BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS.
 
 BOOKS BY GEORGE D, HERRON. 
 
 Published by T. Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 H Plea for the Gospel. 
 
 i6mo. Cloth. Gilt top $ .75 
 
 the flew Redemption. 
 
 i6mo. Cloth. Gilt top .75 
 
 Paper 40 
 
 the Christian State. 
 
 i6mo. Cloth. Gilt top 75 
 
 Paper 40 
 
 Social meanings of Reii^ous experiences. 
 
 i6mo. Cloth. Gilt top 75 
 
 Paper 40 
 
 iScKvccn Caesar and 3esus. 
 
 i6mo. Cloth. Gilt top 75 
 
 Paper 40 
 
 Published by the FLEMING H. REVELL 
 COMPANY. 
 tlit Earger Christ. 
 
 i2tno. Cloth. Gilt top 5-75 
 
 Paper 25 
 
 Clje Ss.il of the Cross. 
 
 i2mo. Cloth. Gilt top 75 
 
 Paper 25 
 
 Che Christian Society. 
 
 i2mo. Cloth. Gilt top 75 
 
 Paper 25 
 
 " Dr. Herron thinks and speaks as one who is under 
 the compulsion of heavenly visions and voices. He is 
 haunted by his subject. He does not argue, nor specu- 
 late, nor balance a number of conflicting theories, nor 
 guide his readers to a mild and inconclusive issue of 
 alternatives. Like a true pro,;het of Gud, he sees, he 
 declares, he warns, he denounces, he appeals." — Rev. 
 Charles A. Berry, D.D., Wolverhampton, England.
 
 Between Caesar and Jesus 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE D. HERRON 
 
 A course of eight Monday-noon lectures given in Willard Hall, 
 Chicago, for the Christian Citizenship League, upon the subject of 
 the relation of the Christian conscience to the existing social system, 
 beginning October 2\ and closing December 12, 1S9S. 
 
 EIGHTH THOUSAND 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1899, 
 By Thomas Y. Croyvell & Company. 
 
 C. J. PETERS & SON, TYPOGRAPHERS, 
 BOSTON.
 
 nrj 
 
 i 
 
 «0 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 CO 
 CO 
 
 CT> 
 
 cc 
 
 H43b 
 
 L- TO 
 
 C fHo Colleagues m tljc Jacultg of Eofoa College, 
 
 3 
 
 "HI TO WHOSE NOBLE TOLERANCE AND 
 
 SELF-DENIAL 
 
 L 
 
 & I AM GREATLY INDEBTED. 
 
 s 

 
 For the body is not one member, but many. . . . And 
 whether one member suffer; all the members suffer with it ; 
 or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it. 
 
 — Paul.
 
 A PREFACE FROM PLATO. 
 
 " And can there be any greater evil than discord and dis- 
 traction and plurality where unity ought to reign? or any 
 greater good than the bond of unity?" 
 
 " There cannot." 
 
 " And there is unity where there is community of pleasures 
 and pains — where all the citizens are glad or sorry on the same 
 occasions? " 
 
 " No doubt." 
 
 " Yes; and where there is no common but only private feel- 
 ing, that disorganizes a state — when you have one-half of the 
 world triumphing and the other sorrowing at the same events 
 happening to the city and the citizens? " 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 " Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement 
 about the terms 'mine' and 'his' ?" 
 
 " Exactly." 
 
 " And is not that the best ordered state in which the greatest 
 number of persons apply the terms ' mine ' and ' not mine ' in 
 the same way to the same thing? " 
 
 "True, very true." 
 
 " Or that again which most nearly approaches the condition 
 of the individual — as in the body, when but the finger is hurt, 
 the whole frame, drawn toward the soul and forming one realm 
 under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes 
 all together with the part afflicted, and then we say that the man 
 has a pain in his finger; or again, in any other part, when 
 there is a sensation of pain or pleasure at suffering, or allevia- 
 tion of suffering, the same expression is used? " 
 
 "Yes," he replied, "that is as you say; and I agree with 
 you that in the best ordered state there is the nearest approach 
 to this common feeling which you describe." 
 
 "Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good 
 or evil, the whole state will make his case their own, and either 
 rejoice or sorrow with him? " 
 
 "Yes," he said, "that will be true in a well ordered 
 state."
 
 Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of 
 matter of a dull gloomy color between the south and the east, 
 and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great 
 misery as they could be and live, and that I was mixed with 
 them, and that henceforth I might not consider myself as a dis- 
 tinct or separate being. — John Woolman.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PACE 
 
 I. The Ethical Tragedy of the Economic Prob- 
 lem x 3 
 
 II. The Social Sacrifice of Conscience ... 43 
 
 III. Public Resources and Spiritual Liberty. . 73 
 
 IV. Christian Doctrine and Private Property, 105 
 V. The Conflict of Christ with Civilization, 143 
 
 VI. The Conflict of Christ with Christianity, 179 
 
 VII. Industrial Facts and Social Ideals . . .213 
 
 VIII. The Victory of Failure 249
 
 The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in 
 the soldier's work seems to be — that he is paid little for it — 
 and regularly: while you traffickers, and exchangers, and 
 others occupied in presumably benevolent business, like to be 
 paid much for it — and by chance. I never can make out how 
 it is that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his 
 trouble, but a peddler-errant always does; — that people are 
 willing to take hard knocks for nothing, but never to sell 
 ribands cheap; — that they are ready to go on fervent crusades 
 to recover the tomb of a buried God, never on any travels to 
 fulfil the orders of a living God; — that they will go anywhere 
 barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well bribed to prac- 
 tise it, and are perfectly ready to give the gospel gratis, but 
 never the loaves and fishes. — Ruskin.
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ETHICAL TRAGEDY OF THE 
 ECONOMIC PROBLEM.
 
 Let us take the law of the competitive struggle for existence — 
 which has been looked upon by political economists (perhaps with 
 some justice) as the base of social life. It is often pointed out that 
 this law of competition rules throughout the animal and vegetable 
 kingdoms as well as through the region of human society, and there- 
 fore, it is said, being evidently a universal law of nature, it is use- 
 less and hopeless to expect that society can ever be founded on any 
 other basis. Yet I say that granting this assumption — and in reality 
 the same illusion underlies the application of the word " law " here 
 as we saw before in its social application — granting, I say that com- 
 petition has hitherto been the universal law, the last word, of nature, 
 still if only one man should stand up and say, " It shall be so no 
 more," if he should say, " It is not the last word of my nature, and 
 my acts and life declare that it is not," then that so-called law would 
 be at an end. He being a part of nature has as much right to 
 speak as any other part ; and as in the elementary law of hydrostatics 
 a slender column of water can balance (being at the same height) 
 against an ocean — so his will (if he understand it aright) can balance 
 all that can be arrayed against him. If only one man — with regard 
 to social matters — speaking from the very depth of his heart says, 
 "This shall not be: behold something better;" his word is likely 
 stronger than all institutions, all traditions. And why ? Because in 
 the deeps of his individual heart he touches also that of society, of 
 man. Within himself, in quiet, he has beheld the secret, he has seen 
 a fresh crown of petals, a golden circle of stamens, folded and slum- 
 bering in the bud. Man forms society, its laws and institutions, and 
 man can reform them. Somewhere within yourself, be assured, the 
 secret of that authority lies. — Edward Carpenter.
 
 Between Caesar and Jesus. 
 
 i. 
 
 THE ETHICAL TRAGEDY OF THE 
 ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 
 
 It cannot be wondered at that this general inquest into abuses 
 should arise in the bosom of society, when one considers the practi- 
 cal impediments that stand in the way of virtuous young men. The 
 young man, on entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments 
 blocked with abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the 
 borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) 
 of fraud. — Emerson. 
 
 I do not come to you, in this lecture course, 
 as one bringing any private revelation, or hav- 
 ing special information to give. I do not ex- 
 pect to answer all the questions I shall raise, 
 or to solve the problem I shall state. I am 
 a fellow-sufferer with you in the wrongs which 
 have intensified and grown mightier since we 
 first began to discuss the social question, and 
 a fellow-seeker with you of the truth that has 
 power to set us free. If what I say has any 
 13
 
 14 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 quickening value, which is all I hope for it, 
 it is only because I shall articulate what is 
 most common in your thought and feeling, and 
 most potent in your sympathy and faith. My 
 purpose is to first state the crisis we all feel, 
 and I shall not go beyond that in this open- 
 ing lecture ; in subsequent lectures, I will try 
 to point out what seems to me the position 
 of a disciple of Christ in that crisis. 
 
 We live near the culmination of a social 
 system. Over the chaos and strife we call 
 civilization there broods the thought of love 
 as law, changing the motives that make and 
 remake the world. From the midst of our 
 devouring industrial monsters rises the crea- 
 tive dream of equality and harmony. And this 
 dream has already become a full-born working 
 ideal, growing in stature and in favor with 
 men. Unto us this child is born, and upon 
 its shoulders will the government of the peo- 
 ples be. For industry is about to be carried 
 over from the individual to the social or spirit- 
 ual plane. 
 
 So far as industrial organization has gone, 
 man has been treated and associated as a crea- 
 ture for producing things. Upon the new plane, 
 the production of things will be treated and 
 organized as a means of associating men for
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 1 5 
 
 their spiritual education and liberty. The ques- 
 tion of how to do this, or whether it can be 
 done at all, is the social question, of which 
 the world is so full, and the pressure and pain 
 of which no conscience escapes or any longer 
 denies. 
 
 Broadly speaking, the social problem is a 
 problem of how to so organize the world that 
 all men may be equally secure in the material 
 means and social resources needful for a com- 
 plete life. The hope of the social reformer is 
 to open wide the gates of opportunity, so that 
 every creature, from the least to the greatest, 
 may make his life a moral adventure and a 
 joy, and exhaust his possibilities in the thing 
 he can best do. All that is good in civiliza- 
 tion must be for the equal use of all, in order 
 that each man may make his life most worth 
 while to the common life and to himself ; and 
 there must be equal freedom for each to choose 
 the work that will best fulfil his serving ca- 
 pacity and individuality. 
 
 Along with the culmination of the social 
 system, indeed at the very heart of it, is cul- 
 minating a new kind of conscience. The re- 
 sponsibility of the individual for the whole 
 human life, the responsibility of the whole for 
 each individual, is its distinct mark and quality.
 
 1 6 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 The individual feels himself enslaved and op- 
 pressed in the enslavement and oppression of 
 his brethren ; he feels himself guilty of his 
 brother's blood in every custom or necessity 
 that makes for poverty, ignorance, and defence- 
 less toil ; he feels himself a traitor in the 
 prosperity which political debauchery builds on 
 the prostrate bodies of citizens, a destroyer in 
 the luxury that feasts on the flesh of boys and 
 girls, of women and men. No longer is it pos- 
 sible for men to be content to have, while their 
 brothers have not. The physical misery of the 
 world's disinherited is becoming the spiritual 
 misery of the world's elect. Superior privi- 
 leges of any sort now carry with them the 
 sense of shame. The disgrace of wealth, the 
 puerility of culture, the corruption that inheres 
 in the possession of power, are making them- 
 selves widely and deeply felt. Few are so lost 
 as to escape the feeling that superiority is a 
 thing to be expiated in social sacrifice. " Now 
 at last," says Professor Marshall, "we are set- 
 ting ourselves seriously to inquire whether 
 there should be any so-called lower classes at 
 all : that is, whether there need be large num- 
 bers of people doomed from their birth to 
 hard work in order to provide for others the 
 requisites of a refined and cultured life, while
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. I 1 / 
 
 they themselves are prevented by their poverty 
 and toil from having any share or part in that 
 life." Thus the might and right of the social 
 problem, with the immensity and intricacy 
 thereof, are matched by the honesty and the 
 searching subtlety of the new conscience. 
 
 In the light of the social awakening, there 
 has come to men the vision of a life and destiny 
 which belong to the race as a whole ; a race life 
 and destiny in which all individuals are to share, 
 yet which is altogether more than the mere sum 
 of individual lives and destinies ; just as a col- 
 lege is more than the faculty, students, and edu- 
 cational machinery that happen to be present 
 in any given year. The new conscience is 
 teaching the individual that his life is a function 
 of this race life, and that he can fulfil his indi- 
 viduality only through fulfilling this function. 
 " A man passes like a traveller through the 
 world," says one of Henryk Sienckiewicz's Po- 
 lish knights ; " and should not be concerned for 
 himself, but only for the Commonwealth, which 
 is and must be without end. Amen ! " 
 
 This conscience is the precipitation of the 
 idea and initiative of Jesus ; it is the effectual 
 working of the leaven which he put into man- 
 kind eighteen centuries ago. Slowly it has 
 been leavening the Greek world of mind and
 
 1 8 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 beauty ; slowly the Roman world of law and 
 power ; slowly the Teutonic world of individ- 
 uality and organization. Out of the whole 
 slowly issues the universal democracy, which is 
 to sacredly unfold every individuality, and rev- 
 erently receive its contribution, from the dog 
 and the ape to the poet and the statesman, the 
 artist and the saint. " A new mankind," says 
 Henry D. Lloyd, "has been conceived and will 
 be born — a winged beauty out of the earth- 
 measuring worm — which will not know force, 
 and fraud, and hatred, and will let love, their 
 natural tie, bind men and nations together." 
 
 When I call the new conscience Christian, I 
 do not use the word in any professional or piet- 
 istic sense. I do not mean that any particular 
 form of religion need be accepted. The social 
 awakening does not come in the names or terms 
 of Christianity. It comes without observation, 
 almost as a new religion springing up from the 
 human soil. Its most manifest activities and 
 evolutions are unconscious of their relation to 
 him we call Christ. The truest faith of to-day 
 rejects much that is preached and professed as 
 Christianity. Many things done in his name 
 are the things which Jesus stood against ; and 
 the things he stood for are done by many who 
 call themselves materialist or agnostic. The
 
 TRAGEDY OP THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 1 9 
 
 atheist or profligate with human sympathies 
 and social ideals may be elementally Christian ; 
 while the professional Christian of faultless 
 morality, conserving only his material and reli- 
 gious interests in the existing order of things, 
 may be in fact solidly atheistic. We speak of 
 our free-school system as secular ; but it is 
 probably our most concrete social expression of 
 Jesus' idea. By the term Christian I mean that 
 quality of conscience and sympathy which suf- 
 fers not a man to rest short of some altar, how- 
 ever rude, on which he offers his life for the 
 common service, the social good. He refuses 
 to drink of the fruit of the vine until he can 
 drink it in fellowship with all his brethren in 
 the full come kingdom of God. Therefore doth 
 the Father love him, because he lays down his 
 life for the sheep. 
 
 Now, that which makes the ethical tragedy 
 of the present moment is the chasm between 
 the existing civilization and the new con- 
 science. The social crisis discloses conscience 
 and civilization becoming separate entities. 
 Civilization no longer represents the con- 
 science of the individuals who must find 
 therein their work. The facts and forces 
 • which now organize industry and so-called jus- 
 tice, violate the best instincts of mankind.
 
 20 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Civilization affords no industrial machinery by 
 which the Christ-spirit can express itself in 
 things. This best force in society is helpless 
 to effectuate itself in facts. The highest moral 
 reason of the world has as yet found no way 
 to enforce its dictates. The best faith of the 
 world offers no method by which the individual 
 can obey its principles. Without regard to 
 his conscience, the economic system involves 
 a man in the guilt of the moral and physical 
 death of his brothers : their blood cries to 
 him from the adulterated and monopolized 
 foods he eats ; from the sweat-shop clothes 
 he wears ; from his educational advantages, 
 his special privileges, his social opportunities. 
 " In a thousand ways, great and small," this 
 economic system is "the monstrous evil that 
 beleaguers society to-day ; " it wounds us 
 "with poisoned darts, and takes away our lib- 
 erty, and fills the air with panic, so that the 
 straightest and most fearless souls are ham- 
 pered, and scarcely dare walk in the light of 
 the sun, under the open sky." In fine, civil- 
 ization denies to man that highest of all 
 rights — the right to live a guiltless life, the 
 right to do right. 
 
 For instance, I cannot come from Iowa 
 College to this city, to speak to you of Chicago
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 21 
 
 against the existing order of things, without 
 riding upon a railway system, the capitaliza- 
 tion of which is largely watered stock. Now, 
 watered stock is a method of high treason by 
 which corporations forcibly tax the nation for 
 private profit, and by which they annually 
 extort millions from American toilers and pro- 
 ducers. It is as essentially a system of 
 violence, spoil, and robbery as would be the 
 overrunning of the nation by Tartar hordes, 
 laying hands on whatever they choose to take 
 for their own. Although a large part of Amer- 
 ican industry is organized by this system of 
 watered stocks, and we consent to it tamely 
 and ignorantly, it is yet the worst historic 
 form of indirect usurpation and tyranny ; and 
 it renders our national wealth in large part 
 purely fictitious. Again, this railway system 
 practically administers the government of the 
 United States, in all things that concern the 
 system, and the governments of the several 
 states of the Union as well. The majority 
 of the United States senators recently elected 
 have been its mere appointees and lobbyists, 
 and agents at the same time for other cor- 
 porate properties. It took a shameless mob 
 of railway attorneys to elect a United States 
 senator to represent the people of the state 
 of which I am a citizen.
 
 22 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 In all this corrupt exploitation of the nation 
 by the most degrading sort of economic force, 
 in this debauchery of every citizen of my 
 commonwealth, I am obliged to participate, 
 in order to travel anywhere upon the national 
 highways, whether I go upon God's errands 
 or go in quest of evil to do. Yet it is my 
 divine right as a son of God, and as a free- 
 born citizen, to travel national highways built 
 by the social service and political purity of the 
 people ; by good-will, virtue, and the common 
 love. The only possible innocence that re- 
 mains to me, while I pay forced tribute to 
 the system, while I profit by its corrupting 
 influences and agencies, while I bear my part 
 in the culpable public ignorance and guilty 
 moral apathy, is that of protest and exhaustless 
 effort. I cannot deliver the people from the 
 system by choosing to ride in the stage-coach 
 with Mr. Ruskin, or by deciding to walk with 
 Mr. Thoreau. 
 
 But the railway system is not all ; indeed 
 it is but the beginning. If I put sugar in my 
 coffee, I support a trust that practically admin- 
 istered the finances of the United States for 
 personal profit ; that threw the national gov- 
 ernment into the hands of a Wall-Street re- 
 ceiver, where it still remains ; that presented,
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 23 
 
 in its relation to the United States Senate, 
 one of the most awful and unconcealed spec- 
 tacles of national debauchery in political his- 
 tory. In a speech made in the American 
 Senate, Senator John Sherman stated that this 
 trust, "upon a basis of $9,000,000 issued $75,- 
 000,000 of stock, and $10,000,000 of bonds, and 
 paid upon it, watered stock and all, from six 
 to twelve per cent interest every year, every 
 dollar of which was at the cost of the people 
 of the United States." Again, in order to 
 send my children to the public school, that 
 holy of holies in the temple of American free- 
 dom, I must buy the books ordered by a pri- 
 vate corporation that has forcibly assumed the 
 function of administering the free-school sys- 
 tem of the United States as private property ; 
 that employs gangs of ruffians to go up and 
 down these states and prepare school legisla- 
 tion for private profit ; that appoints school 
 superintendents, intimidates school principals, 
 throws out of employment and blacklists teach- 
 ers who dare reject its publications. I can no 
 longer clothe myself, whether in good clothes 
 or cheap, without the likelihood that my 
 clothes are made under sweat-shop condi- 
 tions, in which men and women and children 
 toil together in hot-air slave-pens, fourteen to
 
 24 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 eighteen hours a day, for earnings that range 
 from two to five dollars a week. If I send 
 my students to pursue further study upon 
 subjects to which I have introduced them, I 
 must send them to receive the benefits of 
 endowments from the hands of a besotted phi- 
 lanthropy, drunken and sated with the wine of 
 life pressed from the crushed and exhausted 
 millions who feed the modern industrial wine- 
 press. By merely preaching the ethics of the 
 Sermon on the Mount in their pulpits, I have 
 been the means of depriving able and noble 
 men of their positions and livelihoods, because 
 of their economic dependence upon the few 
 rich men who control the organizations of their 
 churches. Whatever I do, whichever way I 
 turn, I can neither feed nor clothe my family, 
 nor take part in public affairs as a citizen, nor 
 speak the truth as I conceive it, without being 
 stained with the blood of my brothers and sis- 
 ters; without putting my hands into the wicked- 
 ness that prostitutes every sacred national and 
 religious function. It matters not that I ask of 
 society only such "keep" as will enable me to 
 serve with peace of mind, and to the exhaustion 
 of my possibilities ; society denies me a guilt- 
 less "keep." 
 
 The economic system denies the right of the
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 2$ 
 
 sincerest and most sympathetic to keep their 
 hands out of the blood of their brothers. We 
 may not go to our rest at night., or waken to 
 our work in the morning, without bearing the 
 burden of the communal guilt; without being 
 ourselves creators and causes of the wrongs we 
 seek to bear away. At every step, when we 
 would do good, evil is present with us, and ex- 
 acts its tribute from the very citadel of the soul. 
 If we stay at our posts, in order that we may 
 change the system, we are on the backs of our 
 brothers ; if we desert our posts, in order that 
 we may get off our brothers' backs, we take 
 bread from their mouths, from the mouths of 
 their children, and add to the army of the 
 workless and hopeless. Upon the conscience 
 which enthrones Christ, civilization forces this 
 dilemma : seek extrication and peace for your- 
 self, at the risk of losing your soul through the 
 supreme selfishness of living to save it ; or else 
 remain in the thick of the wrong, enduring the 
 ethical strain, the tragedy of soul, the moral 
 suffering unspeakable, in order that you may 
 help to bear the wrong away from the necks 
 and souls of your brothers. And millions are 
 denied even the right to this dilemma. The 
 hard conditions of stupefying toil under which 
 the vast majority of human beings live, even in
 
 26 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Christendom, destroys moral desire, or denies 
 opportunity where desire exists, and converts 
 man into a mere creature of profit, a beast of 
 work. It is no wonder that heaviness and 
 half-despair seem to be settling upon the age, 
 upon its most aspiring thought and urgent 
 effort ; and that books about degeneracy and 
 the decadence get themselves written. 
 
