 
 Conservatism, at its best, means the 
 preservation of existing order; 
 slow changes, if any. It is afraid 
 of subversions. How do we know, 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 123 
 
 it says, if all that you desire comes 
 to pass, that men will be, the hap- 
 pier? It seems to lack faith; as 
 though better days were unlikely 
 and man's visions were delusive, 
 not inspired of God : as though God 
 had given up the lost world: as 
 though society were not a living, 
 growing thing, but a mechanism not 
 to be tampered with lest it burst 
 in pieces. Is not that little faith 
 impossible to those who have the 
 sense of the Kingdom of Heaven 
 ready to break out into the world, 
 if men were willing? Has the con- 
 servative Christian understood how 
 the Spirit of God moves every- 
 where, as in the Church, so in the 
 world, which, in its discontents and 
 
124 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 disorders, groans and labours to- 
 wards a new creation? 
 
 Liberal thought again, though 
 it has many shades, is still col- 
 oured by individualism. Its 
 scheme is liberty, of thought, of re- 
 ligious belief, of commercial en- 
 terprise; and it has the true credit 
 of having overturned many tyran- 
 nies. But its essential concern is 
 for the rights of the individual. 
 It defends the man against un- 
 fair burdens; against the land- 
 lord, or the privileged church or 
 class. It is a demand for justice 
 that second-rate virtue the eye 
 for an eye, the tooth for a tooth, 
 which Jesus never praised: and 
 perhaps, with some, a little lack- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 125 
 
 ing in imagination, the rights of 
 others, or the overright of the 
 community, do not weigh so strong- 
 ly in the balance against the suf- 
 fering they have themselves borne. 
 With that bias of mind it is not 
 always easy to question one's own 
 privileges, the right to the power 
 or wealth which our free energy 
 has won for us. The admiration 
 of liberty is sometimes hurt by the 
 suggestion of the greater right of 
 the community: or that no right 
 must ever become privilege ; or that 
 society may interfere with a man's 
 business or personal expenditure. 
 It begins to talk about grand- 
 motherly legislation or govern- 
 ment by an army of officials. Per- 
 
126 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 haps it is true to say that Liber- 
 alism does not always see society 
 as one; that it is individualistic, 
 imperfectly communistic. Again, 
 it has, it seems, no final ideal. 
 Here and there, where an abuse is 
 urgent, it does its work; but not 
 with a sure purpose towards a state 
 of society which it long ago imag- 
 ined and is always working for. 
 It is opportunist; therefore random 
 rather; and so far less effectual 
 than a further-sighted policy might 
 be. It has not the clear vision 
 which saves politics from by-ways. 
 So it is, perhaps because of a 
 sense of this defect, that Liberal- 
 ism shades off into Socialism; for 
 the socialist knows what he wants, 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 127 
 
 he has a theory and a Utopia ; and 
 his ideals look very like the neigh- 
 bour-love, expressed in community, 
 which we believe is implied in our 
 Lord's teaching. It is the party 
 which tempts many Christians, to 
 which many profess adhesion. In 
 practice the Christian is often with 
 the socialist. He might be with 
 him whole-heartedly but for the 
 doubt that Socialism, abroad in 
 Germany and France, at home and 
 in English - speaking countries, 
 though not so markedly, is materi- 
 alistic, dislikes religion, perhaps not 
 unreasonably because so often the 
 churches seem to fight for privilege. 
 If it had a new knowledge of what 
 Christianity means to its followers, 
 
128 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 if it were captured by the spiritual 
 impulse, it might yet be, it may be, 
 a political expression of Christian- 
 ity; and if a Christian may do a 
 work of more use to-day than any 
 other, it would be to convince the 
 great mass of Socialism that the 
 one thing it lacks is the knowledge 
 of the futility of materialistic 
 hopes, a sense of God and the soul, 
 an understanding of Jesus. 
 
 Meanwhile men of like thoughts 
 draw together and begin to work 
 together, inevitably if the principle 
 which binds them is not present in 
 its purity elsewhere. Others are 
 not against them, nor yet alto- 
 gether on their side. The Church 
 can only be satisfied with its own 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 129 
 
 more perfect knowledge of what 
 life is. In that knowledge it must 
 have a policy of its own. It should 
 be enough for a man to say that he 
 is a Christian and every one should 
 know his politics ; that he has made 
 the mind of Jesus his own ; His su- 
 preme concern for the soul; His 
 ideals of personal poverty the 
 freedom from the desire of dying 
 things ; of mercy in all relations ; of 
 real neighbour-love. All Chris- 
 tians belong to the Church Mili- 
 tant ; not yet, perhaps, with a single 
 policy and ideal, though every day 
 one sees and reads the signs of 
 awakening purpose, the call to 
 service from many quarters. The 
 Church, with the driving power of 
 