 It is only the densest ethical ignorance that 
 talks about a "Christian business" life; for 
 business is now intrinsically evil, whatever good 
 may come out of it. Whoever says that a man 
 can live the Christian life, while at the same 
 time successfully participating in the present 
 order of things, is either profound in the lack 
 of knowledge, or else he deliberately lies. 
 " The ways of trade," said Mr. Emerson, years 
 ago, "have grown selfish to the borders of 
 theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond 
 the borders) of fraud." "A tender and intelli- 
 gent conscience," he declares to be a " disquali- 
 fication for success." " The young man," he 
 says, "on entering life, finds the way to lucra- 
 tive employment blocked with abuses." There 
 is no such thing as an ethical bargain ; for bar- 
 gains are matters of force, fraud, and chance. 
 There are no honest goods to buy or to sell ; 
 adulterated foods, shoddy manufacture of all
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 2*] 
 
 that we wear, the underpaid labor and con- 
 sumed life that make every garment a texture 
 of falsehood, the hideous competitive war that 
 slays its millions where swords and cannons 
 slay their tens, all unite to baffle and mock 
 the efforts of the awakened conscience at every 
 turn, and make the industrial system seem like 
 the triumph of hell and madness on the earth. 
 Only by a sort of terrible daily denial of his 
 spiritual self, a crucifixion of the principles 
 by which he longs to organize his life, can a 
 man wrest a stained and insecure livelihood 
 from this terrible war for bread which we call 
 industry. 
 
 Not long ago, a Christian merchant came 
 to me in great anguish of spirit ; he had tried, 
 in what he considered a meagre way, to organ- 
 ize his business in a Christian fashion ; he 
 placed himself on terms of economic and social 
 equality with his employees, and they together 
 tried to be honest servants of their customers, 
 with no competing thought in their mind ; but 
 the result was the bankruptcy and ruin of sev- 
 eral competitors, and the increase of sweat- 
 shop conditions in the goods the merchant 
 purchased. " If I try to pay my miners just 
 wages," said a mining operator to me, at the 
 conclusion of the last national coal-strike, " I
 
 28 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 will ruin them, for the combination will crush 
 me, causing my contracts to be forfeited, and 
 preventing my coal from being shipped ; I will 
 be bankrupted, and the men who have been 
 with me for fifteen years will be black-listed, 
 wageless, and homeless." " What shall I do ? " 
 he cried ; " I care not for a moment for the 
 loss of every cent of my property, if I could 
 only find some way to do right without wrong- 
 ing others ; I am almost mad with the mental 
 and moral strain." These two men are not 
 exceptions ; they are revelations of a common 
 tragedy of soul which the denial of the right to 
 do right is regetting among men of economic 
 power. 
 
 There is nothing in nature to bring about this 
 conflict between civilization and conscience ; 
 nothing that need have prevented material 
 facts from being the perfect expression of spir- 
 itual forces. The persistent assumption that 
 sheer economic might, with the inequalities 
 and miseries it brings, is in accord with natural 
 law, is a piece of academic bluff, a wanton 
 abuse of science. All progress shows nature 
 to be the friend of man and righteousness, and 
 the enemy of force and fraud. The evils that 
 we have been scientifically charging upon na- 
 ture are due to the imbecile and ruthless self-
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 29 
 
 ishness of man. As Mazzini has pointed out, 
 our inequalities are not in nature ; they are 
 in man's wasteful perversion of nature. Our 
 trouble lies, as Henry George has said, in that 
 we have "given into the exclusive ownership 
 of the few the provision that a bountiful Father 
 has made for all." Nature has never been 
 lacking in providing resources and food for 
 man ; nature over-produces ; nature is prolific 
 and prodigal in bestowment and opportunity. 
 We pray, " Give us this day our daily bread ; " 
 but our Father answered that prayer before 
 the foundation of the world. Even in the 
 present monstrous organization of production, 
 the people could not by any possibility con- 
 sume all that they produce in any given year. 
 And the possibilities of production have 
 scarcely been touched. A conservative statis- 
 tician estimates that the state of Texas alone, 
 if its resources were all organized to that end, 
 could support the present population of the 
 world. An eminent Austrian economist figures 
 that all that is produced in the Austrian em- 
 pire would require but three hours a day labor 
 from each toiler, if production were rationally 
 organized, and each man to toil ; and that if 
 the production of Austria were equitably dis- 
 tributed, each family would have enough for an
 
 30 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 abundant life. "If," says Mr. George, "men 
 lack bread, it is not that God has not done his 
 part in providing it. If men willing to labor 
 are cursed with poverty, it is not that the store- 
 house that God owes men has failed ; that the 
 daily supply he has promised for the daily want 
 of his children is not here in abundance." It 
 is this abundance of natural resources which 
 leads the highest commercial genius of the day 
 to exhaust itself in organizing industry so as to 
 limit and suppress production. We speak of 
 great monopolies as created for the purpose of 
 facilitating production. They are in reality 
 organizations to forcibly prevent the people 
 from producing for the common consumption ; 
 organizations for the sole purpose of compelling 
 the people to produce for the profit of the few, 
 instead of for the consumption of all. And this 
 congestion of economic goods, which has been 
 the historic destroyer of nations and religions, 
 we are in habit of calling prosperity and the 
 increase of wealth. This forcible appropriation 
 of the resources of the people, and of the prod- 
 ucts of their toil, we are taught to view as the 
 development of industry ; while people starve 
 in a world of abundance because, as Edward 
 Bellamy says, too much is produced. 
 
 On every hand, we may see what desola-
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 3 1 
 
 tions are wrought by the economic wars and 
 conquests of our lords of industry, our Napo- 
 leons of the market. In the early part of 1897, 
 when meetings for the relief of the famine in 
 India were being held in English and Ameri- 
 can cities, when contributions were received 
 from newsboys and washerwomen, scores of 
 ships laden with wheat, and carrying millions 
 of money, arrived in English ports as rents 
 from the people in India for the privilege of 
 living on the lands which the English had 
 taken from them. The recent forcible control 
 of the American wheat-market, which enabled 
 one man to "hold up" the earth, by precisely 
 the same ethic with which the foot-pad with 
 the sand-bag holds up his victim in the dark 
 alley, occasioned the shooting down of hun- 
 dreds of starving workmen in Italian cities, 
 and may indirectly cost more human lives than 
 some of the great wars. An eminent physi- 
 cian recently declared to me his belief that 
 the control of the anthracite coal output, a 
 few winters ago, by which a few men forcibly 
 took a hundred and twenty-five million dollars 
 from the American people, caused more deaths 
 than Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. The 
 economic advantage which our Spanish war 
 has given to the controllers of the market will
 
 32 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 probably result in the loss of more lives, by 
 economic indirection, than there are people in 
 the Island of Cuba ; the chivalry and patriot- 
 ism of the people furnish opportunity and prey 
 for the speculators. " Where the Spaniard has 
 slain us by tens," says Mr. Lloyd, "the Ameri- 
 can has slain his own by hundreds, by army 
 contracts and ' pulls ' for incompetents and 
 politicians. The country stands pale with rage 
 at the tragedy of the fever, the hunger, the 
 nakedness, the delirium visited upon those who 
 have labored for it on the fields of battle. But 
 capitalism, business, has been visiting these 
 horrors year in and year out on those who 
 labor on all the other fields not less necessary 
 to our safety and honor. Camp Wikoff and 
 the other camps are only dress rehearsals of 
 a drama of greed — greed for money and greed 
 for office and titles — which now holds the 
 stage in every department of our government 
 and business life." While I write this, there 
 is destitution and suffering in the city of New 
 York because of the rise in the price of food 
 products ; yet a great manufacturer who is 
 deeply interested in intensive agriculture, as 
 well as in economic problems, tells me that 
 he estimates that the entire population of the 
 city could be abundantly fed on what might
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 33 
 
 be produced within a radius of twenty-five 
 miles of the city limits. 
 
 We are told that there is lack of work. But 
 there is no lack of useful and beautiful work 
 to be done, and no lack of eager toilers to 
 whom free and fruitful labor would be the glad- 
 ness of life. Millions of fields are waiting for 
 plough and seed, and for water from the hills, 
 that they may sing to the ill-fed and over- 
 worked millions with harvests of bread and joy. 
 Millions more of valley and hillside acres are 
 ready to blossom with cotton and the wool 
 of sheep, that they may clothe the millions of 
 ill-clad children and their miserable mothers. 
 Millions of ore and fuel, in the hearts of moun- 
 tains and the depths of earth, promise to come 
 forth for the wealth and warmth of the millions 
 asking to fulfil the promise by the labor of 
 their hands. Millions of homes are needed 
 for the millions who die in the moral and physi- 
 cal wretchedness of tenements, because they 
 must buy from the lords of rent a place wherein 
 to lay their heads on the earth God gave them ; 
 and millions of builders are waiting to clothe 
 with homes of love and beauty an earth set 
 free from owners and tribute-takers. 
 
 Lack of work, while the millions are starved 
 and dwarfed and blighted for want of the
 
 34 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 things and opportunities that make life whole 
 and sweet, loving and lovely and worth 
 while ? 
 
 Lack of work, while exhaustless resources 
 are at hand out of which to make the things 
 and opportunities the millions need, with mil- 
 lions of workers praying only for the privi- 
 lege of making them ? 
 
 Yes, after all, amidst these boundless re- 
 sources for countless billions of the children 
 of God, offering ten thousand times ten thou- 
 sand kinds of noble and useful and happy 
 things to do, with myriad hearts and hands 
 and brains asking nothing but freedom to do 
 them, there is lack of work. 
 
 But wherefore comes this lack ? Do you 
 not see ? It comes from the lords of industry 
 and land, who have shut up the resources which 
 God gave to all people, and who have made 
 laws to keep what they took by force, and have 
 made judges to keep their laws, so that the 
 people may not use their own, nor earn their 
 bread and rejoice, nor even live upon the earth 
 the Lord God gave them, except they toil for 
 the gain of the industrial lords, to whom they 
 must sell their labor-power for the right to 
 exist ; whose wage-slaves they must become, 
 or else stand all the day idle, and starve in
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 35 
 
 the market-place at night. And thus it is that 
 the majority of human beings drag out impov- 
 erished lives of unsupplied physical and spirit- 
 ual need amidst overflowing abundance, to have 
 even their need destroyed at last by the ever- 
 lasting lack. 
 
 Yet the majority of people are not bad at 
 heart, and do not want to injure each other in 
 the earning of their daily bread, nor gain their 
 opportunities through the suffering and loss of 
 their brothers. Mankind is naturally unselfish 
 and loving ; yea, the sacrifice of self for the 
 good of others is man's deepest natural in- 
 stinct. But in a competitive society, with its 
 natural monopoly of opportunity and power by 
 the strong, with its desolating conquests of 
 sheer economic might, a complete ethical life 
 is impossible to the weak and strong alike. 
 "Equitable legislation not existing in a city," 
 said Plato, " it would be impossible for a citi- 
 zen to be good or happy." If civilization is 
 organized industrial war, how can men live at 
 economic peace with one another ? How can 
 we effectually obey Christ's law of love, when 
 every industrial maxim, custom, fact, and prin- 
 ciple renders that law inoperative ? If we have 
 only a competitive and monopolistic system to 
 live in, how can we escape being competitors
 
 $6 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 and monopolists ? Whither shall we flee from 
 the presence of this evil system ? If we group 
 ourselves in colonies, and dig our living from 
 the soil, we are still injuring our brothers in 
 moral and economic competition, and are guilty 
 of seeking a private property in righteousness 
 besides. 
 
 It is thus that to the Christian with the 
 ethics of Jesus, to the American with his politi- 
 cal origins and traditions, the social problem is 
 everywhere becoming a problem of conscience ; 
 a problem of how to effect an economic organi- 
 zation that shall express in material facts the 
 highest spiritual forces, and thus liberate the 
 individual soul from moral bondage. Only in 
 a subjective and inadequate sense, and that 
 through collision and suffering, can a man even 
 try to follow Christ in the present system. 
 The machinery of the world was constructed 
 by the strong and cunning to be run by the 
 motive powers of force and self-interest. Love 
 and Christian conscience have as yet no ma- 
 chinery to apply the love-motor to ; attempted 
 applications often wreck the machines, and 
 human beings with them. There must be a 
 new social machinery, in order that love and 
 conscience may organize the world for the com- 
 mon good of all. Except the system of things
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM, tf 
 
 be born again, the individual cannot be socially- 
 saved. 
 
 It does not lie in the nature of things that 
 righteousness should be pursued and achieved 
 only through tragedy. If man has a destiny, 
 and if Christ and history reveal the presence of 
 God in the life of man, a system which makes 
 righteousness a conflict with civilization cannot 
 stand. To accept a civilization so organized is 
 to reject Christ and all that he stood for, quite 
 as effectually as if we nailed him upon a wooden 
 cross before the enraged city. To accept Christ, 
 his idea and initiative, is to reject a civilization 
 whose motives and methods, whose organized 
 feast and forces, render the Christian life un- 
 livable. 
 
 The highest right of every man is the right 
 to do right ; the right to obey an enlightened 
 conscience ; the right to earn his living in 
 such a way as to help the living of every 
 other man ; the right to live a guiltless life. 
 The right to do right includes every other 
 right under the heavens ; it has been God's 
 hid secret at the heart of every movement 
 for liberty since the world began. The right 
 to do right is the substance of the economic 
 problem ; it is a problem of things only in 
 the sense that conscience demands the right 
 
 •
 
 38 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 to organize things as the supports of spiritual 
 freedom. 
 
 We glorify our fathers who crossed the seas 
 that they might find freedom to worship God 
 according to the dictates of conscience. Theirs 
 was the simple and easy task. The Pilgrim 
 Fathers were but rudely fumbling the alphabet 
 of the chapter now to be written in the book of 
 progress. The new Pilgrim conscience is out 
 upon an infinitely vaster quest, a more glorious 
 adventure. It is searching the sources of life 
 for foundations upon which to build a civiliza- 
 tion in which conscience may find freedom to 
 obey as well as worship ; freedom for the com- 
 mon life to practise what the wise and good in 
 all centuries have preached — the law of love. 
 This is the first time in history that such a task 
 has been seriously undertaken ; and it is the 
 mightiest task to which conscience ever sum- 
 moned mankind. That man will be equal to 
 the summons we need not doubt. It is enough 
 that the thought of love as law has been born, 
 and that the ideal of society governed by this 
 law is upon the earth. "The only thing evil 
 cannot withstand," says a noble Englishwoman, 
 " is the winged ideal ; it cannot even fight it ; 
 its weapons are not made for that warfare." 
 
 Potential within existing conditions is a reali-
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 39 
 
 zation surpassing our noblest ideals. Our social 
 wrongs carry in themselves the seeds of their 
 own regeneracy. Our economic evils are vital 
 with the elements of their own redemption. 
 Our monopolies are charged with the forces 
 that will yet change them into the spiritual or- 
 gans of a ransomed society ; the organs of a 
 progress without strife or struggle. The failure 
 of self-interest as the organizing and executive 
 law of society is a witness to the better law 
 that lies indestructible at the foundations of life. 
 In the midst of our social tribulation we may be 
 of good cheer; for the better law is overcoming 
 the world, and the justice of love will prevail. 
 It is because the thought of love as law has be- 
 come a full-grown working ideal that many 
 voices are calling us to repentance. These are 
 the voices of the truest optimism — the optim- 
 ism that has so brave and joyful a faith in the 
 right that it dares to faithfully portray the 
 wrong. Repent ye, they cry, because the king- 
 dom of heaven is at hand ; because a good that 
 is better than our best is rising up in the midst 
 of us, calling us to judgment, freedom, and the 
 peace of good-will among men. 
 
 * 
 
 " In this broad earth of ours, 
 
 Amidst the measureless grossness and the slag,
 
 40 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
 Nestles the seed perfection. 
 
 "Is it a dream? 
 
 Nay but the lack of it the dream, 
 
 And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, 
 
 And all the world a dream."
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF 
 CONSCIENCE.
 
 The appalling magnitude of the evil against which he felt him- 
 self especially called to contend was painfully manifest to John 
 Woolman. At the outset, all about him, in every department of 
 life and human activity, in the state and the church, he saw evi- 
 dences of its strength, and of the depth and extent to which its roots 
 had wound their way among the foundations of society. Yet he 
 seems never to have doubted for a moment the power of simple truth 
 to eradicate it, nor to have hesitated as to his own duty in regard to 
 it. There was no groping, like Samson in the gloom ; no feeling 
 in blind wrath and impatience for the pillars of the temple of Dagon. 
 " The candle of the Lord shone about him," and his path lay clear 
 and unmistakable before him. He believed in the goodness of God 
 that leadeth to repentance ; and that love could reach the witness for 
 itself in the hearts of all men, through all entanglements of custom 
 and every barrier of pride and selfishness. No one could have a 
 more humble estimate of himself ; but as he went forth on his errand 
 of mercy, he felt the Infinite Power behind him, and the conscious- 
 ness that he had known a preparation from that Power " to stand as 
 a trumpet through which the Lord speaks." The event justified his 
 confidence ; wherever he went hard hearts were softened, avarice and 
 love of power and pride of opinion gave way before his testimony of 
 love. — John G. Whittier.
 
 II. 
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF 
 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 In like manner also the chief priests mocking him, with the 
 scribes and elders, said, He saved others ; himself he cannot save. — 
 Matt, xxvii. 41,42. 
 
 In the social problem, we are confronted 
 anew with the old question of following Jesus 
 in Caesar's realm ; and it is the cross upon 
 which the new conscience is crucified. Can 
 we be servants of truth and love while paying 
 tribute to fraud and force? Do we believe in 
 the laws of Christ when we continue to live 
 and work under the laws of Caesar ? How can 
 we free our brothers if we ourselves remain 
 involved and enslaved ? If we cannot save 
 ourselves, how can we save society ? What 
 right have we to witness for a faith and a 
 future which we do not realize in our present 
 practice ? If we be indeed Christian reformers, 
 let us prove our sincerity by coming out of 
 the evil system, and separating ourselves from 
 all its entanglements and iniquities ; let us 
 43
 
 44 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 "do the thing we talk about;" let us "prac- 
 tise what we preach." Thus we are com- 
 manded by both mocking oppressors and the 
 suffering oppressed ; and with the mockery 
 of the one, as well as with the sorrowful 
 doubting of the other, we can have but the 
 deepest sympathy. 
 
 Both our religious experience and our polit- 
 ical training go to create and increase the 
 danger that we shall yield to this command 
 and temptation to deal with the social problem 
 from an individual point of view — treat it as 
 a matter of individual salvation. Our passion 
 to individually extricate ourselves from the 
 communal wrong, our anxiety to prove our 
 sincerity by our practice, above all our heart- 
 ache for the people whom we would deliver, 
 may betray us into an evasion of the real task 
 to which we are summoned. We have here 
 one of the many cases, common to both indi- 
 vidual experience and historic movements, in 
 which a hasty and uncomprehending conscience 
 may prove to be our Judas, and drive us in 
 spiritual panic from the field on which the 
 battle for God and the people is to be fought. 
 Already the times are full of new forms of 
 old doctrines for saving men out of the world, 
 as though God were somewhere else than in
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 45 
 
 the thick of the world's on-goings. The new 
 conscience is beset by reforms and reformers 
 with programmes for saving the world by giv- 
 ing it up. These doctrines and programmes 
 are a return of the pagan renaissance that has 
 brought betrayal and boundless self-deceit to 
 the Christian conscience since its apostolic 
 dawn, leading every revival astray, balking 
 and defeating every attempt of that conscience 
 to claim the world of fact as its inheritance 
 and kingdom. The greatest spiritual menace 
 to the cause for which we stand lies in this 
 return of social unfaith under the guise of 
 redemption. This denial of God in life and 
 history is indeed the most hopelessly infidel 
 position a man can take. It will take an 
 exhaustless spiritual nerve, a revised set of 
 spiritual qualities, to bravely and unevasively 
 face the whole human question which the social 
 problem sets for us to answer. 
 
 I. In the nature of the case, a social problem 
 can have only a social solution for each indi- 
 vidual member of society. There is no in- 
 dividual redemption from a social system ; 
 only a social redemption will free each indi- 
 vidual at last. Society is an organism, and 
 not a certain number of individuals; individuals 
 are members of the social body, and can be
 
 46 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 healthy only in the health of the whole body. 
 The laws and customs which govern the rela- 
 tions of individuals to each other, and which 
 make up the collective life, are the larger and 
 ever-increasing part of the life of each indi- 
 vidual. Whether the individual will or no, he 
 is governed by the collective life, either through 
 his willing acceptance of its facts and forces, 
 or through collision with them, with the result- 
 ing tragedy. 
 
 In the present unity and complexity of life, 
 there is no way for the individual to prac- 
 tise his social ideal, if he have one, until it is 
 realized by society ; he can only exhaust the 
 possibilities of his life in bringing about the re- 
 alization ; he can plant his life in the common 
 life and die, that he may not abide by himself 
 alone, but may bring forth the fruit of a re- 
 demption which shall be to all people. An in- 
 dividual cannot practise national ownership of 
 land, except the land be owned by the nation ; 
 if his zeal be at bottom a spiritual self-deceit 
 and cowardice, he will spend his time devising 
 ways whereby he may individually escape the 
 curse of private ownership ; if his zeal be social 
 and Christian, born out of love for his brethren, 
 he will spend his life in bearing away the curse 
 from his nation, and from the world. An indi-
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 47 
 
 vidual cannot practise the public ownership of 
 utilities, except the utilities be publicly owned ; 
 his Christian sacrifice does not lie in keeping 
 his hands clean of privately owned public econ- 
 omies, but in helping the people to own their 
 economies in common. A Russian cannot 
 practise political democracy, except Russia be- 
 come politically democratic ; his service for 
 freedom does not consist in his moving out of 
 Russia, but in giving himself to making Russia 
 free. A man cannot escape the slavery of the 
 wage system, except the system be abolished, 
 and there be no more hirelings under the sun ; 
 indeed, to pay the best possible wages to the 
 largest possible number may be the precise 
 Christian sacrifice required of a consistent op- 
 ponent of the wage system. A slave cannot 
 practise freedom, except his shackels be broken, 
 and his freedom be secured in the freedom of 
 all his brethren ; for no man's liberty is safe so 
 long as there remains any kind of slave upon 
 the earth. 
 
 Nor is there either escape for the individual, 
 or redemption for society, in yielding to the 
 seemingly noble impulse to withdraw from 
 work or part in the order of things which we 
 know to be evil. The world is too well on to 
 its blossoming to be further helped by schisms
 
 48 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 or separations of any sort soever, social or re- 
 ligious. We shall miss God and his freedom, 
 this time, if we journey into "far countries" 
 in search of his promises, for the kingdom of 
 God is within us ; we must dig up God and 
 freedom in ourselves. There are no more 
 Canaans left to go to ; the people must be 
 their own Moses, and free Egypt, or remain 
 slave. The Pilgrims can no more find Plym- 
 outh Rock across the seas ; it lies inward, at 
 the heart of the people. Let Abraham stay in 
 Ur of Chaldea, and there fulfil the promises 
 of God in the redemption of his city. Let 
 Luther stay in his monastery, and justify his 
 faith by making that a shrine of the people. 
 Let every man stay at his post in " the ma- 
 chine," as Jesus stayed in the complicated reli- 
 gious and political machinery of his nation, 
 either to capture "the machine" by mighty 
 love and passion, or to be ground up in the 
 cogs, that "the machine" may be broken, and 
 the peoples set free to build for love and free- 
 dom. " Let us bear the burden and endure the 
 trial," says a Japanese mystic, " till the world 
 is rectified, and home is found for all." There 
 is no other manful and apostolic course of dis- 
 covery and achievement left open ; we have 
 tried everything else. We have long experi-
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 49 
 
 merited with ways of saving individuals out of 
 the world ; it is time to adopt Jesus' original 
 idea of bearing away the sin of the world, so 
 that the kingdom of heaven may rise in our 
 midst. 
 
 Social separation cannot be charged, of 
 course, against the brave and self-denying 
 men and women who associate themselves in 
 co-operative enterprises and colonies, or who 
 group themselves in social settlements, in order 
 to concentrate their efforts, or to educate the 
 people by illustrating social principles. But 
 the value of these is in the attention they call 
 to the social problem — their preaching and 
 teaching value ; they do not profess to be a 
 redemption either of or from society. Those 
 who thus associate themselves have no notion 
 of escaping the communal guilt ; they purpose 
 only to more effectively bear that guilt. Their 
 motive is not a giving up of the world as bad, 
 but a taking up of the responsibility of making 
 it good. 
 
 If New Testament philosophy comes to any- 
 thing it is this : that no man liveth or dieth 
 unto himself — the same conclusion to which, 
 under different terms, the social sciences are 
 coming. For good or ill, we are bound up 
 together in one human life and destiny. With-
 
 50 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 out us, the patriarchs and prophets, "the noble 
 army of the apostles and martyrs," cannot be 
 made perfect. There is no final salvation of 
 any man from sin, until the last prodigal sets 
 his face homeward. There is no ascending 
 into heaven, save through descending into hell, 
 to fight with the flame of the pit, and deliver 
 our brethren therefrom. The secret place of 
 the Most High, wherein is the life that is hid 
 with Christ, on the bosom of the peace that 
 passeth understanding, lies under the founda- 
 tions of life, at the deepest roots of human 
 need. Here, and here alone, at the sources 
 of the communal pain and shame, in the thick 
 of the collective life and struggle, may a man 
 rest his soul in the heart of God, and work the 
 works of him who came to save all men from 
 seeking a righteousness that separates them 
 from their brothers. 
 
 There is a sense in which God, as well as his 
 witness, cannot " practise what he preaches," 
 cannot "do the thing he talks about," until the 
 whole human life co-operates with him in the 
 practising or doing. "God has become free," 
 Lacordaire used to say, "with the liberty of 
 the citizen." If the theological doctrine of the 
 incarnation is a moral fact, and not a mere 
 metaphysical definition, it means that God him-
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 5 1 
 
 self is living in the life of the common man, 
 bearing the sins of the downcast life as his 
 own sins, suffering the sufferings of the peo- 
 ple in his own heart, breaking their bonds and 
 oppressions by the passion of his love in the 
 midst of them. The coming of Christ is the 
 disclosure of God as the innermost presence 
 in every human prison-house, in every historic 
 tyranny and wrong ; it is the disclosure of the 
 suffering love of God as the making-force of 
 history, as the real power that is leading the 
 collective life through successive forms of ma- 
 terial captivity to a common spiritual kingship 
 and liberty. " The greatest of the apparent 
 contradictions of life," says Mr. Hamilton 
 Mabie, "is the fact that God has led a human 
 life." God himself, so we see in Christ, will 
 have no righteousness or freedom that he may 
 not have in the common life of man ; the soul 
 of God will not be satisfied until we are satis- 
 fied in being like him. 
 \ II. There ought not, then, to be any individ- 
 ual extrication from a wrong social system. 
 The impossibility of individual extrication from 
 the communal pain and shame, with the Chris- 
 tian sacrifice of conscience for which that im- 
 possibility calls, is the divine method by which 
 the good is to overcome and consume the evil.
 
 52 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 They who stay in the existing order of things 
 because they do not believe in it, are the ones 
 who will make way for the better order. Their 
 sacrifice of the individual right to do right, in 
 order to give their lives to procuring a common 
 righteousness for all, is the dynamic of the new 
 society. Through their realization of their one- 
 ness with the communal guilt, they re-enforce 
 the social movement with a tremendous gain 
 of saving sympathy ; they are able to approach 
 the monstrous facts of the social problem with- 
 out any spirit of condemnation towards individ- 
 ual men. feeling no man to be guilty above 
 them selves.'"? "It will be noted," says the poet 
 Whittier oF John Woolman, "that in his life- 
 long testimony against wrong he never lost 
 sight of the oneness of humanity, its common 
 responsibility, its fellowship of suffering and 
 communion of sin." "Sin," continues the poet, 
 "was not to him an isolated fact, the responsi- 
 bility of which began and ended with the indi- 
 vidual transgressor ; he saw it as a part of a 
 vast network and entanglement, and traced the 
 lines of influence converging upon it in the 
 underworld of causation. Hence the wrong 
 and discord which pained him called out pity, 
 rather than indignation." To thus stay with 
 loving protest amidst the common wrong and
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 53 
 
 suffering, recognizing* one's self as a causal part 
 of it all, refusing to believe in strife and tyr- 
 anny as social reality or fact, seeing God invisi- 
 ble as the living and becoming presence within 
 the misery and prejudice, — this is an infinitely 
 harder and Christlier course of service than to 
 endure and protest as one apart from the guilt 
 and shame ; for there is a self-righteous satis- 
 faction in treading the wine-press alone that 
 one does not find in treading it in company 
 with his brothers. But it is only those who 
 toil and endure with their brethren, in the 
 thick of the wrong and struggle with which 
 society travails, who will furnish the sympathy 
 and dynamic able to bring forth redemption 
 and freedom. "Through the tangled thicket" 
 of social and industrial wrong " there is but 
 one deliverer that can make his way, and as of 
 old his name is the Prince of Love." 
 
 Not for a moment would I excuse the indi- 
 vidual from becoming, in the fullest sense of 
 the term, the living incarnation of the truth 
 which he proclaims. A profound and search- 
 ing simplification of one's life is the beginning 
 of social service. Under no circumstances, is 
 private luxury tolerable ; it is not only not 
 Christian : in a world of wretched want and 
 poverty, it is indecent and criminal. There
 
 54 BETWEEN CAESAR A tVD JESUS. 
 
 can never be any justifiable splendor save 
 communal splendor, giving beauty and glory 
 to each individual life. Most urgently would I 
 agree with Edward Carpenter, that "there 
 seems but one immediate step that the wealthy 
 despoiler can take — which at the same time is 
 a most obvious step — and that is, at once or 
 as soon as ever he can, to place his life on the 
 very simplest footing." Not only for " the 
 wealthy despoiler," but for every one of us who 
 live by the labor of others — as all of us do live 
 who belong to the so-called educated classes — 
 " the most obvious thing " is to cost our broth- 
 ers as little of injury and toil as we can while 
 we serve them. But the Christian will always 
 simplify his life with reference to the service 
 of others, and not with reference to an indi- 
 vidual escape. And when he has clone his best, 
 he will count that best as but a preparation for 
 the service of his brethren, and not as a solu- 
 tion of the problem of life. For their sakes 
 he will sanctify himself, in order that they also 
 may be sanctified in the truth that sets men 
 free. 
 
 There is a passion for individual perfection, 
 an effort to escape the sin and guilt of the 
 world, that is at bottom a profound spiritual 
 selfishness, an inverted egoism. There are
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 55 
 
 times when to do the absolutely right thing, 
 as we call it, would be the greatest wrong a 
 man could do. There are circumstances under 
 which a man has no right to do right ; when 
 he can be individually guiltless only by being 
 guilty of the blood of others, only by the be- 
 trayal of sacred trusts. There are places and 
 crises in which a man must be morally wrong 
 in order to be nobly true and spiritually right ; 
 and considerations of public morality may com- 
 pel a man to endure relations which are pro- 
 foundly immoral, from his point of view, but 
 which are the embodiment of the highest legal 
 and conventional morality. " There be climb- 
 ings which ascend to depths of infamy," says 
 Maarten Maartens ; "there be also — God is 
 merciful ! — most infamous fallings into hea- 
 ven." There are more senses than one in 
 which conscience makes cowards of us all. 
 Those of us who have sinned and suffered 
 deeply, who have been caught unawares in 
 complications to which we can see no end, who 
 have been heart-broken and beaten to the dust 
 by the knowledge of our part in the hideous 
 things of the existing order, know well what 
 it means to look a selfish and fearful con- 
 science in the face and defy it as a liar and 
 a tempter. The way of mere individual extrica-
 
 fc> 
 
 56 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 tion and escape may always be put down as the 
 way of selfishness and spiritual death. No 
 spiritual values will be finally recognized as 
 genuine that are not social values, that do not 
 gain their worth from the sacrifice of service. 
 
 For instance, in the present system of things, 
 a college education is a monopoly of oppor- 
 tunity ; by teaching in a Christian college, sup- 
 ported by interest or profit on endowments, I 
 am a monopolist as well as Mr. Rockefeller ; 
 but I do not see that I can further the king- 
 dom of God by having nothing to do with 
 colleges, or by bringing up my children in 
 ignorance, in order that I may have a barren 
 individual guiltlessness. I do not conceive that 
 I can persuade the public to own its utilities 
 by staying at home, and refusing to deliver 
 whatever message I may have, in order that 
 I may escape the moral suffering of riding on 
 privately owned and publicly corrupting rail- 
 ways. I do not believe tl*at I can help to bear 
 away the competitive system by trying to get 
 out of it, in order that I may "practise" the 
 law of love by myself, or in company with a 
 few kindred spirits ; I should fear that such 
 co-operative love might turn out to be a subtle 
 and dreadful co-operative selfishness. I can 
 not leaven the world by taking leaven out of
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. $/ 
 
 it, in order that I may monopolize some of it 
 for my own salvation, for that is what it comes 
 to ; if I so save my life I lose it, as I ought to 
 lose it. If I would have part in removing any 
 individual or organized sin from among men, 
 I must get under it : I can do nothing by 
 taking a position in Mars, and then talking 
 at the world from the long range of superior 
 advantage ; that is always immoral. The best 
 that a guiltless onlooker can do for the world 
 is to keep his mouth shut ; it is an imperti- 
 nence for him to come meddling with the 
 affairs of sinning and suffering men. 
 
 Sometimes, when we hunger for a spiritual 
 comradeship we fancy our day does not afford, 
 we reach sad hands across the centuries, to 
 clasp in ghostly fellowship with the renowned 
 and saintly dead, who by great living and mar- 
 tyr dying glorified the early Christian ages. 
 Here, think we, we shall find disentangled souls 
 in perfect communion with goodness. But 
 when the search-light of the historian pierces 
 the mystic halo religious romance has gathered 
 about these clays of sanctity and martyrdom, 
 we find the early Christian heroes involved and 
 baffled like ourselves, serving often from false 
 motives, learning wisdom through folly and 
 failure, entering peace out of great pain. None
 
 58 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 of the reformers were without a narrow and 
 inadequate conception of their mission ; none 
 of them wrought out the will of God unalloyed 
 with selfish ambition, unbiassed by personal 
 opinion and desire. Calvin was the power of 
 God for political and moral progress ; but he 
 consented to the burning of his antagonist. 
 Cromwell was God's anointed champion of lib- 
 erty ; but he was himself the prince of despots. 
 Human life continues its rise because men 
 strong in their very imperfections, rise up to 
 press the race closer home to God, that he may 
 ever be breathing into it the breath of new 
 life. When the Son of man next comes, to 
 quote sweet Edward Carpenter again, " he will 
 present no stainless perfection ; but he will do 
 better : he will bring something absolute, primal 
 — the living rock — something necessary and 
 at first hand — and men will cling to him there- 
 fore." We shall yet see that much of what 
 seems for the time imperfect is, in its fitness 
 for its function or service, divinely perfect. 
 That which would be crude and faulty in the 
 perfect society may be perfectly organized to 
 regenerate the imperfect society ; perfectly or- 
 ganized to prepare man for the new earth 
 which God may command, sooner than we 
 think, to come forth from our social nebulae.
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 59 
 
 III. But if there is no individual extrication 
 from a wrong social system, will not the effect 
 of preaching this be baffling and paralyzing to 
 individual responsibility ? Some of you, I know, 
 have been anxiously asking this question while 
 I have been speaking. Yet it seems to me 
 that I have been doing nothing else than heap 
 up the responsibility which Christ and the 
 times call the individual to manfully bear. I 
 have tried to show that the charge a man has 
 to keep is the common well-being of all his 
 brethren, and not merely his own soul. I have 
 not even allowed him the negative comfort, 
 which some take unto their souls, of saying 
 that if civilization gives him only adulterated 
 food, sweat-shop clothes, corrupt highways, po- 
 litical falsehood, monopolized opportunities, he 
 is not to blame, so he earn his "keep," and live 
 "the life of love." I am contending that he 
 is to blame; that the soul that consents to 
 existing social or political or economic arrange- 
 ments, whereby some of the sons of God are 
 given privileges and opportunities above other 
 sons of God, is a lost soul. The salvation of a 
 Chicago man's soul may depend upon his atti- 
 tude toward the subject of municipal franchises, 
 or toward the tax-assessments of railway prop- 
 erty ; while his church and his prayers may
 
 60 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 literally have no more to do with his soul than 
 the geology of the moon. The sin that is 
 destroying American souls is that of ignorance, 
 apathy, and indifference concerning the politi- 
 cal and economic evils that are eating out the 
 heart of the nation, and making every man 
 guilty of his brothers' blood. The evangelist 
 who really wants to save American souls from 
 spiritual death, and not get success for himself 
 and approval for his doctrines, will set about 
 arousing these souls against the national evils 
 that darken and destroy. No man is saved 
 until he is saved from silence and inactivity 
 concerning every known evil,, and has given 
 his life to the procuring of all known common 
 good. The substance of all salvation lies in 
 redemption from living for one's self, in any 
 spiritual or material form whatsoever. To 
 preach any other sort of a salvation is simply 
 a gross religious imposture, a leading of men 
 into darkness, a fundamental denial of individ- 
 ual responsibility. The church that stands for 
 a mere saving and culture of the individual soul 
 is the abode of the lost, and not an ark of 
 safety. 
 
 Private property in righteousness is the worst 
 form of private property ; and self-interest in 
 pursuit of righteousness is the essence of evil.
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 6 1 
 
 To be content to have while others have not, to 
 be content to be right while others are bound 
 and crushed with wrong, to be content to be 
 saved apart from the common life, to seek 
 heaven while our brothers are in hell, is deepest 
 perdition and not salvation ; it is the mark of 
 Cain in a new form. " Under a government 
 which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for 
 a just man is also in prison," said Thoreau, who 
 individually rebelled against his government, 
 but remained at his post of service and took a 
 rebel's punishment. If the Christian con- 
 science of our nation would rise to the true 
 measure of its responsibility, and behold the 
 width and breadth and grandeur of its oppor- 
 tunity, it must first descend into the pain and 
 shame of our economic system, to be beaten 
 with many religious and political stripes, to be 
 despised and rejected by the powerful and the 
 respectable. Only through giving itself as a 
 ransom for the many, through the emancipation 
 of the whole human life, can the Christian con- 
 science gain for itself the freedom and right to 
 do right. 
 
 IV. There is, then, but one final answer to 
 the question of the relation of the disciple of 
 Jesus to the laws of Caesar. He must conquer 
 Caesar's realm, and transfer the law-making
 
 62 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 functions to Jesus. Caesar and Jesus will be- 
 come one at last, and the prophecy for which 
 the papacy stands thus be fulfilled : then the 
 Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall 
 be the shepherd of the people, who shall hunger 
 and thirst no more, neither in spirit nor body. 
 Until the conquest is complete, the disciple has 
 no choice but to fall into the chasm between 
 Caesar and Jesus and die, that his sacrifice may 
 form a living stone in the bridge over which the 
 ransomed society shall pass into the realized 
 kingdom of heaven. There is no way out of 
 the social pain and shame, out of the communal 
 sin and guilt, save deep through it, to the other 
 side. We may not drink of the fruit of the vine, 
 until the kingdom of God be come : that is, we 
 may not enjoy the abundant liberty of life and 
 love, until we can enjoy it in fellowship with all 
 our brethren, in a world of " rest from all self- 
 seeking, and where no man's interest or activity 
 would conflict with that of another." The only 
 Christian innocence in a world of wrong is the 
 sacrifice of one's life in bearing away that 
 wrong. The world is overcome because of the 
 blood of the Lamb, and because of the testi- 
 mony of those who love not their life, even unto 
 death. The sacrifice of conscience in service 
 is the redemptive force that is to save society.
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 63 
 
 To this social sacrifice of conscience Jesus 
 is no exception ; he is rather the most concrete 
 example. Jesus used the Jewish synagogues, 
 travelled the Roman roads, paid tribute to 
 Caesar, and straitened himself by the common 
 straits. Meanwhile, he put a life and an idea 
 into the world that consumed the throne of the 
 Caesars, and that will yet level all our pluto- 
 cracies ; a life and an idea that will break every 
 bond and free every man from the rule of man. 
 But he did it by staying with the people, by 
 being beaten with their stripes, by being 
 ground up in "the machine." He identified 
 himself with the common lot and bondage, re- 
 fusing to separate himself in anything from 
 the entanglements and hard experiences in 
 which all his brethren were involved by the 
 then existing social order and political system. 
 It is by this quality of sacrifice that Jesus bears 
 away the sin of the world. 
 
 If we would follow Jesus in the social re- 
 demption, it will not be by escaping Caesar and 
 his tribute, nor by fleeing from competition, 
 wages, and monopoly ; but it will be by the 
 faithful service of outpoured lives that will yet 
 count strong enough to storm the citadel of 
 monopoly, take its weapons and engines, and 
 thus end the economic war that wastes our
 
 64 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 work and fields and homes. The powers that 
 be are ordained of God to help us to create 
 better powers and gain larger freedom. God 
 ordained monopoly to compel us to industrial 
 democracy. In the machinery of civilization 
 the vast majority of human beings must live 
 their lives ; we can only save the people from 
 being ground to profit by capturing the ma- 
 chinery, so that it shall become the organ of 
 love and liberty. " Are we, the men of to-day," 
 cried our beloved Dr. John P. Coyle, among 
 the last words he left us, " divine enough, is 
 there enough of God in us, to go through with 
 what we have begun, and breathe the breath of 
 life into these beings which we have created, 
 that they may become living souls ? " If we 
 cannot make economic facts the expression of 
 the highest spiritual forces, if the love of 
 Christ is not strong and wise enough to cap- 
 ture and organize the world for perfect free- 
 dom, if the deepest life of the soul is not the 
 real soul of material things, then the world is 
 unredeemed, and we have nothing left but the 
 immoral hope of escaping something of the 
 misery which overwhelms and swallows our 
 brethren. But we have not so learned Christ, 
 and he hath not let us off with so unworthy a 
 charge as the keeping of our own souls amidst
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 6$ 
 
 a common perdition. We are sent to declare 
 the justice of love to the nations and their in- 
 stitutions ; to announce that love is both retrib- 
 utive and constructive law. Go ye, therefore, 
 into all the world, and call laws and economies, 
 religions and moralities, to answer for their 
 ability to secure relations of equality and 
 freedom among men. 
 
 The religious initiative for which the social 
 movement calls, the spiritual dynamic that is 
 to effect the social change, waits for that holy 
 passion for the ideal, without which Hegel 
 affirms "that nothing great in the world has 
 been accomplished." To enlighten the yet un- 
 taught Christian conscience, to mobilize the 
 spiritual forces of Christendom for the eco- 
 nomic redemption, it will take the old apostolic 
 faith in the value of fervent witnessing for 
 simple truth. " Only let us accept and boldly 
 profess the truth to which we are called," says 
 Tolstoi', " and we should find at once that hun- 
 dreds, thousands, millions of men are in the 
 same position as we, that they see the truth as 
 we do, and dread as we do to stand alone in 
 recognizing it." " When a certain point in the 
 diffusion of the truth has been reached," says 
 this prince of individualists, "it is suddenly as- 
 similated by every one, not by the inner way,
 
 66 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 but, as it were, involuntarily." " Just as a single 
 shock may be sufficient," he continues, "when 
 a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipi- 
 tate it at once in crystals, a slight effort may 
 be perhaps all that is needed now" to create a 
 " public opinion consistent with conscience ; " 
 " and through this change of public opinion, 
 the whole order of life may be transformed." 
 V. The Christian reformer is thus one whose 
 mission is to preach what he cannot yet prac- 
 tise ; one who has that quality of faith which 
 dares to build on the substance of things 
 hoped for, but as yet unseen. He shakes his 
 ideal in the face of the world, unabashed by 
 the demand that he shall prove his sincerity 
 by his practice. Plausible as seems the de- 
 mand, deep and distracting as is his yearning 
 to individually realize the ideal for which he 
 stands, he yet knows that the demand and the 
 yearning are a temptation to desert the real 
 battle the followers of the Son of God are sent 
 to fight for the people. So, with the frank- 
 ness and fidelity of the perfect love that casteth 
 out fear, he testifies, early and late, that the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand with its righteous 
 judgments ; with the freedom of equality, and 
 the justice of love. And when, while living 
 the life of love entangled by facts of force and
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OF CONSCIENCE. 6j 
 
 fraud, he is able to so utter the law of love 
 that his word will bring the practical man to 
 organize the world by that law, he will then 
 have done the greater works than Jesus did. 
 