130 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 faith, can in the end have no rival. 
 It may swallow up all parties; be 
 the one great party. If it moves 
 weakly it is because Christianity is 
 divided and has not yet wholly un- 
 derstood, nor accepted, the mind of 
 Jesus. But even now Christian 
 principles can be the sole politics of 
 a growing number. Whatever 
 their present parties, they have a 
 common spirit which must draw 
 them into a more satisfying fellow- 
 ship. 
 
rx 
 
 The Church and the World 
 
 A LAST thought remains, 
 and leads back to the be- 
 ginning: Jesus left His Church in 
 the world, but is she there only to 
 send out her Christians to change 
 the world into the image of her 
 Lord's ideal? or is she something 
 more, peculiar and unworldly? 
 Has she not a larger and ultimate 
 mission, looking beyond the world? 
 While we are gone away upon the 
 work every steeple points to heaven, 
 and every sound of singing through 
 open doors answers the old ques- 
 131 
 
132 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 tions, whence men come and 
 whither they go, why they suffer 
 and for what are we at work. 
 
 For we need something more from 
 the Church than the stimulus to 
 politics: we ask for an unshakable 
 reason for it all. Consider it is 
 a good thing to stand aside or be 
 compelled to rest for a time, and so 
 as the quieted mind clears to find 
 ourselves asking what we were so 
 busy about, the last question if all 
 that we seek were realised, what 
 then? If our Lord's ideals became 
 realities, in some future age when 
 men were poor and merciful and 
 shared together all good things, 
 what then? Sometimes we seem 
 to work as though the end were 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 133 
 
 here; but, if so, the ground trem- 
 bles under our feet. Just as our 
 own life is meaningless if bodily 
 death ends all, and our struggling 
 to be the best that lies in us would 
 be wasted when we die, so, on a 
 greater and more dreadful scale, 
 all effort, however rightly aimed, 
 however Christian, to better man's 
 state, is wasted if it looks for an 
 earthly result, because the Earth is 
 no more immortal than our body. 
 
 There is a star in Orion which 
 seems fainter, vaguer, than its 
 neighbours. It is in fact a nebula 
 coiled and scattered through space 
 vaster by far than the length and 
 breadth of the solar system. They 
 say that it is a universe in birth. 
 
134 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 Out of such a cosmic cloud the sun 
 and its planets were formed. 
 Through time so long as to be 
 meaningless to thought the nebula 
 contracted, and grew hot, and 
 threw off stars, lesser or greater, 
 circling about the central sun. Ac- 
 cording to their mass so was the 
 life of the stars. The Sun is still 
 a fire immeasurably hot : the planet 
 Jupiter is still cloud and vapour not 
 yet become solid. But the Earth is 
 past her youth ; long ago the outer 
 cold froze upon her surface, and 
 filled her shrunken sides with seas, 
 and clothed her in the blue mantle 
 of air. Upon her breast life came 
 up, fish and bird and beast, and 
 man last of all. 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 135 
 
 Her old age and death are fore- 
 told in the nearer skies. The as- 
 teroids swimming in nameless mul- 
 titudes through outworn orbits died 
 long ago because they were little. 
 Mars our neighbour is very old: 
 already his seas are dried up ; there 
 is no water there except in the ice- 
 caps of the poles ; the planet's sur- 
 face seems a dry plain of red-brown 
 sand. Schiaparelli and Lowell 
 have thought that the curious lines, 
 the "canals" they called them, may 
 be tracks of harvest fields beside 
 water-ways led down across the 
 long deserts from the polar ice. If 
 there are living creatures there, 
 like ourselves perhaps but older, 
 wiser for the water-ways, if such 
 
136 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 they are, pass unbroken over all 
 their world as though universal 
 peace were there they live by the 
 summer melting of the polar ice. 
 But the ice shrinks, and if the har- 
 vests fail their end is not far away. 
 Nearer still Earth's death is 
 foretold. The Moon is without air 
 and water, cold and barren. As 
 she is, so Earth will be. The cold 
 of space will chill her heart, the 
 water fail, the atmosphere shrink; 
 and man, some day when all his 
 labour has at last brought happi- 
 ness and social justice, will pass 
 away for ever. What then are we 
 working for? Is our fate, not a 
 tragedy, but an unspeakable stupid- 
 ity? 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 137 
 
 Any matter seems a stupidity if 
 one sees only half of it. If we only 
 know this world, life of course is 
 foolishness. But when we see it 
 as Jesus did, it becomes right and 
 reasonable; for He said that there 
 was another world, beyond, within, 
 overshadowing and interpenetrat- 
 ing the dying world, a life, soul, 
 spirit, for which this world is. 
 What should it profit a man if he 
 gain the whole world and lose his 
 soul ? What shall it profit human- 
 ity if they make the dying earth a 
 paradise and cast away their imper- 
 ishable part? No thought which 
 recognises only this world can an- 
 swer the question why we suffer 
 and why we work, nor escape from 
 
138 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 the dilemma of human mortality. 
 Only when with Jesus we have seen 
 the two worlds can we find hope in 
 life and death, man's suffering and 
 trial, and the ideals which drive us 
 to work. 
 