 No such responsibility was ever laid upon 
 men as that which is laid upon the Christian 
 reformer by the crisis of social change ; no 
 such ethical strain ever came to the human 
 conscience. A daily moral and spiritual cru- 
 cifixion is the sacrifice which he has to lay 
 upon the altar of human need, if he fulfils 
 his service to the end. It would be infinitely 
 easier to give up property, if property he has, 
 or to practise something definite in company 
 with kindred spirits, or even to give his body 
 to be burned, than it is to nerve his whole 
 being, to summon all his energies, to the 
 never-ending task, to the matchless spiritual 
 heroism, of pouring out his soul unto death for 
 a public cause, for a common righteousness, 
 for a future good, for a social destiny, in which 
 he can have neither fruit nor part in the flesh. 
 It is not a mere material sacrifice, or a physical 
 martyrdom that is required ; if it were only 
 that, how easy and joyful would be the sacri- 
 fice ! Who cares for poverty, for the stake, 
 the fire, the dungeon, the gallows, or the rack, 
 if that were all ? If in such fashion the sin of
 
 68 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 civilization might be borne away, thousands 
 would respond without a second thought, and 
 with hosannas on their lips. But it is this 
 standing for an order of life which men to- 
 gether must accept or together be lost, and 
 which he alone cannot practise save by desert- 
 ing his brothers, that constitutes the moral 
 tragedy in the soul of the Christian reformer, 
 as he faces the social problem. In order to 
 stay in the thick of the wrong and help his 
 brethren, he must hang his head in shame at 
 the consciousness of his own forced hypocrisy. 
 He sees his own life as a hideous compromise 
 and evasion, entangled and broken by all the 
 things he hates. In order to save others, he 
 literally cannot save himself ; in order to make 
 possible a better human future, he must lite- 
 rally take part in the sins and oppressions of 
 the present. It is by this daily spiritual dying, 
 by this life-long denial of one's true and inmost 
 self, by this hourly crucifixion of all one's ideals 
 of life and love, that the social problem brings 
 unique significance and suffering to the Chris- 
 tian conscience. These are the crosses, crowd- 
 ing every highway of service, on which the 
 apostle of to-morrow's freedom is nailed for 
 every word of truth, for every bold act of spir- 
 itual manhood. This is the martyrdom which
 
 THE SOCIAL SACRIFICE OS CONSCIENCE. 69 
 
 civilization exacts of those who would dedicate 
 their lives to moral and social liberation, a 
 martyrdom unlike anything since the days 
 when the priests and politicians bid the Man 
 of the Cross attest his power to save others by 
 saving himself. 
 
 And who is sufficient for this martyrdom of 
 soul ? Where are the saints able to prove 
 their sainthood in the willingness to be no 
 saints, that the whole human life may be 
 socially sanctified at last ? Where are the 
 anointed ones who will descend into the eco- 
 nomic hell, that they may ascend with hell and 
 its inhabitants into the kingdom of heaven ? 
 Where are the saviors who will lose their own 
 souls, that they may save the soul of the race ? 
 Let them arise, and come quickly ! For them 
 wait the captives and captains of industry 
 alike ; for them wait the heart of God, and 
 the destiny of the world.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES AND SPIRITUAL 
 LIBERTY.
 
 Thus the condition of the masses in every civilized country is, 
 or is tending to become, that of virtual slavery under the forms 
 of freedom. And it is probable that of all kinds of slavery this 
 is the most cruel and relentless. For the laborer is robbed of the 
 produce of his labor, and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence ; 
 but his taskmasters, instead of human beings, assume the form of 
 imperious necessities. Those to whom his labor is rendered and 
 from whom his wages are received are often driven in their turn, 
 contact between the laborers and the ultimate beneficiaries of their 
 labor is sundered, and individuality is lost. The direct responsi- 
 bility of master to slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening 
 influence upon the great majority of men, does not arise ; it is not 
 one human being who seems to drive another to unremitting and 
 ill-requited toil, but " the inevitable laws of supply and demand," for 
 which no one in particular is responsible. The maxims of Cato the 
 Censor — maxims which were regarded with abhorrence even in an 
 age of cruelty and universal slaveholding — that after as much work 
 as possible is obtained from a slave he should be turned out to die, 
 become the common rule ; and even the selfish interest which prompts 
 the master to look after the comfort and well-being of the slave is 
 lost. Labor has become a commodity, and the laborer a machine. 
 There are no masters and slaves, no owners and owned, but only 
 buyers and sellers. The higgling of the market takes the place of 
 every other sentiment. — Henry George.
 
 III. 
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES AND SPIRIT- 
 UAL LIBERTY. 
 
 From possessions which have become private property, and 
 which now, strangely enough, are regarded as the very foundation 
 of good order, spring all the crimes, both of myth and of history. 
 — Richard Wagner. 
 
 Let it be understood that those of us who 
 approach the social problem as religious teach- 
 ers, are not departing from our specific calling 
 as ministers to human souls. So far as we are 
 concerned, there is still but one thing impor- 
 tant and interesting, and that is the soul of 
 man. Whatever else is or is not sacred, the 
 soul is the one certainly and eternally sacred 
 concern. " One soul," says Emerson, " is wiser 
 than the whole world." It is for the sake of 
 the soul that we are saying things about the 
 problems and conditions of society. If the 
 social movement meant simply more bread and 
 a larger bulk of things for each man, we should 
 not be so concerned about its outcome. It is 
 in order that each man may stand free and 
 73
 
 74 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 unafraid to face the problem of his own life, 
 and make of his life an original and complete 
 contribution to the human whole, that we seek 
 for him more bread and better things. Our 
 charge against civilization and its economic 
 system is, that it destroys the human soul. 
 We would not go so far as Mr. Emerson, who 
 declares that " society is a conspiracy against 
 the manhood of every one of its members." 
 But we do declare that the present industrial 
 order attacks the citadel of every soul's faith, 
 and the foundations of its freedom. In try- 
 ing to find the roots and sources of economic 
 wrong, in seeking to set forth the principles 
 of economic right, we are realizing the sole 
 meaning and end of religion ; for religion is 
 relations. To save human souls is to individ- 
 ualize and establish them in right relations — 
 that is, in outward and inward conditions of 
 justice, harmony, and freedom. 
 
 In freedom alone does the soul thrive and 
 blossom. Freedom comes to each man solely 
 through an original vision of truth. Civiliza- 
 tions, religions, and things are valuable just 
 to the extent that they are useful in procuring 
 freedom for each soul to see truth for itself, 
 and to individualize its truth in life and word. 
 The freedom of each man to see truth face to
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 75 
 
 face, to stand erect and fearless in the light 
 of his truth, to conceive and bring forth his 
 destiny through his own communion with truth, 
 is the only thing worth while. The truth, ac- 
 cording to Mr. John Jay Chapman, is whatever 
 so focuses our attention as to bring " all the 
 life within us into harmony. When this hap- 
 pens to us, we discover that truth is the only 
 thing we had ever really cared about in the 
 world." " But," he says, " as the whole of us 
 responds to it, so it takes a whole man to do it. 
 Whatever cracks men up and obliterates parts 
 of them, makes them powerless to give out 
 this vibration. This is about all we know of 
 individualism and the integrity of the individ- 
 ual. The sum of all the philosophies in the 
 history of the world can be packed back into 
 it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world 
 are only bad because they injure this integ- 
 rity ; " they " are only odious because they 
 injure some individual man's spirit." 
 
 A man's spirit is injured, the citadel of his 
 being is attacked, by whatever obstructs, binds, 
 or destroys his freedom to see and live the 
 truth for himself, no matter whether it be a 
 statute law, a religious creed, or an economic 
 condition. Ultimately, anything and every- 
 thing that hinders this freedom will have to
 
 76 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 go. The sooner we begin to take hands off 
 the soul, take our things and laws off, the less 
 of blood and agony the soul will have to go 
 through in the inevitable achieving of its free- 
 dom. To emancipate human life from every- 
 thing that begets necessity and fear, so that 
 each man may have absolute command of his 
 own powers, so that each may find perfect poise 
 in his own individual faith, so that before each 
 may open a clear path of spiritual adventure, 
 this is the only evangelism, the real progress. 
 
 Only the absolutely freed soul can become 
 the complete social man, the willing servant of 
 the common good. In order that each may take 
 his place as a true member and minister of the 
 brotherhood, and thus make his life a perfect 
 function of the social whole, he must be free 
 to fulfil his serving capacity according to his 
 own individuality and faith. This freedom is 
 the goal which the extreme socialist and the 
 extreme individualist alike seek. Is was Fichte, 
 " the ecstatic proclaimer of the glory of the in- 
 dividual will," who said : " Nothing can live by 
 itself or for itself ; everything lives in the whole ; 
 and the whole continually sacrifices itself to 
 itself in order to live anew. This is the law of 
 life. Whatever has come to the consciousness 
 of existence must fall a victim to the progress
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. J J 
 
 of all existence. Only there is a difference, 
 whether you are dragged to the shambles like a 
 beast with bandaged eyes, or whether, in full 
 and joyous presentment of the life which will 
 spring forth from your sacrifice, you offer your- 
 self freely on the altar of eternity." This 
 liberty to offer one's self freely is the worth 
 and meaning of all liberty. It is the right to 
 do right — the hid treasure for which every 
 historic movement has been a search. To do 
 right is to sacrifice one's self in the service of 
 the common life. The quest for liberty for 
 each to give himself to all, in an unfettered 
 and unfearing service of his own choosing, is 
 the substance of the social problem ; which is 
 thus the problem of spiritual liberty. 
 
 The social problem is fundamentally eno- 
 nomic because all privileges rest upon economic 
 supports. Every social question resolves itself 
 into a question of the production and distribu- 
 tion of wealth ; into a question of economic in- 
 dependence or dependence. Is it in the nature 
 of things that the fields of natural resources, 
 and the fruits of human toil, should be reaped 
 as special privileges for the few, or as common 
 benefits for all ? Is superior ability a title-deed 
 to as much of the earth as it can possess, and 
 to the use of human beings for private profit,
 
 y8 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 or is it a divine summons to larger and hum- 
 bler service for the common good ? Did God 
 create our world and race in order that the 
 strong might heap up wealth out of the forced 
 labor of the millions, and is such an order of 
 things the destiny that man must accept ? By 
 what device or right are the sons and daugh- 
 ters of God daily sent to tasks of creating sup- 
 plies out of nature, while their needs of body 
 and spirit go unsupplied, and they have only 
 toil and bare existence for their portion ? Who 
 gave this earth to the profit-makers, and by 
 what authority do they set the children of the 
 earth to making gain for them ? By what pro- 
 cess or alchemy have the resources of nature 
 passed into the hands of the strong, and how 
 comes it that human life is practically treated 
 as mere grist for the capitalist mill ? Is it the 
 end of civilization that industry should develop 
 into a monstrous universal profit-making ma- 
 chine, into which the multitudes are to be fed 
 to be ground out as the increased capital for 
 private owners ? Every nation, every con- 
 science that has a right to be called Christian, 
 searches for the answer, and every reform waits 
 for it. It is thus that the social problem is 
 the problem of human destiny. 
 
 Now, the most fatal difficulty in the way of
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 79 
 
 economic change in behalf of spiritual liberty 
 is revealed by the empty individualistic maxims 
 persistently offered as social remedies. " If 
 men's hearts are only set right," says the reli- 
 gious teacher, "the system of things will be 
 set right." "Any man can get on," says the 
 authoritative commercial instructor of both 
 priest and people, " if he is only honest and 
 industrious." Yet all classes alike are more 
 or less shamefully conscious of the sneaking 
 piety and wanton commercial hypocrisy of 
 these maxims. The worst is, that the teachers 
 of this hypocrisy ostentatiously masquerade as 
 optimists ; although the notion that the pres- 
 ent state of society is the best we can have, or 
 that existing wrongs and inequalities will be 
 righted through individualistic piety, is our most 
 mischievous and cowardly pessimism. 
 
 To begin with, our economic system denies 
 any adequate moral responsibility to the vast 
 majority of human beings ; and there is no in- 
 dividual responsibility where there is no ability 
 to respond. We destroy the ability of the peo- 
 ple to morally respond, and then hold them 
 morally responsible. We deny the people moral 
 rights, and then demand of them that they be 
 morally right. We build civilization on the 
 backs of the people, and then piously enjoin
 
 8o BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 them to get up. We fasten yokes and fetters 
 on the people, and then blame them for not 
 "getting on." We go on creating and support- 
 ing an economic order that morally and physi- 
 cally exhausts the multitudes, and then condemn 
 the social grist for the industrial mill out of 
 which it has been ground. When Richard Wag- 
 ner declared his faith that the people would be 
 the artists of the future, and that from the 
 most absolute democracy the true music would 
 come, his critics pointed to the multitudes as 
 a conclusive answer. "This mob," he said in 
 reply, " is in no wise a normal product of real 
 human nature, but is, instead, the artificial pro- 
 duct of your unnatural culture ; all the crimes 
 and horrors which you find so repulsive in this 
 mob, are only desperate incidents of the war 
 which real human nature is waging against its 
 cruel oppressor — modern civilization." " From 
 possessions," he says, "which have become pri- 
 vate property, and which now, strangely enough, 
 are regarded as the very foundation of good 
 order, spring all the crimes, both of myth and 
 of history." The effort for economic equality 
 and freedom is not an attempt, as the unthink- 
 ing say, to relieve the individual of responsi- 
 bility for his own character and conditions ; it 
 is an effort to place under his feet the founda-
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 8l 
 
 tions of individual responsibility, so that for the 
 first time he shall have opportunity to account 
 for his own character and conditions. 
 
 Nearly all the evils which we are in the habit 
 of attributing to bad hearts are in reality the 
 moral fruits of our economic struggles and in- 
 equalities. It is a Biblical ethical exactness 
 and social insight which leads Mr. W. D. How- 
 ells to conceive of economic inequality as the 
 sum of " almost all the sins and shames that 
 ever were." "In the body of this death," he 
 confesses, " they fester and corrupt forever. 
 As long as we have inequality we shall have 
 these sins and shames, which spring from it, 
 and which live on from inferior to superior." 
 " Half the crimes committed by human beings," 
 said John Brisben Walker to the students and 
 faculty of the Catholic University at Washing- 
 ton, " come from frightful poverty, or an over- 
 abundance of wealth — or from efforts to escape 
 the one, or acquire the other." "The study of 
 the causes of poverty," says Professor Marshall, 
 " is the study of the causes of the degradation 
 of a large part of mankind." Notwithstanding 
 that many of the poor lead less incomplete lives 
 than many who have wealth, " for all that," he 
 declares, " their poverty is a great and almost 
 unmixed evil to them." " Morals rise and flue-
 
 82 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 tuate with trade," says Mr. Arthur Sherwell, in 
 his philosophic little book on " Life in West 
 London." "What are the results of your ob- 
 servations and investigations ? " I asked an 
 ardent rescue-worker, who had spent five years 
 in dealing with what we are pleased to call 
 "fallen girls," and who began his work without 
 the slightest hint of the existence of an eco- 
 nomic problem. " Do you see that great depart- 
 ment store ? " he asked in reply. " The system 
 there embodied is the cause. In that depart- 
 ment store, three thousand girls are employed 
 at an average weekly wage of three and one- 
 half dollars. Upon that wage they are expected 
 to live, and appear neatly dressed in their places 
 of work. They must pay room-rent, board, car- 
 fare, and clothe themselves. Those who do not 
 pay board help support families at home. They 
 cannot live decently in this city on less than six 
 or seven dollars a week. At best, their life is 
 one of helpless, rayless poverty. The evil we 
 seek to remedy comes almost as a matter of 
 course. This store is but an instance of a 
 whole system of things that drags down thou- 
 sands where individual effort can lift up one. 
 There is no remedy but a changed economic 
 system." 
 
 The experience and testimony of this rescue-
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 83 
 
 worker applies to the whole range of moral 
 evils which we point out as causes, when they 
 are in reality effects. Perhaps a quarter of a 
 million people will sit clown in the saloons of 
 Chicago to-night; not to get drunk, or even to 
 drink, for vast numbers of them do not drink at 
 all ; but because the saloon is the only social 
 shrine, the only municipal drawing-room, in 
 which the greater number of citizens can get 
 together as human beings, and " shake their 
 hearts out " to each other, as the Germans say. 
 In this sense, the saloon fulfils a public and 
 profoundly religious function, which the church 
 and municipal system have alike failed to offer ; 
 it is the only social refuge that gives warmth 
 and color, relief and fellowship, to millions of 
 toilers. The drunkenness and crime which fol- 
 low are the direct fruits of the social system. 
 In her last years, Miss Willard declared poverty 
 to be the cause of drunkenness as well as drunk- 
 enness the cause of poverty. We privileged 
 classes are wickedly insensible to the fact that, 
 to the majority of human beings in what we 
 call Christendom, the sensations of drink and 
 sexuality are the only experiences which make 
 life interesting ; the only things that give anti- 
 cipation and romance to life ; the only sacra- 
 ments of human fellowship, save the common
 
 8,; BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 misery and poverty. Centuries ago, the great 
 Augustine declared physical immorality to be 
 perverted divine yearnings after fellowship. 
 And more than four hundred years before Aug- 
 ustine, Jesus declared that the harlots and pub- 
 licans would enter the kingdom of heaven before 
 those of us who belong to the privileged and 
 religious classes, for the simple reason that they 
 are infinitely better than we are : they still have 
 yearnings, while we seek a private property in 
 righteousness, and the safety of our interests 
 in the existing order. 
 
 A newer and truer evangelistic effort will 
 throw its energy and ardor into changing the 
 system of things which destroys human lives 
 by the thousand where the old evangelism can 
 save one. An evangelism that has a genuine 
 interest in really saving individual souls, in- 
 stead of a subtle and self-deceiving interest in 
 its own success as to numbers, will lay the axe 
 at the root of the tree of economic evil, upon 
 which all manner of moral evils grow as natural 
 fruits. The individual, says Mr. George, " is 
 a mere link in an enormous chain of producers 
 and consumers, helpless to separate himself, 
 and helpless to move, except as they move. 
 The worse his position in society, the more 
 dependent is he on society ; the more utterly
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 85 
 
 unable does he become to do anything for him- 
 self. The very power of exerting his labor for 
 the satisfaction of his wants passes from his own 
 control, and may be taken away or restored by 
 the actions of others, or by general causes over 
 which he has no more influence than he has 
 over the motions of the solar system." It is 
 because evangelists and philanthropists have 
 refused to face the economic sources of moral 
 evil, to confess the economic supports of moral 
 superiority, that their honesty is rightly ques- 
 tioned, and their appeals either unheard or 
 heard only with contempt. " These persons 
 are not wrong in saying that poverty and the 
 social problem have a moral cause," says Mr. 
 John A. Hobson, "but they are wrong in the 
 place where they seek the moral cause. It will 
 be found ultimately to reside not in the corrupt 
 nature of the poor, worker or idler, but in the 
 moral cowardice and selfishness of the superior 
 person, which prevent him from searching and 
 learning the economic supports of his superior- 
 ity, and which drive him to subtle theorizing 
 upon 'the condition of conditions' in order to 
 avoid the discovery that his 'superiority' is 
 conditioned by facts which at the same time 
 condition the 'inferiority' of the very persons 
 whom he hopes to assist. The work of grad-
 
 86 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. \ 
 
 ually placing 'property' upon a natural or ra- 
 tional basis, offering that equality of opportunity 
 which shall rightly adjust effort to satisfaction, 
 is a moral task of supreme importance." Moses' 
 first step in disciplining the individual Israel- 
 ites in the ethics and politics of the Ten Com- 
 mandments was the demand upon Pharaoh to 
 let the people go ; the first act in the moral 
 drama of each man was the economic and polit- 
 ical liberation of the whole people. The first 
 step in the development of negro minds and 
 souls was the abolition of slavery. The first 
 step in the spiritual salvation of the present- 
 day individual is the deliverance of the people 
 of Christendom from economic servitude. This 
 is the supreme evangelistic call, which no pious 
 subterfuge proposing to " set men's hearts right " 
 can any longer evade ; it is the commanding 
 spiritual task, which will not move aside for 
 any theological or commercial bluff. Individ- 
 ual " regeneration does not precede reforma- 
 tion, and is not the cause of it," says Dr. S. C. 
 Eby, an able Swedenborgian writer. " On the 
 contrary, the reformation prepares the way for 
 the regeneration, and is an indispensable condi- 
 tion of it." The time has come to distinctly 
 say that civilization must be born again, in that 
 the individual may see the kingdom of God.
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 8/ 
 
 But a changed economic system is essential 
 to the salvation of the privileged classes from 
 monstrous ideals of right. Every advantage 
 which raises some above others, and thus di- 
 vides society into privileged and unprivileged 
 classes, is at bottom some sort of monopoly of 
 opportunity secured by economic advantage. 
 All superiority is thus inherently monopolistic, 
 and therefore unsocial and immoral to begin 
 with ; it can only become moral by exhausting 
 itself in making common the things and privi- 
 leges which the economic system has made 
 special. Privileges and powers that are special 
 result in an utterly immoral standard of moral 
 values ; in the enormous magnifying of com- 
 paratively small sins, and the closing of eyes 
 to the great parent crimes and sources of evil. 
 "A thousand souls are probably destroyed 
 through perjury to the tax-assessor," said Pro- 
 fessor Macy, the other day, "where one is 
 destroyed through drunkenness." "The half- 
 developed animal man," says Horatio W. Dres- 
 ser, "who commits one crime, and is then 
 condemned to a life among those upon which 
 a thoughtless society has set its stamp as 
 incurably 'depraved ' — instead of treating them 
 as human beings to be elevated — may not be 
 nearly as wicked as the cruel capitalist who
 
 88 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 oppresses his employees as though they were 
 slaves, or those who throughout their lives 
 make it easy for the sinner whom society ac- 
 cepts as of good repute." Who can deny that 
 successful coveteousness, although denounced 
 by Jesus and the Scriptures as the supreme 
 crime against God and nations, has yet been 
 the great American virtue, commanding the 
 highest respect of church and society ? On the 
 other hand, the New Testament virtues that 
 make for simplicity and mutual service com- 
 mand scarcely any social respect, and debar 
 from social privileges. " The evil base of our 
 society eats right through," says Edward Car- 
 penter ; " that our wealthy homes are founded 
 on the spoliation of the poor vitiates all the life 
 that goes on within them. Somehow or other 
 it searches through and degrades the art, man- 
 ners, dress, good taste of the inmates." Our 
 accepted standards of moral values train us to 
 strain at gnats of moral weakness, and to swal- 
 low camels and whole caravans of economic and 
 political iniquity. Morality has been degraded 
 to a matter of sheer social might and privilege. 
 With the moral standards produced by our 
 economic system, it is no wonder that our peri- 
 odic appeals to "good citizens," to organize to 
 save their city, or reform the nation, have be-
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 89 
 
 come grotesque and clownish. The "good citi- 
 zens" we call upon to rise above their material 
 self-interests — and that on the ground of more 
 material self-interest, lest the political corrup- 
 tion they have begotten sweep their material 
 things away — are in fact the socially worst; it 
 is from them the city and the nation need sav- 
 ing. The social redemption will come, at last, 
 through the people the "good citizens" exploit 
 and fear. The "good citizens" are the chief 
 enemies of goodness ; the men of " blameless 
 lives " are the high priests of wrongs that af- 
 front the skies, that blaspheme the universe, 
 and that make the very stones cry out against 
 the suffering of man. " The sinners are with 
 us," bitterly cried Lord Shaftesbury ; " it is the 
 saints who fight against us." "Child murder 
 in factories, chattel-slavery, prisoner-flogging — 
 which of these has not had upon its side the 
 majority of the good ? " asks an English social 
 writer ; " leaseholds of tyranny, ignorance, and 
 squalor would not be worth twelve months' pur- 
 chase, but for the unselfish, devoted men and 
 women willing to die in the support of any lie 
 or injustice." "You are told," said Mr. Glad- 
 stone, in a speech at Edinburgh, delivered on 
 June 30, 1892, "that education, that enlighten- 
 ment, that leisure, that high station, that politi-
 
 90 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 cal experience, are arrayed in the opposing camp, 
 and I am sorry to say that I cannot deny it. I 
 painfully reflect that in almost every one, if not 
 in every one, of the greatest political controver- 
 sies of the last fifty years, whether they affected 
 the franchise, whether they affected commerce, 
 whether they affected religion, whether they 
 affected the bad and abominable institution of 
 slavery, or what subject they touched, these 
 leisured classes, these educated classes, these 
 wealthy classes, these titled classes have been 
 in the wrong." It is this defence of evil sys- 
 tem by "good" men that constitutes the tra- 
 gedy of progress. The Father forgives them, 
 as the sons of men forgive them, because they 
 know not what they do. They are as truly 
 victims of a false system and training as the 
 little children who are to-day working beside 
 their mothers in West Virginia coal-pits. They 
 are "the lost" whom the Christ comes to save 
 in the social revolution. Let us hope that 
 some of these, at least, will repent while there 
 is yet time, before the day of dreadful reckoning 
 comes on, and they are called to repentance by 
 barricaded streets and burning cities, by wasted 
 and trampled fields. 
 
 But public or political morality, even more 
 than what we call individual and social morality,
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 9 1 
 
 is destroyed by the economic system. If any 
 text for this proposition were needed, it was 
 furnished, the other day by Mr. Charles T. 
 Root, representing the Merchants' Association 
 of New York City at a meeting of vast finan- 
 cial interests here in Chicago. His address, as 
 reported by the Times-Herald of Oct. 6, 1898, 
 began with this very candid and solemn thesis : 
 " The commercial element in this country 
 shall have its rightful due, and that due is 
 nothing more nor less than a preponderating 
 influence in national and state legislation." 
 The political corruption of which we complain 
 is simply the overflow of the business corrup- 
 tion by which "the commercial element " gains 
 and maintains this " preponderating influence." 
 Political corruption is an integral part of the 
 present business system. In fact, political 
 bribery, both direct and indirect, is the founda- 
 tion upon which industry and commerce now 
 rest. Behind every political " ring " you may 
 find the private owners of public franchises. 
 In New York City, the bottom municipal ail- 
 ment is not Tammany Hall and its retainers, 
 but the business interests that use Tammany 
 Hall to buy legislation at Albany, and to buy 
 franchises at the City Hall ; Tammany is but a 
 symptom, or a disease, of an economic system
 
 92 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 that is through and through corrupt and morally 
 exhausted. It is " business " that balks our 
 attempts at better city government ; that easily 
 bridles and saddles our feeble and halting muni- 
 cipal reforms, and mounts them with " good 
 citizens " who will ride them in the direction of 
 property interests. It is " business " that elects 
 and corrupts our state and national legislatures, 
 and debauches all our sacred political functions. 
 There is scarcely any legislation in the land, 
 municipal or state or national, that is not now 
 bought and sold in the open market. What 
 Justice Harlan intimated, in his dissent from 
 the Income Tax Decision, is a fact : constitu- 
 tional government has been practically over- 
 thrown in America by the "preponderating 
 influence" of "the commercial element" in 
 legislation. Our national courts are largely 
 taken up with the crimes and difficulties which 
 they themselves have created as the instru- 
 ments of corporate properties ; as the agents of 
 private owners of public utilities. The " com- 
 mercial element " has, or is quickly gaining, 
 control of every national situation, threatening 
 the integrity and perpetuity of every existing 
 government. It controls international diplo- 
 macy, makes and breaks treaties for its profit, 
 and increasingly menaces the liberty of the
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 93 
 
 world. In my seventh lecture, I shall refer at 
 length to some of the methods and combina- 
 tions by which American economic and political 
 liberties are being entirely subverted in the 
 interests of private and corporate property. 
 
 Worse than all else, the economic system cor- 
 rupts the sources of public opinion, and baffles 
 the free expression of such free opinion as re- 
 mains. " It would be hard to find," says Mr. 
 Chapman, " a civilized people who are more 
 timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than 
 we." The reason is writ so large that even 
 the blind may read. The money that owns the 
 public press, that inspires its despatches and 
 writes its editorials, also dictates what shall be 
 taught in our colleges, and qualifies the utter- 
 ances of the pulpit to an immeasurably larger 
 degree than we are willing to admit ; and it is 
 gradually adopting legal, journalistic, and aca- 
 demic means to suppress freedom of speech. 
 As an instance of the educational influence of 
 money, let me quote from one of the speakers 
 at the recent annual convention of Illinois 
 bankers. " Largely through the efforts of the 
 American Bankers' Association," says this 
 speaker, " a school of commerce and politics 
 has been established at the University of Chi- 
 cago, and from it much may be hoped." I
 
 94 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 quote from the address as it was published in 
 the Times-Herald of Oct. 26, 1898. But the 
 university referred to is in no sense whatever 
 an exception ; the smallest western college is 
 just as much dependent on the good-will of 
 money as Chicago University. All our educa- 
 tional and missionary organizations elect men 
 to their boards for the bald reason, when di- 
 vested of its pious phrases, that they have 
 money ; and this without a thought of how the 
 money is obtained. The social conscience of 
 our day, and the depthless human need from 
 whence it cries, are as but dust in the balance 
 when weighed with the subtle and indirect, yet 
 absolute, influence of money over both religion 
 and politics. If I were to stand before any 
 representative religious gathering in the land, 
 and there preach actual obedience to the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, declaring that we must 
 actually do what Jesus said, I should commit a 
 religious scandal; I should henceforth be held 
 in disrepute by the official religion that bears 
 Jesus' name. If the head of some great oil 
 combination, though it had violated every law 
 of God or man, besides the so-called economic 
 laws which neither God nor man ever had any- 
 thing to do with, and though it had debauched 
 our nation infinitely beyond the moral shock of
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 95 
 
 the Civil War, were to stand before any repre- 
 sentative religious gathering with an endow- 
 ment check in his hand, he would be greeted 
 with an applause so vociferous as to partake of 
 the morally idiotic. And, mind you, the con- 
 demnation of the miserable spectacle rests not 
 upon the monopolist, but upon ourselves ; upon 
 those of us who worship at his shrine, and teach 
 and preach by the grace of his endowments. 
 It is we, not he and his gifts, that represent the 
 complete prostitution of public opinion. He in- 
 carnates an immeasurably robuster type of ethi- 
 cal manhood than the people who make his 
 interests their lord. We have surrendered our 
 spiritual liberties into the hands of money, and 
 we have done it with an ignorance most culpa- 
 ble. We deserve to work our way out of eco- 
 nomic bondage with shame and tears. 
 
 Retribution for the whole common life in- 
 heres in the nature of our property system. 
 Historically and ethically, private ownership 
 of natural resources rests upon fraud, violence, 
 and force. "Nature," says St. Ambrose, whom 
 I shall quote more at" length in my next lec- 
 ture, " gave all things in common for the use 
 of all ; usurpation created private right." Great 
 private ownership has always been created out 
 of sheer appropriation of the common lands
 
 $6 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 and resources, or else out of the private use of 
 public franchises and functions. In speaking 
 of a single instance of "the moral devastation 
 which has been wrought in the community" by 
 the private ownership of a public utility, Dr. 
 Gladden says: "No despotic government on the 
 face of the earth to-day possesses so much power 
 over the economic welfare of a people as has 
 been held and exercised by one hundred men, 
 at the head of the great railway systems of the 
 United States." " It is not true," he says, 
 "that this is a free country. It is a rich coun- 
 try, a prosperous country, but it is not a free 
 country." To permit an ownership which thus 
 subverts the liberties of the people is the es- 
 sence of public infidelity and irreligion. 
 
 The immorality of private ownership cannot 
 take refuge in legal enactments. Legal owner- 
 ship rests upon force, and not upon ethics ; it 
 is, as Mr. Carpenter has pointed out, a mere 
 "power to prevent others from using." A man 
 has no ethical right to possess what he is not 
 using for the common good. Private ownership 
 is social trusteeship, that is all ; it is not private 
 ownership in any real or right sense. 
 
 Nor can great private ownerships be said to 
 grow out of the profitable use of public re- 
 sources. There has never been such a thing
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 97 
 
 as profit. The so-called surplus value, from 
 which profit theoretically springs, is a pure 
 fiction. Profit is a form of forcibly appropri- 
 ating the produce of the labor of others, an 
 historical device for using human beings as the 
 creatures of private interest. The use of human 
 beings for private and corporate gain can only 
 end in the enslavement of spirit on the one 
 side, and the tyranny of power on the other 
 side. Whatever form it may take, whether 
 power be full of good-will or ill-will, the power 
 to make profit out of things is the power to 
 enslave and exploit human life. 
 
 Precisely such a form of force is the wage- 
 system which Professor Letourneau calls the 
 last evolution of slavery. Let the intent of 
 the wage-master be as benevolent as it may, 
 the wage-system is through and through a 
 slave-system in its essence. Even at its best, 
 the relation of employer and wage-earner is 
 subversive alike of good workmanship, of high 
 morality, and of freedom. Noble ideals and 
 individual initiative do not inhere in, or spring 
 from, the idea of master and men. " It is only 
 after prolonged perversion of feeling and of 
 ideas," says Rousseau, "that it becomes possi- 
 ble for a man to recognize a master in one like 
 to himself." " Every created being is, by na-
 
 98 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 ture, independent of every other," says Abbe 
 Lamennais ; " and if the highest of celestial 
 spirits were to come of his own accord, and 
 with no sanction but his own will, to dictate 
 laws to man, to acquire dominion over him, I 
 should see in him but a tyrant, and in his sub- 
 jects only slaves." This is precisely what the 
 private ownership of public resources, with its 
 system of wages and economic dependence, 
 comes to ; it is essential absolutism and despot- 
 ism, be it ever so kindly. Caesar is none the 
 less Caesar, and Caesarism none the less against 
 the divine course of things, though Caesar be 
 be full of piety and good-will. They who pos- 
 sess the world's resources have mankind at 
 their mercy, its very freedom to think and 
 breathe, with a certainty that no Caesar ever 
 dreamed of. If a few men own the earth, we 
 can live on the earth only on their terms. It 
 is economic power alone that can reduce hu- 
 manity to madness ; that can bring the race to 
 to its knees in a way that would make the 
 mightiest empire seem as but a rope of sand. 
 The armies of emperors and conquerors are as 
 mushrooms compared with the armies of dol- 
 lars which human beings must have or starve. 
 It is this economic throne, already casting its 
 dread shadow of universal empire over a fearful
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 99 
 
 and anxious world, that wage-earners are build- 
 ing for their masters, good and bad alike. Only 
 with the abolition of the wage-system, says Pro- 
 fessor Letourneau, will humanity "be prepared 
 for physical, moral, and mental perfection, and 
 will realize for the first time the full meaning 
 of life's happiness." The freeing of men from 
 this system is the task to which the soul of 
 freedom now summons the peoples and their 
 institutions. 
 
 It follows, then, that the public ownership of 
 the sources and means of production is the sole 
 answer to the social question, and the sole basis 
 of spiritual liberty. Private ownership of pub- 
 lic resources is private ownership of human be- 
 ings. " He who owns my sustenance," says 
 Alexander Hamilton, " owns my moral being." 
 Both body and soul are enslaved by a system 
 which makes one human being dependent upon 
 another for the opportunity to earn his bread 
 and develop his life. So long as the resources 
 of the people are privately owned, so that men 
 are obliged to sell their labor-power to the 
 owners for sustenance, they are not free mem- 
 bers of society or of the state ; they are not 
 even free to worship God according to their 
 own light and intuitions. He who sells his 
 labor-power, under the compulsion of necessity,
 
 IOO BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 for the mere means of existence, is in no sense 
 a really free man. There is no security for 
 any sort of liberty, no basis for a complete and 
 free individuality, except in a civilization in 
 which all shall work for the common good, and 
 each have free access to the supply of every 
 sort of need. In order that each may be secure 
 in the private property wherewith to express 
 his individuality, the resources upon which the 
 people in common depend must by the people 
 in common be owned and administered. The 
 common ownership of the earth is the only 
 ground upon which true property and liberty 
 can be built, the only soil in which individuality 
 may take root. Liberty as a human fact means 
 communism in natural resources, democracy in 
 production, equality in use, private property in 
 consumption, and the responsibility of each for 
 all and of all for each. 
 
 So we may trace back to an economic source 
 every one of our social questions, and the whole 
 immediate problem of spiritual liberty. Every 
 religious and political question may be found 
 to be fundamentally economic. Questions of 
 the individual soul, questions of national poli- 
 tics, finally resolve themselves into questions of 
 economic right and duties. Historic religious 
 persecutions, when analyzed, are found to come
 
 PUBLIC RESOURCES, SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. IOI 
 
 from political weapons in the hands of economic 
 interests. Present day political corruption has 
 its sources and supports in economic might. 
 By economic force human beings are used as 
 creatures of private and corporate profit. Eco- 
 nomic necessity compels the millions to toil for 
 the luxury and power of the few, and destroys 
 the power of toilers to revolt. Every sort of 
 freedom, religious and intellectual, political and 
 social, rests back upon economic freedom. 
 
 That economic and spiritual liberty are in- 
 separable lies in the nature of life and things. 
 It is by the free use of things that spirit comes 
 to self-realization and liberty. In a world where 
 life is work and growth, the motives and con- 
 ditions under which work must be done, the 
 way and spirit in which the fruits of work are 
 shared, involve the whole well-being of each 
 man, and finally determine the quality of man's 
 faith in God. The economic liberty which se- 
 cures equality of opportunity is the only ground 
 on which the sons of men can rise to the glory 
 of the sons of God ; the only ground on which 
 man can achieve his destiny of organized love. 
 The production and distribution of wealth for 
 the common good will prove to be the highest 
 form of spiritual liberty yet attained. The 
 quest for this spiritual liberty is the motive by
 
 102 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 which the social drama must be interpreted ; 
 and the spirit of private ownership is the villain 
 in the drama. 
 
 Out of no spirit of denunciation have I spoken 
 of our economic evils; for I judge no man, and 
 I count no man guilty above myself. Nor do I 
 speak in behalf of one class against another ; 
 for the social movement is not a class move- 
 ment, but an effort of the whole human life for 
 spiritual emancipation. There is not one of us, 
 no matter how rich, no matter how poor, who 
 does not yearn for liberty to live the brother- 
 hood we all feel. We are every one of us, with- 
 out regard to place or possessions, miserable at 
 heart over the existing order of things. We 
 know that it does not represent us ; that it is 
 not just nor noble ; that it compels us to deeds 
 that violate our manhood and desecrate our 
 life. Then let us meet our monstrous wrongs 
 as brothers and not as enemies, and determine 
 that they shall come to an end, so that we shall 
 dare, at last, to look God and one another in 
 the face, unashamed, unafraid, and free, with 
 the justice of love to organize the world in an 
 economic order that shall incarnate the peace 
 of good-will among men.
 
 LECTURE IV, 
 
 CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AND PRIVATE 
 PROPERTY.
 
 He showed that an economical question is invariably hidden 
 beneath each religious evolution, and that, upon the whole, the ever- 
 lasting evil, the everlasting struggle, has never been aught but one 
 between the rich and the poor. Among the Jews, when their nomadic 
 life was over, and they had conquered the land of Canaan, and owner' 
 ship and property came into being, a class warfare at once broke out. 
 There were rich and there were poor ; thence arose the social ques- 
 tion. The transition had been sudden, and the new state of things 
 so rapidly went from bad to worse that the poor suffered keenly, and 
 protested with the greater violence as they still remembered the golden 
 age of the nomadic life. Until the time of Jesus the prophets are 
 but rebels who surge from out the misery of the people, proclaim its 
 sufferings, and vent their wrath upon the rich, to whom they prophesy 
 every evil in punishment for their injustice and their harshness. 
 Jesus himself appears as the claimant of the rights of the poor. The 
 prophets, whether socialists or anarchists, had preached social equal- 
 ity, and called for the destruction of the world if it were unjust- 
 Jesus likewise brings to the wretched hatred of the rich. All his 
 teaching threatens wealth and property : and if by the kingdom of 
 heaven which he promised one were to understand peace and frater- 
 nity upon this earth, there would only be a question of returning to a 
 life of pastoral simplicity, to the dream of the Christian community, 
 such as after him would seem to have been realized by his disciples. 
 During the first three centuries each church was an experiment in 
 communism, a real association whose members possessed all in com- 
 mon — wives excepted. This is shown to us by the apologists and 
 early fathers of the church. Christianity was then but the religion 
 of the humble and the poor, a form of democracy, of socialism strug- 
 gling against Roman society. — Jimile Zola.
 
 IV. 
 
 CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AND 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 
 
 But if we say, on the one hand, that the Bible utterly condemns 
 all violence, revolt, fierceness, and self-assertion, then we may safely 
 say, on the other hand, that there is certainly communism in the 
 Bible. The truth is, the Bible enjoins endless self-sacrifice all round ; V 
 and to any one who has grasped this idea, the superstitious worship 
 of property, the reverent devotedness to the propertied and satisfied 
 classes, is impossible. — Matthew Arnold. 
 
 The common ownership of natural resources 
 follows a clear line of Christian teaching from 
 the beginning of that teaching with Jesus 
 Christ. Nearly all his statements of religious 
 principles are in terms of human relations ; and 
 his idea was altogether more communistic than 
 we care to discover. Reduced to economic 
 terms, the realization of his ideal of the king- 
 dom of heaven could mean nothing less than an 
 all-inclusive, non-exclusive communism of oppor- 
 tunity, use, and service. It may be a debatable 
 matter whether any form of communism is prac- 
 ticable ; but it is not open to question that 
 ios
 
 106 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Jesus never contemplated anything else than 
 an organization of human life in which all men 
 should work together for the common good, 
 and each have according to his needs or power 
 to use. 
 
 The teaching of Jesus is a spiritual evolution 
 of the social ideal that lay at the heart of the 
 Hebrew Commonwealth and its history. His 
 ideal of the kingdom of heaven is a synthesis 
 of Biblical political and social philosophy. In 
 this whole body of literature which we call the 
 Bible, there is no significant message that does 
 not come to practical human equality in all sorts 
 of resources, if the message be carried out and 
 applied. As Matthew Arnold has said : " If we 
 say, on the one hand, that the Bible utterly con- 
 demns all violence, revolt, fierceness, and self- 
 assertion, then we may safely say, on the other 
 hand, that there is certainly communism in the 
 Bible." Or take the way the prophets and 
 apostles are characterized by Renan : " The 
 prophets of Israel are fiery publicists of the de- 
 scription we should now call socialists or anar- 
 chists. They are fanatical in their demands for 
 social justice, and proclaim aloud that, if the 
 world is not just, nor capable of becoming just, 
 it were better it were destroyed ; a most false, 
 yet most fecund mode of viewing the matter, for
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 107 
 
 like all desperate doctrines, as, for instance, 
 Russian nihilism at the present day, it produces 
 heroism and great awakening of human forces. 
 The founders of Christianity, the direct contin- 
 uers of the prophets, conclude by an incessant 
 invocation of the end of the world, and strange 
 to say, they really do change it." 
 
 No man can read the Gospels honestly with- 
 out seeing that Jesus regarded individual wealth 
 as a moral fall, and as social violence. He be- 
 lieved social inequality to be the manifestation 
 of the religious apostasy and spiritual disorder 
 that rooted in covetousness. Though he knew 
 not our economic terms, he yet taught that one 
 could enrich himself only by hardening his heart 
 against his brothers. When he declared that 
 it was hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom 
 of God, it is clear that he meant that it was 
 hard for him to yield to the essential thing in 
 his case, which was the giving up of his prop- 
 erty to the common good ; because he was not 
 able to do this, the rich young man went away 
 sorrowful. When he said that a man must re- 
 nounce all he had to become his disciple, he 
 was not speaking vaguely ; he meant exactly 
 what he said. "There is," says John Brisben 
 Walker, " no escaping the severity of the Sa- 
 viour upon the matter of wealth and poverty.
 