 What did He say about suffering 
 and work? God is our Father, in 
 the heavens, of another plane and 
 order; Spirit, whose children we 
 are. And as children He deals 
 with us. Ourselves, if we are 
 wise, so deal with our sons and 
 daughters. We might make their 
 life perfectly easy and painless; if 
 we are foolish, wrap them away 
 from all necessity of effort. We 
 might give them all that they want, 
 as some say God, if he would, 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 139 
 
 might give us all we have not. 
 But we should condemn ourselves 
 if we so dealt with our own chil- 
 dren; so spoilt them; without inde- 
 pendence, with everything done for 
 them, and every trial which makes 
 strong character kept from them, 
 they grow up poor creatures. 
 God, in His wisdom and love, is no 
 worse father than we are; so it is 
 that He does not do everything for 
 us, but leaves us to work out our 
 salvation, overcoming by our own 
 effort and increasing knowledge 
 the diseases of the body, the igno- 
 rances of the mind, the social in- 
 iquities, which are indeed troubles, 
 but stepping-stones to power and 
 character. Out of his trials and vie- 
 
140 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 tories man that was a child grows 
 to be a Son of God knowing good 
 and evil, because His Father, wise 
 and loving, leaves him to fight his 
 own battles. But even that is only 
 half the truth, for the Kingdom in 
 the heavens, the spiritual plane and 
 order, enters into this world, is 
 within us, and in it we are com- 
 forted in sorrow, strengthened in 
 work, and there store up the ever- 
 lasting gain. Our outward condi- 
 tions are but the school of the soul; 
 this world is for the other, body for 
 soul; earth's life for the spiritual 
 order. Neither is any sorrow nor 
 trial more than we can bear. Even 
 if we die of it We do not die; it is 
 only that the old half-blind thought 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 141 
 
 that death is the end of all things, 
 still deceives us. If we saw it as 
 God may, as the opening into some- 
 thing larger, the leaving school, an 
 episode in life, we should think of 
 it with gladness. So, as Jesus re- 
 vealed Him, God is our Father; 
 Earth is the school of the soul; its 
 sorrows make character ; He leaves 
 us to fight our battles for our own 
 good; He comforts our spirit and 
 when we see life whole we may un- 
 derstand His goodness, whence we 
 come and whither we go, why man 
 suffers. And why we work to bet- 
 ter the earthly life, are politicians 
 and social reformers? Because 
 the better the school the better the 
 scholar : the stronger the body and 
 
i 4 2 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 mind the greater the opportunity 
 of spiritual gain: because the only 
 justification of political ideals is 
 that they make character and soul. 
 Other justification we have none: 
 body and brain perish, the world 
 passes away, only spiritual gain is 
 worth working for. 
 
 That we may easily forget in our 
 business with politics, and it is to 
 this that the Church is witness. 
 Though she sends her people out to 
 work and change society she has 
 herself a larger duty; to be an ever- 
 lasting answer to the reason of 
 work, why we are here, why we do 
 good. 
 
 In the old metaphor, man's soul 
 passes through this world a trav- 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 143 
 
 eller in a foreign land. If any set 
 up their tent in a pleasant place, or 
 grow weary, the Church calls to 
 them: This is not your rest; here 
 we have no abiding city: and 
 no soul that understands would 
 wish to stay, for the other land is 
 much better. Though Great-Heart 
 makes the rough places smoother 
 and the journey easier, it is not that 
 the foreign land may become so 
 pleasant as to detain the travellers, 
 but that they may be hastened on 
 their way. The way will always 
 be hard. There will be dark val- 
 leys where some one vanished ; long 
 hills where the heart laboured; 
 waste places and dryness; and 
 friends who went another way. 
 
144 JESUS AND POLITICS 
 
 But every traveller who reached 
 the end went home the manlier, and 
 made the path more plain for 
 others; so that there are always 
 more who go down confidently to 
 the last black river and climb out 
 upon the other side at the foot of 
 the shining city. And as they go 
 up to the gate they know why they 
 were sent on that journey, because 
 they are stronger grown through 
 hardships than when they set out. 
 It was a stern and rugged place 
 and in its gloom they were often 
 near to forgetting and doubted the 
 King's goodness, but now it is all 
 made clear, and even the dark river 
 was not really dreadful. 
 
 What shall it profit a man if he 
 
JESUS AND POLITICS 145 
 
 lose his soul? Blessed are the 
 poor, for theirs is the undying 
 Kingdom. He healed the disabled 
 and evil-haunted. He would have 
 every man whole and sane, and 
 poor, for his soul's sake. And 
 blessed are mercy and neighbour- 
 love. Then, His will is not done 
 until the best has become ours and 
 every man's, whatever it mean ; un- 
 til we have made life's good a com- 
 mon wealth, surrendering our priv- 
 ilege, accepting His poverty. To 
 be delivered from the desire of dy- 
 ing things ; to share the best of life 
 with all men, so to help them on the 
 way; is not that the wisdom not of 
 this world? 
 
 THE END 
 
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