 I08 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Strange to say, to the casual reader of the 
 sacred Scriptures, it seems the one subject 
 upon which his words always ring with a terri- 
 ble directness against the trespasser. The re- 
 pentant thief — the outcast who turned in his 
 misery upon the cross — had only to look to be 
 forgiven. The sudden anger of St. Peter, and 
 his unhappy denials of his Saviour, were made 
 lio-ht of. Magdalen had but to fall at his feet 
 to hear her pardon pronounced. But these rich, 
 who know not their brothers, how relentlessly 
 does he always speak to them." Jesus could 
 see nothing more irreligious, more defiant to- 
 ward God or wicked toward man, than that men 
 should use superior ability as a mere instrument 
 for exploiting their brothers, making human 
 need and ignorance their prey. From his point 
 of view, the power to serve is not only the 
 sacredest gift, but is in itself, in its intrinsic 
 worth, the highest human reward. The idea 
 that serving power is something to be rewarded 
 by things other than itself, something to be 
 sold and paid for in the market, was to him a 
 frightful profanation of life. The harmony of 
 the most common economic and social facts 
 with the highest subjective and spiritual ideals 
 is the distinctive ground of the religion of 
 Jesus.
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. IO9 
 
 Now apostolic Christianity took seriously the 
 economic facts of the spiritual life. Men under- 
 stood that, in becoming Jesus' disciples, it was 
 incumbent upon them to surrender private 
 interests to the brotherhood. "It is beyond 
 all question," as Canon Gore says, that the 
 early Christians took it to be the intention of 
 Christ that they should live "by a certain 
 moral law, which put the sternest restraints on 
 the spirit of competition, on the acquisition of 
 wealth, on selfish aggrandizement." "No one," 
 says Mr. Walker, " can read the early history 
 of the church and doubt that the spirit of the 
 first Christians was communistic. Catholic 
 writers dwell on their communism. There can 
 be no doubt about these early conditions. 
 The words, then so recently from the lips of 
 the Saviour, were construed literally." When 
 the Holy Ghost came upon the apostolic 
 fellowship, "the multitude of them that be- 
 lieved were of one heart and soul : and not one 
 of them said that aught of the things he pos- 
 sessed was his own ; but they had all things 
 common. And with great power gave the 
 apostles their witness of the resurrection" of 
 the Lord Jesus : and great grace was upon 
 them all. For neither was there among them 
 any that lacked : for as many as were pos-
 
 IIO BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 sessors of houses or lands sold them, and 
 brought the prices of the things that were sold, 
 and laid them at the apostles' feet : and dis- 
 tribution was made unto each, according as 
 any one had need." We are nearly always told 
 that the early Christians of Jerusalem were 
 reduced to poverty because of their com- 
 munism ; but we have not an iota of evidence 
 that such was the case. In fact, the historical 
 evidence is quite to the contrary. The siege 
 of Jerusalem under Titus reduced the whole 
 nation to such poverty that mothers ate their 
 babes. In that awful rebellion and national 
 extinction, the Christian communities alone 
 seem to have fairly survived. In appealing to 
 the churches for mutual help, in these times of 
 peril and want, Paul lays down the law of such 
 help, which I quote from the Catholic Bible : 
 "For I mean not that others should be eased 
 and you burdened ; but by an equality. And 
 again in the present time let your abundance 
 supply their want ; that their abundance may 
 also supply your want ; that there may be an 
 equality." The great argument of the apostle 
 was the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which 
 consisted in his becoming poor for our sakes, 
 he being rich in himself. 
 
 Down past the time of Augustine, who would
 
 PRIVA TE PROPERTY. 1 1 I 
 
 admit no one to the churchly offices save on 
 the surrender of all private property, the com- 
 munistic idea largely prevailed. "We must 
 admit," says Professor Nitti, in his great work 
 on "Catholic Socialism," "that Christianity was 
 a vast economic revolution, more than anything 
 else." "The early fathers of the church," he 
 says, "faithful to the teachings of Christ, pro- 
 fessed thoroughly communistic theories. They 
 lived among communistic surroundings, and 
 could not well have maintained theories con- 
 trary to those held by Christ and the apostles." 
 Professor Nitti has done noble service in collat- 
 ing the sayings of the church fathers with 
 regard to private property. " Opulence,'' says 
 Jerome, "is always the result of theft, if not 
 committed by the actual possessor, then by his 
 predecessors." "All is in common with us 
 except women," says Tertullian. " It is no 
 great thing," writes Gregory the Great, "not to 
 rob others of their belongings, and in vain do 
 they think themselves innocent who appropri- 
 ate to their own use alone those goods which 
 God gave in common ; by not giving to others 
 that which they themselves receive, they be- 
 come homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in 
 keeping for themselves those things which 
 would have alleviated the sufferings of the
 
 112 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 poor, we may say that they every day cause 
 the death of as many persons as they might 
 have fed and did not. When, therefore, we 
 offer the means of living to the indigent, we 
 do not give them anything of ours, but that 
 which of right belongs to them. It is less a 
 work of mercy that we perform than the pay- 
 ment of a debt." "It was not until the thir- 
 teenth century," says Professor Nitti, in con- 
 cluding these and many like quotations, " when 
 the church was already immensely rich, that 
 ecclesiastical writers appeared openly maintain- 
 ing the right of property." When this came 
 to pass, " the church was not only obliged to 
 repudiate its original teachings, but it was 
 forced, after a long struggle, to exclude from 
 the fold those who obstinately maintained 
 them." Many statements and sermons might 
 be taken from the church fathers to verify Pro- 
 fessor Nitti's position ; but they are needless. 
 The quotations he has gathered are fairly typi- 
 cal of the whole body of patristic teaching. 
 It all comes to the same thing : that com- 
 munism and equality are the only logical and 
 obedient economic expressions of our Lord's 
 teachings. With the single exception of Clem- 
 ent of Alexandria, nothing else was taught 
 concerning property by the great fathers of
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 113 
 
 theology and the church. But I can make 
 place for citing only three of these, Chrysostom, 
 Ambrose, and Augustine. 
 
 The struggle of Chrysostom with the powers 
 of church and state, at Constantinople, was 
 purely an economic conflict, and but incident- 
 ally a theological controversy. The golden- 
 mouthed preacher insisted on "the necessity 
 of restoring at all costs community of goods." \J 
 He could not conceive of great fortunes except 
 as the fruits of theft and crime, of monopoly or 
 usury. " Behold," he writes, " the idea we 
 should have of the rich and covetous : they are 
 truly as robbers, who, standing in the public 
 highways, despoil the passers-by ; they convert 
 their chambers into caverns, in which they bury 
 the goods of others." "You say that the poor 
 do not work," he one day responds to some ex- 
 cuses of the rich, "but do you work yourselves? 
 Do you not enjoy in idleness the goods you have 
 unjustly inherited? Do you not exhaust others 
 with labor, while you enjoy in indolence the 
 fruit of their misery ? " On another occasion, 
 having violently censured the rich citizens of 
 Constantinople, he exclaims : " They say to me, 
 * Wilt thou never cease from speaking ill of the 
 rich ? Still more anathemas against the rich ! ' 
 and I answer, ' Still your hardness towards the
 
 114 BETWEEN' CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 poor!'' It was because of his merciless de- 
 nunciations of the rich, upon every occasion 
 which he could find or make, that Chrysostom 
 was finally driven from the city to his last exile 
 and death. Once, during an exile, the authori- 
 ties sent for him to return on condition that he 
 would cease to stigmatize the rich. His reply 
 was to the effect that he would return if they 
 wished him to preach the gospel of the Lord, 
 but that in so doing he would never cease to 
 denounce the wealth of the rich as the robbery 
 of the poor. 
 
 The majestic Ambrose was the greatest states- 
 man of the church before Hildebrand, if not 
 the greatest statesman who has made the church 
 his sphere up to this day. He was himself a 
 Roman patrician of the highest blood and dig- 
 nity. Yet no man ever taught so explicitly 
 that the common ownership of natural re- 
 sources is the only Christian justice. He 
 sometimes does this at once in the name of 
 Christ and in the terms of the ancient Roman 
 law. One could easily imagine that he gave 
 Henry George and Rousseau their theses. 
 "The soil," he says, "was given to rich and 
 poor in common. Wherefore, oh ye rich! do 
 you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone?" 
 " Nature grave all things in common for the use
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. I I 5 
 
 of all, usurpation created private right." Com- 
 pare this with Mr. George : The curse of pov- 
 erty is due to the fact "that, impiously violating 
 the benevolent intentions of their Creator, men 
 have made land private property, and thus given 
 into the exclusive ownership of the few that 
 provision that a bountiful Father has made for 
 all. Any other answer than that, no matter 
 how it may be shrouded in the mere forms of 
 religion, is practically an atheistical answer." 
 Or compare Ambrose with Rousseau : " The 
 first man who, having fenced off a piece of 
 ground, could think of saying, 'This is mine,' 
 and found people simple enough to believe him, 
 was the real founder of civil society. How 
 many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and hor- 
 rors would not have been spared to the human 
 race by one who, plucking up the stakes, or 
 filling in the trench, should have called out 
 to his fellows : ' Beware of listening to this im- 
 postor ; you are undone if you forget that the 
 earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are 
 for all.' " To the rich, against whose oppres- 
 sions his voice was constantly raised, Ambrose 
 said: "You clothe the walls of your houses and 
 leave the poor unclad ; the naked wail at your 
 gates, and your only thought is of the marble 
 with which you shall overlay your floors; he
 
 Il6 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 begs for bread, and your horse has a golden bit. 
 Costly apparel delights you, while others lack 
 food. The very jewel in your ring would pro- 
 tect from hunger a mass of people." "When 
 men were unjustly persecuted," says Dean Far- 
 rar, "he extended to them the rights of asylum. 
 When multitudes were taken prisoners in the 
 incessant battles against rebels and invaders, 
 he unhesitatingly melted down the sacred ves- 
 sels to purchase their ransom. Nobody spoke 
 more boldly against vice. He denounced the 
 custom of drinking toasts, and put down the 
 vice of revelling on the feast days of martyrs. 
 He rebuked the perfumed and luxurious youths ; 
 the women who reclined on silver couches and 
 drank from jewelled cups ; the men who de- 
 lighted in porphyry tables and gilded fret-work, 
 and cared more for their hounds and horses 
 than for their fellow-Christians. Nor did he 
 less faithfully denounce the idle multitude who 
 patronized the madness of the circus and the 
 vice of the theatre." 
 
 Augustine anticipated Cardinal Manning and 
 Archbishop Lynch in declaring the divine and 
 unlimited right of human need ; he character- 
 ized the monopoly which limited the supply 
 as murder. His whole philosophy of history 
 pivoted upon the doctrine that both private
 
 PRIVA TE PROPER TY. I 1 7 
 
 property and the state originated in sin. " God 
 has made the rich and the poor of the same 
 clay, and one earth bears them both," he says. 
 " 'Tis through emperors and kings of the world 
 that God gives the human law of the human 
 race. Take away the law of the emperors and 
 who will dare to say 'This villa is mine'?" 
 Though differing totally in substance, Augus- 
 tine's doctrine of property and the state comes 
 to the same thing as the philosophical anar- 
 chism of Kropotkin and Bakunin ; it lays a per- 
 fect foundation for the Christian nihilism of 
 Tolstoi'. The best summing up of Augustine's 
 doctrine is by Professor Nash, in his " Genesis 
 of the Social Conscience": Property "has no 
 ground whatever in equity as distinguished from 
 positive law. In true humanity it lacks all 
 root. To sin it owes its origin and to sin its 
 continuance. Its title-deeds cannot pass mus- 
 ter in the supreme court of morality, — the 
 monastery." " All who have a passion for good- 
 ness," continues Professor Nash, "find no stop- 
 ping-place short of the monastic 'counsels of 
 perfection.' On this level there is no private 
 property. No saint can own his farm. In the 
 Pseudo-Isidore, it is written : ' We know that 
 you are not ignorant of the fact that hitherto 
 the principle of living with all things in com-
 
 Il8 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 mon has been in vigorous operation among 
 good Christians, and is still so by the grace of 
 God ; and most of all among those who have 
 been chosen to the lot of the Lord, that is to 
 say, the clergy.' " 
 
 I am not contending, by all these quotations, 
 that the church fathers had economic knowl- 
 edge or authority. It is not with unqualified 
 approval that I quote their hard sayings, or that 
 I call upon them as witnesses in our social 
 crisis. But I do insist that we must account 
 for the fact that for centuries it was taken as a 
 matter of course that Christianity meant com- 
 munism, when actually practised. 
 
 It is to the monastery we must turn when 
 the question of communistic practicability is 
 raised. The monastery was a pure communism, 
 and was originally a pure democracy. " A prac- 
 tical democracy," says Dr. Richard S. Storrs, 
 " existed in the monasteries, where all the monks 
 elected the abbot whom they were afterward to 
 obey, and where the distinctions of rank pre- 
 vailing in the world had entirely disappeared, 
 noble and vassal working together, the count and 
 the ploughman side by side. This was a fact 
 fruitful of consequences. Such an established, 
 organized, Christian socialism had to do with 
 all history." Within its walls and among its
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 1 9 
 
 members, there was neither wage nor price, 
 neither profit nor bargain. Every man did the 
 thing he could best do, and had free supply for 
 every recognized need. " The monks who built 
 the abbeys of Cluny and St. Denis," says Mr. 
 Brooks Adams, in his great work on " The Law 
 of Civilization and Decay," " took no thought 
 of money, or it regarded them not. Sheltered 
 by their convents, their livelihood was assured ; 
 their bread and their robe were safe ; they 
 pandered to no market, for they cared for no 
 patron. Their art was not a chattel to be 
 bought, but an inspired language in which they 
 communed with God, or taught the people, and 
 they expressed a poetry in the stones they 
 carved which far transcended words." 
 
 With enormous exaggeration, Protestant his- 
 torians and sectarian agitators have dwelt upon 
 the corruption of the monks. Wide and deep 
 corruptions existed, it is true ; but they came 
 as the natural fruit of the great endowments 
 which wealth and feudal powers brought to the 
 monastery in later times ; and they were but 
 incidental in a system which was the channel 
 through which came about all that is worth 
 having in modern civilization. Through the 
 monastery the Renaissance and Greek democ- 
 racy came to Europe. Out of the monastery
 
 120 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 rose the great arts, the university, the cathe- 
 dral, the revivals of Francis and Bernard, the 
 Crusades, and finally the Reformation. The 
 monk was the pioneer of industry and agricul- 
 ture, as well as of learning and the cross ; it 
 was he who founded cities and states in the 
 forests, among the barbarians ; it was he who 
 defended the weak from feudal and savage 
 oppressors, and sought to diminish the suffer- 
 ings due to the wide poverty that was the crea- 
 tion of feudal wars and feudal monopoly of the 
 land. " The monasteries," says Professor Mar- 
 shall, " were the homes of industry, and in par- 
 ticular of the scientific treatment of agricul- 
 ture ; they were secure colleges for the learned, 
 and they were hospitals and alms-houses for the 
 suffering. The church acted as a peace-maker 
 in great matters and in small ; the festivals and 
 the markets held under its authority gave free- 
 dom and safety to trade." " The Benedictine 
 monks," says M. Guizot, " were the agricultur- 
 ists of Europe ; they cleared it on a large scale, 
 associating agriculture with preaching." " We 
 owe the agricultural restoration of the great 
 part of Europe to the monks," says Mr. Hal- 
 lam. " They found a swamp," says Cardinal 
 Newman, "a moor, a thicket, a rock, and they 
 made an Eden in the wilderness. They de-
 
 rRIVATR PROPERTY. 121 
 
 stroyed snakes ; they extirpated wild cats, 
 wolves, boars, bears ; they put to flight or they 
 converted rovers, outlaws, robbers. The gloom 
 of the forest departed, and the sun, for the first 
 time since the Deluge, shone upon the moist 
 ground." " So long as the church held its lands 
 and its power, permanent pauperism was un- 
 known," says Mr. Hyndman, who is certainly no 
 friend of the church. "The general employ- 
 ment," he says, " which, as landlords resident 
 among the people, they afforded, the improve- 
 ments of the farms and of their own buildings 
 which they carried out, the excellent work in 
 road-making which they did — a task especially 
 necessary in those times — in addition to their 
 action as public alms-givers, teachers, doctors, 
 and nurses, show what useful people many of 
 these much-abused monks and nuns really were." 
 "It is hard," says Mr. John Fiske, " to find 
 words to express the debt of gratitude which 
 modern civilization owes to the Catholic 
 Church ; " and this applies especially to the 
 spiritual chivalry and enterprise which went 
 forth from the monastery to subdue and organ- 
 ize both human and material worlds. The 
 monks aimed, as Professor Harnack has said, 
 at nothing less than " a Christian life of entire 
 Christendom." They set the example and laid
 
 122 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 the basis, the world over, for free labor and a 
 Christian society. 
 
 It thus turns out that the best work of the 
 world has been done, and the best things of the 
 past produced, by communistic institutions. 
 For that matter, the best things in our modern 
 life, such as the free school, are the working 
 out of the communistic idea ; and only the 
 other day, one of the greatest American law- 
 yers, who is also chief attorney for a most pow- 
 erful corporation, specifically arraigned our 
 public school system on the ground that its 
 continuation would destroy the existing order 
 of things. Through ages of political anarchy, 
 the monks were able to preserve for the future 
 the intellectual and spiritual resources of the 
 centuries, to give refuge to the robbed and the 
 oppressed, through the power that inhered in 
 their communistic order. No other economic 
 method has ever proved to be so practicable 
 and successful as the economic method of the 
 purely communistic monastery ; indeed, the 
 question of practicability may all turn out to be 
 on the other side. It is certainly a universal 
 question to-day, as to whether the private own- 
 ership of resources and industry is likely to 
 prove anything but impracticable and disas- 
 trous.
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 23 
 
 Of supreme significance, at this point, is the 
 religious movement of St. Francis of Assisi, — 
 the truest knight of Christ that ever drew the 
 sword of love against the fortresses of oppres- 
 sion and strife. He aimed at nothing less than 
 the entire social regeneration of Europe, begin- 
 ning with the cities and castles that crowned 
 his Umbrian hill-tops. His initiative rooted in 
 the idea of the sacrifice of love in service as 
 universal and redemptive law, and as the sole 
 bond of political and social unity. To this end 
 he gathered his friars, as the marshalled hosts 
 of conquering love. He organized them, as M. 
 Paul Sabatier has pointed out, not into a men- 
 dicant order, but into a laboring order. The 
 monks were to work together for the common 
 good, reducing their necessities to a minimum, 
 in order that each might become a living evan- 
 gel of the revolution of love. The prayer of 
 St. Francis was that he might be denied all 
 privileges, except the privilege of having no 
 privileges. His Third Order was an attempt to 
 extend the economic system or communistic 
 idea of the monastery so as to take in the family 
 and the community. " The enemy of the soul 
 for him," says his great biographer, "as for 
 Jesus, was avarice, understood in its largest 
 sense — that is to say, that blindness which
 
 124 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 constrains men to consecrate their hearts to ma- 
 terial preoccupations, makes them the slave of 
 a few pieces of gold or of a few acres of land, 
 renders them insensible to the beauties of na- 
 ture, and deprives them of infinite joys which 
 they alone can know who are the disciples of 
 poverty and love. Whoever was free at heart 
 from all material servitude, whoever was decided 
 to live without hoarding, every rich man who 
 was willing to labor with his hands and loyally 
 distribute all that he did not consume in order 
 to constitute the common fund which St. Fran- 
 cis called the Lord's table, every poor man who 
 was willing to work, was free to resort, in the 
 strict measure of his wants, to this table of the 
 Lord ; these were at that time true Francis- 
 cans." After many awkward discussions and 
 entanglements, finding itself unable to with- 
 stand the movement, the church perverted St. 
 Francis's original idea by adopting it, and 
 Christ's sweetest and bravest knight died of a 
 broken heart. But even in its perverted chan- 
 nels, the initiative of Francis was the real re- 
 naissance of Christianity, — a world revolution 
 that is scarcely yet fairly under way. 
 
 Time would fail me to tell of the communis- 
 tic base that underlies the thought and words 
 of all the great mystics and religious teachers
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 12$ 
 
 through the centuries that unite the miscalled 
 Dark Ages with the present time. It was the 
 conviction of Anselm that " the riches of the 
 world are for the common benefit of men, as 
 created by the common Father of all, and that 
 by natural law no one has more right than any 
 other to any possession." According to the 
 " Theologia Germanica," the fall of man was 
 his "setting up of a claim, his I and me and 
 mine, these were his going astray, and his 
 fall. And thus it is to this day." "What else," 
 continues the writer, "did Adam do but this 
 same thing ? It is said, it was because Adam 
 ate the apple that he was lost, or fell. I say, it 
 was because of his claiming something for his 
 own, and because of his I, mine, and me, and the 
 like. Had he eaten seven apples, and yet never 
 claimed anything for his own, he would not 
 have fallen : but as soon as he called something 
 his own, he fell, and would have fallen if he had 
 never touched an apple." Pascal teaches that 
 the institutions of state and property rest upon 
 sheer force ; that they are unjustifiable to rea- 
 son, and are the square contradiction of Chris- 
 tianity ; that they are due to the fact that " not 
 being able to make strong what was just, men 
 have made just what was strong." He illus- 
 trates: "'This dog belongs to me,' said these 
 
 f
 
 126 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 poor children ; ' that place in the sun is mine ! ' 
 Behold the beginning and the image of all usur- 
 pation upon earth." Listen to the preaching of 
 one who is always set before us as our classic 
 homiletic model, whom Matthew Arnold calls 
 the " best and soundest moralist " of the English 
 church, " a man sober-minded, weighty, es- 
 teemed ; " it is Barrow, in his famous Hospital 
 Sermon of 1671, and that in the face of the 
 wild orgies of the Restoration : " Inequality and 
 private interest in things (together with sick- 
 ness and pains, together with all other infelici- 
 ties and inconveniences) were the by-blows of 
 our guilt ; sin introduced these degrees and dis- 
 tances ; it devised the names of rich and poor ; 
 it begot those ingrossings and inclosures of 
 things ; it forged those two small pestilent 
 words, meum and tuum, which have engendered 
 so much strife among men, and created so 
 much mischief in the world." I might quote 
 Bossuet and many others to the same effect, but 
 I must hasten to briefly notice the teachings of 
 the leaders of the Reformation. 
 
 Professor Nitti, himself an Italian Catholic, 
 credits Wyckliffe, Huss, Jean Petit, and the 
 Anabaptists with " making vain efforts to re- 
 store the theories of the gospel regarding prop- 
 erty." "If their disputes," he says, "were
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. I2"J 
 
 almost always of a religious nature, they never- 
 theless invariably bore an economic character 
 as well. It should not be forgotten that during 
 the Middle Ages all questions were discussed 
 under a theological aspect." In the Introduc- 
 tion to " A Contemporary Narrative of the Pro- 
 ceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler," edited 
 by Thomas Wright, and printed in London for 
 the Camden Society in 1843, appears the fol- 
 lowing : " The earliest instances of the direct 
 combination of the charges of heresy and sor- 
 cery is presented by the sect of the Waldenses, 
 or Vaudois. A singular account of the origin 
 of this sect is given in an early anonymous 
 tract on the history of the Carthusian Order, 
 where it is stated that a Vaudois, who lived at 
 Lyons, following the letter of the New Testa- 
 ment, quitted all his riches to embrace volun- 
 tary poverty." Hence he and his followers 
 were charged with having entered into league 
 with the devil. 
 
 Although the Waldenses and some of the 
 Anabaptists lived in a beautiful communistic 
 faith and practice, it would not be fair to classify 
 the reformers of the Continent with the church 
 fathers in their teachings concerning property 
 or equality ; they were not communists in any 
 authorized use of that term. They were, how-
 
 128 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 ever, social and political idealists of the sternest 
 type ; idealists who believed that the actual 
 facts of life should be made to express the law 
 and equality of the kingdom of God. Though 
 favoring too much the privileged classes, and 
 betraying his own cause in his attitude towards 
 the Peasants' War, Martin Luther yet preached 
 against wealth in terms that would not be tol- 
 erated in any representative Protestant pulpit 
 in America. The bulk of Calvin's writings lie 
 buried in the archives of the University of 
 Geneva, having never been published ; but M. 
 Eugene Choisy, of the theological faculty of the 
 University, has lately written a scholarly book 
 of profound historical interest, entitled " La 
 Theocratie a. Geneve au temps de Calvin," in 
 which he shows that Calvin's theology was but 
 fundamental to his ideal of a social order that 
 should incarnate the spirit of Jesus Christ. 
 Zwingli was a social reformer above all else, 
 and was the initiator of much of the subsequent 
 social development of Switzerland. Critical in- 
 vestigators point to John Huss's defence of the 
 peasants against their lords as the real cause 
 of his martyrdom. 
 
 Crossing into Scotland, we find that John 
 Knox " utterly damned in Christ's servants " 
 the careful solicitude of money. With all the
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 29 
 
 vehemence of his sweet yet terrible nature, he 
 condemned interest, low wages, and the taking 
 advantage of the necessity of the poor. The 
 First Book of Discipline, which is called " the 
 most interesting document in Reformation lit- 
 erature," is chiefly the work of Knox. " The 
 book simply tingles," as Dr. Glasse expresses 
 it, "with contempt for superstition, and with 
 indignation against oppression." As to the 
 part of the Scotch reformers on social and 
 political questions, "there is simply no ambi- 
 guity," says Dr. Glasse ; " they occupied an ex- 
 ceptionally advanced position, and endeavored 
 to harmonize their institutions with their opin- 
 ions." And there would be no ambiguity now, 
 if we could take as representative of the Church 
 of Scotland the address given, at the close of 
 the General Assembly in 1891, by its modera- 
 tor, Dr. Macgregor. " Ought we not," he said, ^s' 
 "to keep more prominently before ourselves, 
 and so before our people, that Christianity is 
 the highest and purest socialism : that the Bible 
 is the great text-book of socialism : that Jesus 
 Christ was the greatest socialist who ever trod 
 this lower world — himself a poor hard-working 
 man — that he was the healer of all diseases, 
 the Saviour of the body as well as the soul : 
 and that what he was his church ought to be —
 
 I30 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 the implacable foe of injustice, oppression, and 
 wrong, come from what quarter they may ? " 
 
 But it is when we turn to Wyckliffe and the 
 Lollards that we find the most explicit commu- 
 nism taught as the very essence of the gospel 
 and freedom of the New Testament. Wyck- 
 liffe, even more specifically and severely than 
 Augustine, taught that private property origi- 
 nated in sin. John Richard Green tells how 
 the Lollards were put to death, not for religious 
 reasons so much as for reasons that were, in 
 the last analysis, economic. The preparer of 
 Wyckliffe's way was John Ball, known as "the 
 mad priest of Kent," in whose preaching Mr. 
 Green says " that England first listened to the 
 declaration of the natural equality of the rights 
 of man." " By what right are these lords 
 greater than we ? " asks John Ball. " Good peo- 
 ple," he cries, "things will never be right in 
 England so long as goods be not in common. 
 If we all came of the same father and mother, 
 of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove 
 that they are better than we, if it be not that 
 they make us gain for them by our toil what 
 they spend in their pride ? They are clothed 
 in their velvet, and are warm in their furs and 
 their ermines, while we are covered with rags. 
 They have wine and spices and fair bread ; and
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 131 
 
 we have oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. 
 They have leisure and fine houses ; we have 
 pain and labor, the rain and the winds in the 
 fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that 
 these men hold their state." The usual irony 
 of history — the irony of treason, murder, and 
 despotism which the economic spirit always 
 visits upon the people and their ideals and 
 idealists — is seen in the political establish- 
 ment of the Reformation by the miserable 
 Henry VIII. and his court of basest plunderers, 
 under whom the Reformation was converted 
 into a regime of the most wholesale capitalistic 
 robbery in the history of nations. The Angli- 
 can Church became, under him, as it largely 
 remains to this day, a sort of an ecclesiastical 
 fiunkyism — a system of political retainers, a 
 police vassalage, to the capitalistic landlords. 
 It is perhaps this fact that moves an able writer, 
 speaking from an academic point of view, to 
 say that the faith of the Church of England 
 varies with " the exigencies of real estate." 
 The revolt of the people, and of the reformers 
 who inherited the spirit of Wyckliffe, took the 
 form of Puritanism, which was already ominous 
 in Henry's time. These early Puritans were 
 known as "gospellers." "It is reported," says 
 the ever changeable Cranmer, " that there be
 
 132 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 many among these unlawful assemblies that 
 pretend knowledge of the gospel, and will needs 
 be called gospellers." " I will go further," he 
 continues, " to speak somewhat of the great 
 hatred which divers of these seditious persons 
 do bear against the gentlemen ; which hatred in 
 many is so outrageous, that they desire nothing 
 more than the spoil, ruin, and destruction of 
 them that be rich and wealthy." But the in- 
 herent nobility of Cranmer's sympathies could 
 not always be suppressed in the interests of his 
 masters, as his brave death afterwards proved ; 
 and in this same sermon, in which the "gos- 
 pellers " are set forth as the despoilers of the 
 wealthy, he also says : " And although here I 
 seem only to speak against these unlawful as- 
 semblers, yet I cannot allow those, but I must 
 needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, 
 whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they 
 be, which never cease to purchase and join 
 house to house, and land to land, as though 
 they alone ought to possess and inhabit the 
 earth." Even down to the time of the Puritan 
 exodus to New England, though many Puritans 
 were rich, economic inequality was more or less 
 outrageous to the deeper Puritan religious sense. 
 John Winthrop's letters show that economic 
 reasons had much to do with his migration ; he
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 33 
 
 protested against the profanity of the talk of 
 over-population, even then beginning, and which 
 he declared would not be heard " if things were 
 right." And it was among the hard-pressed 
 and impoverished yeomanry that Pastor Robin- 
 son gathered the Mayflower seed of a great 
 nation yet to be born. 
 
 The finest elements of the Reformation doc- 
 trines were gathered into the Society of Friends, 
 or Quakers ; and from them come the deepest 
 and most wide-reaching utterances of spiritual 
 truth in social terms, from the days of George 
 Fox down to the clays of Barnabas Hobbs. The 
 Quakers were not communists ; but they were 
 most devout believers in an order of life that 
 should express, in profoundest social realism, 
 the brotherly love of Jesus Christ. The glory 
 of their teaching appears in " The Journal of 
 John Woolman," which stands beside Augus- 
 tine's "Confessions" and Amiel's "Journal," 
 as one of the three greatest religious and lite- 
 rary expressions of its kind. John Woolman 
 always had before him the " prospect of one 
 common interest from which our own is insep- 
 arable, so that to turn all we possess into the 
 channel of universal love becomes the business 
 of our lives." " When house is joined to house," 
 he said, in a tract to the rich, " and field laid to
 
 134 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 field, until there is no place, and the poor are 
 thereby straitened, though this is clone by bar- 
 gain and purchase, yet so far as it stands dis- 
 tinguished from universal love, so far that woe 
 predicted by the prophet will accompany their 
 proceedings. As he who first founded the earth 
 was then the true proprietor of it, so he still re- 
 mains ; and though he hath given it to the chil- 
 dren of men, so that multitudes of people have 
 had their sustenance from it while they contin- 
 ued here, yet he hath never alienated it, but his 
 right is as good as at first ; nor can any apply 
 the increase of their possessions contrary to 
 universal love, nor dispose of lands in a way 
 which they know tends to exalt some by op- 
 pressing others, without being justly chargeable 
 with usurpation." 
 
 Here my citations must end. I have called 
 the noblest elect from a great cloud of witnesses 
 to testify whether there be a Christian doctrine 
 of property that we can trace, in any clear line 
 of development, from Christ to the establish- 
 ment of Protestantism. In order that I might 
 not seem to be reading into their teachings any 
 notions of my own, I have let these witnesses 
 speak in their own words. In all that I have 
 cited from them, I have tried to take such ex- 
 pressions as would fairly represent their faith
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 35 
 
 and thought. I do not want to claim for them 
 foreknowledge or undue economic authority. 
 But I do want us to let their consistency with 
 each other, their common interpretation of the 
 kingdom of heaven in economic terms, have its 
 full weight with us, especially those of us who 
 claim to be of Christ's household of faith. 
 
 The testimony of these witnesses agrees upon 
 a fact of wonderful and imperative significance : 
 that what we call the baptism of the Holy Ghost, 
 when genuinely experienced by a religious 
 group, immediately manifests itself in the 
 reaching after economic brotherhood. The ex- 
 perience of the first Christians, told in the Acts 
 of the Apostles, instead of being a singular ex- 
 perience, about which the less said the better, 
 is precisely what occurs whenever Christian 
 groups return to apostolic sources, to move upon 
 the world with early Christian feeling and will. 
 The apostolic succession is disclosed in the 
 economic communion of Christian springtimes. 
 The nearer men approach to being of one mind 
 with God, the more impossible it becomes to 
 hold anything as their own. When Christian 
 experience becomes elemental, individual own- 
 ership becomes sacrilegious ; it becomes mur- 
 derous, and behind it the shadow of Cain grows 
 dark. The procession of the Holy Ghost keeps
 
 136 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 step with the human reaching after economic 
 brotherhood, without which there can be no 
 real spiritual brotherhood. There is no true 
 communion of saints apart from the communion 
 of property. 
 
 The undeviating hostility of Christ and his 
 witnesses to individual wealth cannot be evaded 
 by following John Wesley's immoral advice to 
 make all one can and then give all one can. 
 The philanthropy of economic extortion is the 
 greatest immediate menace to religion and so- 
 cial progress. The gifts that come not from 
 wilful extortion, but from as clean hands as the 
 system of things will suffer any man to have, 
 are apt to be even more misleading than the 
 benevolence of avarice, because they seem to 
 justify and make Christian what is really anti- 
 Christ. Let us honor such contributions as 
 they deserve to be honored, or concede the eco- 
 nomic and historical necessity of individual 
 wealth in the social evolution ; but let us not 
 deceive ourselves, and become false teachers to 
 the people, by speaking of such wealth as Chris- 
 tian. Wealth is a power in the world, and often 
 a power for good, while a rich man may be very 
 useful and generous, and his motives noble ; 
 but, however religious and philanthropic he be, 
 the rich man stands in the antithesis of the
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 37 
 
 Christian attitude towards the world. We can- 
 not honestly imagine one in Christ's state of 
 mind, one feeling as Christ felt, one coming at 
 the world from his point of view, giving himself 
 to acquiring individual wealth. Strictly speak- 
 ing, a rich Christian is a contradiction of terms. 
 This is a hard saying, and it places every one 
 of us in positions of dreadful inconsistency and 
 difficulty; but it is the bald, naked reality of 
 Jesus' teaching. Let us confess that we are all 
 alike guilty; that none of us are really Chris- 
 tian, if it comes to this ; but let us be men 
 enough to look the truth straight in the face. 
 As Charles Kingsley makes one of his charac- 
 ters say, the worm that dieth not and the fire 
 that is not quenched are a great blessing, if one 
 may only know the truth by them at last. The 
 shame and sorrow that the truth brings, I must 
 face with you ; for none are guiltier for the ex- 
 isting order of things than those of us who teach 
 in colleges endowed by individual wealth. 
 
 Of course, one should not throw away, nor 
 destroy, nor desecrate any property that is in 
 his hands. He ought not and cannot individu- 
 ally extricate himself from the system that now 
 exists. But the very least that a Christian can 
 do, in the existing order, is to administer what 
 he possesses for the common good, in the most
 
 138 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 literal sense of the term. A man cannot be 
 Christian without being practically communis- 
 tic ; as a possessor of property, he is simply a 
 steward having in trust what belongs to others. 
 With this, he must exhaust his possibilities in 
 changing the system from one of private owner- 
 ship and competition into the common owner- 
 ship and co-operative service of the kingdom of 
 heaven. Sometimes, I think that a single man 
 of great economic power, accepting such a stew- 
 ardship, with the heart of Christ in him, could 
 change the world. 
 
 The question as to whether economic brother- 
 hood is practicable is a question of whether 
 Christianity is practicable. If Jesus dwelt at 
 the heart of God, and knew the law and secret 
 of the universe, it is not worth while trying 
 to establish society on any other basis than 
 that of the universal communism of the Father 
 who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and 
 the good, and sendeth rain on the just and un- 
 just ; the Father who, when his children had 
 wasted the abundant resources of life which 
 he had already given them, redeemed them by 
 giving them more resources. Before we dis- 
 miss such a social basis as a dream, let us well 
 consider our free schools, the free street rail- 
 ways in the Australian city, the free highways
 
 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 1 39 
 
 unto the ends of the earth, and many other 
 initiatives in the common life of to-day, which 
 indicate that we are in the beginnings of a tre- 
 mendous change upward into communism which 
 Jesus disclosed as universal life and order. 
 
 In the fulness of its times, we shall have 
 a new Christian synthesis upon which to base 
 the religious movement which the social spirit 
 seeks, and it will guide society through storm 
 and change. The details of that synthesis do 
 not yet appear ; but in the outline emerging 
 from the confusion of our faith, we may behold 
 an economic of the kingdom of heaven. It will 
 so state the facts and forces which are the sum 
 of Jesus' idea, in such clear terms of present 
 social need, as to afford a definite, tangible, 
 working programme of social faith. It comes, 
 after the long winter of apostolic faith, as a 
 new religion springing up from the seed of 
 Christ in the human soil. It promises a faith 
 for which men will once more be ready to live 
 or die with equal joy. It will be, as was prophe- 
 sied by the last words of a beloved teacher, Dr. 
 Edwin Hatch, " a Christianity which is not new 
 but old, which is not old but new, a Christianity 
 in which the moral and spiritual elements will 
 again hold their place, in which men will be 
 bound together by the bond of mutual service, 
 
 V
 
 14O BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 which is the bond of the sons of God, a Chris- 
 tianity which will actually realize the brother- 
 hood of men, the ideal of its first Christian 
 communities." 
 
 The original idea of Jesus, once out in the 
 social open, as a mode and economy of life, to 
 be seen as it humanly is, will sweep the world. 
 His early standard, once lifted amidst the per- 
 plexity and strife, and millions will rally to it 
 as if on wings, not one of whom can be changed 
 by our system of religion. His kingdom of 
 heaven once more at hand, and the Christian 
 conscience that overran the Roman empire, that 
 wrought the spiritual chivalry of Francis Xavier 
 and Loyola, that went crusading at the call of 
 Hermit Peter and Abbot Bernard, that endured 
 Spanish rack and fire and English gallows and 
 dungeons, that crossed winter seas to found 
 Pilgrim homes and build Puritan states, will 
 arise in a messianic passion vaster than any 
 summoned to change the world by crises past, 
 and our economic problem will dissolve away in 
 its fervent heat, to disclose the friendly stars 
 of the new heaven lighting the new earth with 
 the everlasting truth that love is law.
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH 
 CIVILIZATION.
 
 Hail, spirit of revolt, thou spirit of life, 
 
 Child of the ideal, daughter of the far-away truth ! 
 
 Without thee the nations drag on in a living death ; 
 
 Without thee is stagnation and arrested growth ; 
 
 Without thee Europe and America would be sunk in China's 
 
 lethargy, 
 Smothered in the past, having no horizon but the actual. 
 
 Hail, spirit of revolt ! Thou spirit of life, 
 
 Child of eternal love — 
 
 Love, rebelling against lovelessness — life rebelling against death ; 
 
 Rise at last to the full measure of thy birthright, 
 
 Spurn the puny weapons of hate and oppression. 
 
 Fix rather thy calm, burning, protesting eyes on all the myriad 
 
 shams of man and they will fade away in thinnest air. 
 Gaze upon thy gainsayers until they see and feel the truth and love 
 
 that begat and bore thee. 
 
 Thus and thus only give form and body to thy noblest aspirations. 
 
 And we shall then see done on earth as it is in heaven 
 
 God's ever-living, growing, ripening will. 
 
 Ernest H. Crosby.
 
 V. 
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH 
 CIVILIZATION. 
 
 The chief priests therefore and the Pharisees gathered a council, 
 and said, What do we ? for this man doeth many signs. If we let 
 him thus alone, all men will believe on him : and the Romans will 
 come and take away both our place and our nation. But a certain 
 one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said unto them, 
 Ye know nothing at all, nor do ye take account that it is expedient 
 for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole 
 nation perish not. — John xi. 47-50. 
 
 We are in the habit of saying that Jesus had 
 nothing to do with institutions or with politics ; 
 that he went about appealing to individuals to 
 "be saved." We have a fatal way of viewing 
 Jesus apart from his history and social perspec- 
 tive, apart from the human facts which form 
 the setting of his career. " Theological writers 
 have not," says Dr. Baring-Gould, "laid suffi- 
 cient stress on the great social revulsion with / 
 which the Jewish world was threatened by the 
 teaching of Christ." " The public to whom 
 Christ appealed has not been adequately con- 
 sidered," he continues, " nor has it been shown 
 143
 
 144 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 how large it was, how uneasy was its posi- 
 tion." 
 
 It is absurd to suppose that Jesus was put to 
 death for going about healing sick people and 
 appealing to individuals to "be saved," or to 
 " be good," as we understand these terms. He 
 was crucified for disturbing the existing na- 
 tional order of things ; crucified as a national 
 menace, because he was aiming at the wrong at 
 the heart of the nation. His avowed purpose 
 was to make the Jewish people a messianic and 
 redemptive nation to the world. When he was 
 rejected, it was a governmental as well as an 
 ecclesiastical rejection. His death was brought 
 about by the politicians, who were also the 
 priests, or belonged to the priestly party. The 
 chief actors in the drama of the crucifixion 
 were such as we call the "good people," or 
 "judiciously progressive," whose plans Jesus 
 spoiled, and to whom he seemed altogether 
 unamenable to reason. 
 
 More clearly than Renan or any of the Con- 
 tinental critics, Principal Fairbairn has ana- 
 lyzed and set forth the wholly political nature 
 of Jesus' trial and death. But there is a fact 
 of greatest significance, which the critics seem 
 to me to have scarcely touched. It is the fact 
 that the four extremely antagonistic parties
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. 1 45 
 
 concerned in Jewish politics — parties which 
 had never been able to unite on anything else 
 — found a meeting-ground and common inte- 
 rest in the putting to death of Jesus. There 
 were the Pharisees, or Puritan party ; there 
 were the Sadducees, or party of the national 
 aristocracy ; there were the Herodians, or party 
 of the existing and usurping dynasty ; there 
 were the Romans, interested in maintaining 
 their conquest, and in subjecting all parties to 
 the perpetuation of their power. These parties 
 watched each other with bitterest hatred, and 
 day and night plotted for each other's destruc- 
 tion. Yet each party believed itself driven by 
 self-interest to destroy Jesus. All parties alike, 
 whether social or religious, economic or polit- 
 ical, agreed that there was no safety for their 
 interests so long as Jesus was left alive. What 
 Principal Fairbairn says of the Sadducees, in 
 their attitude towards Jesus, can be said of the 
 three other parties as well : "They had no con- 
 cern with his claims, only with their own 
 safety. They knew him at once as the enemy 
 of their order." 
 
 But we are not dependent upon the critics. 
 We have only to read the Gospels, with even a 
 little historic sense, to see that the career of 
 Jesus was as certainly political, in relation to
 
 146 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 his times and nation, as the career of Joseph 
 Mazzini in Italy, or that of Joan of Arc in 
 France. His words reveal him in closest touch 
 with the political situation and the economic 
 and social facts of his day. He planted his 
 feet amidst the actual conditions and problems 
 of Jerusalem, spending a large part of his min- 
 istry there in vain before he turned into Gal- 
 ilee. His hands were always in the human 
 clay, and he went about his work with a knowl- 
 edge of the complications and forces with which 
 he had to deal. He was no pietist or mere 
 dreamer, but a re-maker of men and of the 
 conditions that make men. The first year of 
 his ministry was spent in trying to get some 
 sort of a national recognition. We must believe 
 that he was sincere, not making believe or act- 
 ing, when he sought to gain acceptance at the 
 hands of the rulers of Jerusalem ; that he was 
 honest in offering himself to them as their 
 King and national Messiah. Nothing more 
 truly lays bare his heart than the cry, " O 
 Jerusalem, Jerusalem," which went forth from 
 the baffled patriot, on the slopes of Olivet, to 
 the beloved capital of his doomed nation. 
 
 There is one instance of Jesus' political 
 action which has been a subject of much dis- 
 pute. According to John, the first public act
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZA TION. 1 47 
 
 of his ministry was to go up to Jerusalem and 
 clean out the Capitol. Whatever attitude we 
 take towards this action, whether we place it at 
 the beginning or the end of Jesus' ministry, it 
 has a significance which we have too long 
 evaded. The Jewish temple, which Jesus 
 purged, was the political Capitol of the nation. 
 He did precisely what one of us would do if we 
 should go up to Washington, and suddenly 
 drive from the Senate chamber the lobbyists, 
 the chief of whom are our elected senators — 
 elected to represent the corporations for which 
 they, are paid attorneys. I am not saying that 
 Jesus was right about the proceeding ; nor am 
 I discussing Dr. Farrar's hint and Renan's 
 statement that he acted from an over-wrought 
 moral passion ; I am simply noting the fact 
 that, according to the beloved apostle, his pub- 
 lic introduction was at the capital of his nation, 
 in the Capitol building, through what seemed 
 to the authorities a high-handed act of political 
 and economic outrage. He was finally put to 
 death by the supreme court of his nation, on 
 the ground that he endangered the nation's 
 existence by doing the things he was doing, 
 by saying the things he was saying. The 
 judges of this court had often personally en- 
 joined Jesus from saying the things that he
 
 148 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 said, and he had as often refused to obey their 
 injunctions. 
 
 When Jesus' ideal is viewed in its historic set- 
 ting, the conflict between that ideal and the civ- 
 ilization into which it came is seen to have been 
 politically inevitable. The preaching of the 
 kingdom of God, which never meant other than 
 a righteous human order, was the revolutionary 
 cry of the Palestine of Jesus' day. For raising 
 this cry, the Romans put men to death as an- 
 archists, so Rabbi Hirsch and other able Jew- 
 ish scholars tell us. It was the synonym for 
 social justice, and was so understood by the 
 people. Both John the Baptist and Jesus put 
 this divine social order before the individual as 
 his spiritual motive and perspective ; then they 
 appealed to him to accept it, and renounce all 
 he had in behalf of its realization. This ideal 
 " gave utterance," as Dr. Baring-Gould has 
 pointed out, " to an immense inarticulate crav- 
 ing that for long had been felt by a large sec- 
 tion of the Jewish people." To the priests and 
 politicians subservient to Roman power through 
 self-interest, as well as to the Romans them- 
 selves, it was certain that Jesus would seem a 
 destroyer of all that was socially fundamental. 
 Even to the best, his presence and teaching 
 would seem an increasing menace to religion 
 and civilization.
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CI VI LIZA TION. 1 49 
 
 I can never understand the bald and persis- 
 tent statement that Jesus had nothing to do 
 with politics or economics, except on the ground 
 that we are anxious to keep him out of politics 
 and economics. It is only an apostate Chris- 
 tianity that asserts that the Christ has nothing 
 to do with politics. The reign of Christ will 
 never be unless it comes as a political reign. 
 The notion that it can come otherwise is the 
 accursed fruit of that worst and blackest of all 
 heresies, — the heresy that religion is one thing 
 and life another. The kingdoms of this world 
 belong to Christ ; and the Christianity that says 
 that the preaching of Christ must be kept sep- 
 arate from politics and economics is simply the 
 betrayer of Christ into the hands of his enemies. 
 The price paid for this treason is the money of 
 political and economic self-interests, as it ever 
 has been and ever will be, until we have the re- 
 vival that shall show forth Christ as the giver 
 of economic and political law. 
 
 Any genuine religion must be a science of 
 righteous politics, — a science of individual lib- 
 erty. It is a Hegelian principle, as well as the 
 substance of Hebrew social philosophy, that the 
 political life of the nation is the final revelation 
 of the moral worth and living power of religion. 
 The real religious creed of the people, the un-
 
 150 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 mistakable evidence of what they actually be- 
 lieve, is their politics. A corrupt state is simply 
 the expression of a decadent and formal reli- 
 gion ; and a merely respectable religion is the 
 worst human enemy. 
 
 Now, the history of Christianity is the book 
 of an unresting conflict between Christ and civ- 
 ilization ; between an ideal and the political 
 supports of the material things which civiliza- 
 tion takes to be realities. Edward Carpenter 
 is right in declaring that civilization has always 
 hated Christ, as it has always hated the com- 
 munism which it forever seeks to destroy, yet 
 which it blindly builds. Through a more exact 
 study of history, we now know that the so-called 
 religious persecutions have been really political. 
 All through our Christian era, when we come 
 to deal with actual facts, we find political inte- 
 rests availing themselves of religious reasons for 
 killing men who, either wisely or mistakenly, 
 propose to bring right things to pass ; just as 
 we now find monopolists trembling for the 
 safety of "the faith," and eagerly supporting 
 so-called conservative religion. Of course, plenty 
 of religious reasons have always been available 
 for the politicians and the economic interests ; 
 but the actual reasons were the menace of 
 Christ's teachings to the modes of life existing
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZA TION. I 5 I 
 
 as civilization. From the day when the cross 
 lifted its matchless victim into eternal view, 
 down past the day when St. Bartholomew mas- 
 sacre was planned as a political expedient, we 
 may trace the progress of the Christ ideal, as 
 Mr. Lowell has said, " by the blackened stakes 
 of martyrs," in conflict with material power. 
 Over and over again, our Lord pointed out how 
 it must be so, until his reign should be estab- 
 lished throughout human life. This is the 
 whole meaning of the mystic yet terrible ima- 
 gery of John in the Revelation. It is the blood 
 of the Lamb, and of those who are immersed 
 in its sacrifice, that overcomes a material civili- 
 zation with its mark of the beast. 
 
 If there were time, I could bring to you the 
 testimony of the church fathers and the re- 
 formers, witnessing to the political and eco- 
 nomic causes of religious persecutions. Out 
 of the mouth of these witnesses, I could show 
 you how Christ's conquest of the world has 
 proceeded, at every step, through conflict with 
 the various forms and powers of what is known 
 as civilization. But I must confine my cita- 
 tions to two particular periods of Christian his- 
 tory, — that of the conflict of early Christianity 
 with Rome, and that of the martyrdom of Sa- 
 vonarola in Florence.
 
 152 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 The Roman attitude towards Christianity as 
 the enemy of society is vividly stated by the 
 words which Henryk Sienkiewicz puts into 
 the mouth of Pilate, in his little story, " Let 
 Us Follow Him." "Answer, Cinna," demands 
 Pilate, "thou art a man of sound judgment, — 
 what wouldst thou think of me were I, neither 
 from one cause nor another, to bestow this 
 house in which thou art dwelling on those tat- 
 tered fellows who warm themselves in the sun 
 of the Joppa gate ? And he insists on just such 
 things. Besides, he says that we should love 
 all equally, — the Jews as well as the Romans 
 themselves, the Romans as the Egyptians, the 
 Egyptians as the Africans, and so on. I con- 
 fess that I have had enough of this. At the 
 moment when his life is in peril, he bears him- 
 self as if the question were of some one else ; 
 he teaches — and prays. It is not my duty to 
 save a man who has no care for his own safety. 
 Whoso does not know how to preserve measure 
 in anything is not a man of judgment. More- 
 over, he calls himself the Son of God, and dis- 
 turbs the foundations on which society rests, 
 and therefore harms people. Let him think 
 what he likes in his soul, if he will not raise 
 disturbance. As a man I protest against his 
 teaching." More vividly still is Christianity
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CI VI LIZ A TIOJV. 1 53 
 
 seen through Roman eyes in "Quo Vadis." 
 To Vinicius, " that religion seemed opposed to 
 the existing state of things, impossible of prac- 
 tice, and mad in a degree beyond all others. 
 According to him, people in Rome and in the 
 whole world might be bad, but the order of 
 things was good. Had Caesar, for example, 
 been an honest man, had the Senate been com- 
 posed, not of insignificant libertines, but of men 
 like Thrasca, what more could one wish ? Nay, 
 Roman peace and supremacy were good ; dis- 
 tinction among people just and proper. But 
 that religion, according to the understanding 
 of Vinicius, would destroy all order, all suprem- 
 acy, every distinction." "I made the acquain- 
 tance of a wonderful man," writes Vinicius to 
 Petronius, " a certain Paul of Tarsus, who spoke 
 to me of Christ and his teachings, and spoke 
 with such power that every word of his, with- 
 out his willing it, turns all the foundations of 
 our society into ashes." "I know not how the 
 Christians order their own lives ; but I know 
 that where their religion begins, Roman rule 
 ends, Rome itself ends, our mode of life ends, 
 the distinction between conquered and con- 
 queror, between rich and poor, lord and slave, 
 ends, government ends, Caesar ends, law and 
 all the order of the world ends." " I told Paul,"
 
 154 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 he concludes, " that society would fall apart be- 
 cause of his religion, as a cask without hoops ; 
 he answered, ' Love is a stronger hoop than 
 fear.' " 
 
 Questions have been raised as to the his- 
 torical accuracy of "Quo Vadis." While Sien- 
 kiewicz has used the license and historical 
 imagination permitted the novelist, in his great 
 romance of early Christianity, it is evident that 
 he writes with thorough scientific knowledge of 
 the facts and forces of the struggles between 
 Christ and Rome. No one need expect either 
 to verify or to disprove these facts from any of 
 the church histories, or indeed to learn any- 
 thing about them from such source. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, probably nothing is more unreliable 
 and partisan, and indeed so wholly without 
 knowledge of the thing it is supposed to record, 
 as church history. The church histories, even 
 at their best, are attorneys' briefs, written in 
 the interest of theological or critical schools, or 
 from ecclesiastical points of view. The begin- 
 nings of some very noble work, monumental 
 in its character, was done by the beloved Dr. 
 Hatch, in his " Influence of Greek Ideas and 
 Usages Upon the Christian Church," and in his 
 " Organization of the Early Christian Churches." 
 If his life had been spared, we might have had
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVIL fZA TION. I 5 S 
 
 from him a history of the Christian peoples, 
 instead of the annals of the combats of theolo- 
 gians and ecclesiastical politicians. Some very 
 skilful and useful beginnings in this direction 
 have been made by Professor Nitti, in his work 
 on " Catholic Socialism," which shows us clearly 
 the economic and political causes of the early 
 Christian persecutions. From many sources, 
 he discloses the effect of Christianity in a vast 
 economic revolution, destroying the foundations 
 of the Roman order of things, even when ques- 
 tions were discussed in theological terms. In his 
 " Law of Civilization and Decay," Mr. Brooks 
 Adams points out how the position of the early 
 Christians in the Roman empire was practically 
 that of the nihilists of to-day in the Russian em- 
 pire ; the light in which they were regarded by 
 Roman civilization was much the same as that 
 in which the nihilists are viewed by European 
 civilization. " It was indeed," says Cardinal 
 Newman, "an old, decayed, and moribund world, 
 into which Christianity had been cast. The 
 social fabric was overgrown with the corrup- 
 tions of a thousand years, and was held together, 
 not so much by any common principle, as by the 
 strength of possession and the tenacity of cus- 
 tom. It was too large for public spirit, and too 
 artificial for patriotism, and its many religions
 
 156 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 did but foster in the popular mind division and 
 scepticism. Want of mutual confidence would 
 lead to despondency, inactivity, and selfishness. 
 Society was in the slow fever of consumption, 
 which made it restless in proportion as it was 
 feeble. It was powerful, however, to seduce 
 and deprave ; nor was there any locus standi 
 from which to combat its evils ; and the only 
 way of getting on in it was to abandon principle 
 and duty, to take things as they came, and to do 
 as the world did." 
 
 It is the critical study of history — history 
 written with the spade and pickaxe — that 
 makes clear the nature of the struggle between 
 Rome and Jesus, between the Sermon on the 
 Mount and Caesar's legions. This critical study 
 reveals how the early Christian persecutions 
 were caused by no hostility to their religion as 
 such. Every man could worship whom and 
 what he pleased, so far as the Romans were 
 concerned ; they were hospitable to all reli- 
 gions ; they opened temple doors to all the 
 gods, and stole such gods as hesitated to enter 
 their Pantheon. " The sceptical masters of 
 Rome," says Henry George, "tolerant of all 
 gods, careless of what they deemed vulgar su- 
 perstitions, were keenly sensitive to a doctrine 
 based on equal rights; they feared. instinctively
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. 1 57 
 
 a religion that inspired slave and proletariat 
 with a new hope ; that took for its central 
 figure a crucified carpenter ; that taught the 
 equal fatherhood of God and the equal brother- 
 hood of men ; that looked for the speedy reign 
 of justice, and that prayed, 'Thy kingdom come 
 on earth ! ' " The Roman upper classes keenly 
 discerned that the spread of a society, and the 
 growth of communities, based upon the teach- 
 ings of Jesus, meant the ultimate submerging 
 of the whole Roman political and economic 
 fabric. Hence the early Christians were tor- 
 tured, imprisoned, exiled, and put to terrible 
 forms of death, on the charge of anarchy and 
 atheism ; on the charge of being- destroyers of 
 morals, religion, property, and the state. The 
 conflict was a social conflict, a life and death 
 meeting of two antipodal conceptions. Both 
 social conceptions could not stay together in 
 the same world, any more than light and dark- 
 ness, love and force, could stay together. There 
 was not room in humanity for both Caesar and 
 Jesus. 
 
 Now, the best and most impartial work which 
 has been done along the line of critical investi- 
 gation upon our subject is that of Professor 
 Rodolfo Lanciani of Rome, some of whose lec- 
 tures it was my privilege to hear in that city.
 
 158 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 I wish that every student of social and religious 
 problems might carefully read Professor Lanci- 
 ani's book on "Pagan and Christian Rome." 
 All his authorities, and the results of his re- 
 searches, are carefully given. And, best of all, 
 it is manifest to any one that he has investigated 
 without the slightest taint of any sort of parti- 
 san motive ; indeed, with a sweet unconscious- 
 ness of there being any other than the truly 
 religious as well as scientific motive of finding 
 out the facts. He writes simply as a most 
 patient and critical archaeologist and historian. 
 His work comes as near being authoritative and 
 final, so far as it has gone, as such work is ever 
 likely to be. Without any thought of support- 
 ing anything or any position, but purely as an 
 archaeologist and scientific historian, he presents 
 the facts which support precisely the position 
 assumed by Sienkiewicz in " Quo Vadis." " We 
 must not believe," he says, " that gentiles and 
 Christians lived always at swords' points. Ital- 
 ians in general, and Romans in particular, are 
 noted for their great tolerance in matters of 
 religion, which sometimes degenerates into 
 apathy and indifference. Whether it be a sign 
 of feebleness of character, or of common sense, 
 the fact is, that religious feuds have never been 
 allowed to prevail among us. In no part of the
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIS! 1 WITH CI VI LIZA TION. I 59 
 
 world have the Jews enjoyed more freedom 
 and tolerance than in the Roman Ghetto. The 
 same feelings prevailed in imperial Rome, 
 except for occasional outbursts of passion, fo- 
 mented by the official persecutors." " The 
 transformation of Rome from a pagan into a 
 Christian city was a sudden and unexpected 
 event, which took the world by surprise." But 
 " it was not a revolution or a conversion in the 
 true sense of these words ; it was the official 
 recognition of a state of things which had long 
 ceased to be a secret. The moral superiority 
 of the new doctrines over the old religions was 
 so evident, so overpowering, that the result of 
 the struggle had been a foregone conclusion 
 since the ages of the first apologists. The 
 revolution was an exceedingly mild one, the 
 transformation almost imperceptible. No vio- 
 lence was resorted to, and the tolerance and 
 mutual benevolence so characteristic of the 
 Italian race was adopted as the fundamental 
 policy of state and church." " In Rome itself 
 the apostle could preach the gospel with free- 
 dom, even when in custody, or under police 
 supervision. And as it was lawful for a Roman 
 citizen to embrace the Jewish persuasion, and 
 give up the religion of his fathers, he was 
 equally free to embrace the Evangelic faith,
 
 l6o BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 which was considered by the pagans a Jewish 
 sect, not a new belief." 
 
 The first persecutions must be attributed, 
 says Professor Lanciani, not to the Romans, 
 but to the Jews, who found it of vital impor- 
 tance to " separate their cause from that of the 
 new-comers." The church, thus being "re- 
 pudiated by her mother the synagogue, could 
 no longer share the privileges of the Jewish 
 community. As for the state, it became a ne- 
 cessity either to recognize Christianity as a new 
 legal religion, or to proscribe and condemn it. 
 The great fire which destroyed half of Rome 
 under Nero, and which was purposely attributed 
 to the Christians, brought the situation to a 
 crisis. The first persecution began. Had the 
 magistrate who conducted the inquiry been able 
 to prove the indictment of arson, perhaps the 
 storm would have been short, and confined to 
 Rome ; but as the Christians could easily ex- 
 culpate themselves, the trial was changed from 
 a criminal into a politico-religious one. The 
 Christians were convicted not so much of arson, 
 as of a hatred of mankind ; a formula which 
 includes anarchism, atheism, and high treason. 
 This monstrous accusation once admitted, the 
 persecution could not be limited to Rome ; it 
 necessarily became general." Of the subse-
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. l6l 
 
 quent historic persecutions of the Christians, 
 Professor Lanciani says : " Strange to say, more 
 clemency was shown towards them by emperors 
 whom we are accustomed to call tyrants, than 
 by those who are considered models of virtue. 
 The author of the 'Philosophumena' (book ix., 
 ch. n) says that Commodus granted to Pope 
 Victor the liberation of the Christians who had 
 been condemned to the mines of Sardinia by 
 Marcus Aurelius. Thus that profligate em- 
 peror was really more merciful to the church 
 than the philosophic author of the ' Medita- 
 tions,' who, in the year 174, had witnessed the 
 miracle of the Thundering Legion. The reason 
 is evident. The wise rulers foresaw the destruc- 
 tive effect of the new doctrines on pagan society, 
 and indirectly on the empire itself; whereas 
 those who were given over to dissipation were 
 indifferent to the danger ; ' after them the 
 deluge ! ' " 
 
 Let us now pass on to the conflict of Savo- 
 narola with medieval civilization. Protestants 
 complain because the inscription on the enor- 
 mous statue of Savonarola, in the great hall of 
 old Florence, is to the effect that he was a 
 martyr to Italian unity. They smile at this as 
 a Catholic evasion of the facts of Savonarola's 
 martyrdom. And yet if a smile of pitying de-
 
 1 62 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 rision is ever rightly evoked, there is reason 
 enough for it in the Protestant prejudice and 
 ignorance which makes this complaint. Savo- 
 narola was always a faithful Catholic. He 
 never departed, nor was he even charged with 
 departing, from strict adherence to both the 
 religious and ecclesiastical teachings of the 
 church. He was in no sense what we call a 
 Protestant, either in his faith or his religious 
 reforms ; and he was a forerunner of Protes- 
 tantism only in the same sense that St. Fran- 
 cis or even Pope Gregory the Great, might be 
 called such a forerunner. The charges against 
 Savonarola were political charges ; his trial 
 was a political trial ; his death was a political 
 martyrdom. His reforms were none the less 
 religious because of their social and civic na- 
 ture ; but they had nothing to do with the 
 theological and ecclesiastical problems that 
 afterwards occupied Protestantism. 
 
 Savonarola had constantly before him the 
 dream of a regenerated and united Europe. In 
 a true sense, he and Dante were the political 
 heirs of the religious and social ideal of St. 
 Francis. Savonarola sought a free and right- 
 eous Florence as the city of God, from which 
 the salvation of Christ would go forth to redeem 
 and unite Italy, and then move northward to
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. 1 63 
 
 regenerate and unite Europe in the full come 
 kingdom of heaven. We critics, who take our 
 little profundities so solemnly, and who spend 
 our days analyzing and criticising the men who 
 have done something, in order that we may lay 
 wise foundations for doing nothing ourselves, 
 are quite clear and agreed that the mistake and 
 failure of Savonarola's life was in committing 
 his cause to a political party. Be that as it may, 
 it was a political cause, with a religious revival 
 for its dynamic. It was a deliberate attempt, 
 steadily adhered to unto the hour when the 
 great martyr swung from the historic piazzi in 
 Florence, to establish the political reign of 
 Christ in Europe. The purification of Flor- 
 ence, the banishing of those practices which 
 seemed to him to defile citizens and city, was 
 intended to culminate in a solemn declaration 
 to the world that Christ was king of Florence. 
 " God permitted," he says, "that I should come 
 to Florence, which is the light of Italy, that you 
 might spread the knowledge of repentance to 
 all the other cities of Italy. But thou, Florence, 
 hast heard of this only from the report of others ; 
 and, therefore, thou, Florence, wilt have no ex- 
 cuse if thou repent not. Believe me, Florence, 
 it is not I, it is God who says these things." 
 " Florence, wilt thou have liberty ? Citizens,
 
 [64 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 will ye be free? First, love God, love your 
 neighbor, love one another, love the common 
 good. If you have this love and this union 
 among yourselves, you will have true liberty." 
 Later, and in anxious urgency, he exclaims : 
 "I warn you that already Italy is near the be- 
 ginning of her tribulations. O Italy ! O princes 
 of Italy ! O prelates of the church ! the wrath 
 of God is upon you, and you have no remedy 
 unless you repent! O Italy! O Florence! for 
 thy sins these trials are coming upon thee ! 
 Repent while the sword is yet unsheathed, 
 while it is not yet stained with blood ! The 
 conclusion is this : I have told thee all these 
 things, with reasons divine and human, with 
 moderation, restraining my language. I have 
 besought thee. I cannot command thee, be- 
 cause I am not thy master, but thy father. Do 
 thou act, O Florence ! I can only pray that God 
 may enlighten thee." Then at the end, keep- 
 ing unbroken faith with his ideal, he comforts 
 his brother-monks with these words : " My chil- 
 dren, before God, before the consecrated host, 
 with the enemy already in the convent, I con- 
 firm to you my doctrine. That which I have 
 spoken I have received from God, and he is my 
 witness in heaven that I do not lie. I did not 
 know that the whole city was to turn against
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CI VI LI /.A Tl OX. 1 05 
 
 me ; but the will of the Lord be done. My 
 last counsel is this : let faith, patience, and 
 prayers be your arms. I leave you with anguish 
 and grief, to put myself into the hands of my 
 enemies. I know not whether they will take 
 away my life ; but I am certain that if I must 
 die, I shall be able to aid you in heaven more 
 than I have been able to do on earth." 
 
 Savonarola failed in the end, we say, speaking 
 historically. Yet his ideal still dominates the 
 Christian apostleship of the world, and he actu- 
 ally succeeded, for the time being, as no other 
 man has ever succeeded in a like undertaking, 
 unless it be Moses, or the great Ambrose at 
 Milan. Neither Isaiah at Jerusalem, nor Calvin 
 at Geneva, nor Cromwell in England, nor Maz- 
 zini at Rome, held spiritual sway over a political 
 and social situation with any such defmiteness 
 of effect or length of time as Savonarola ruled 
 Florence in the name of Christ, and from the 
 pulpit of the Duomo. " For years," says his 
 greatest biographer, " Savonarola worked in the 
 midst of successes which have seldom, perhaps 
 never, been attained in the civil reform of a 
 state by one whose days had been spent in re- 
 tirement and preaching." And his triumphs 
 were achieved in steady and open war against 
 the most magnificent and popular tyrant of
 
 1 66 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 medieval times, Lorenzo de Medici, who was 
 also master of all the medieval arts of intrigue 
 and power. 
 
 The conflict between Christ and civilization 
 still goes on. It must go on, until Carl Marx's 
 ideal of a perpetually fluid civilization is realized 
 by the universal acceptance of the love of Christ 
 as the sole human law and liberty. Christ and 
 civilization are building upon two entirely op- 
 posing principles : the war between them is the 
 war of love against self-interest as the governing 
 principle of mankind. It is this law of self- 
 interest which makes civilization the antithesis 
 of all that the name of Christ rightly stands for. 
 " For all industrial matters," says Frederic Har- 
 rison, "in modern Europe and America, amoral 
 code has been evolved, which makes the un- 
 limited indulgence of self-interest, pushed to 
 the very verge of liability to law, the supreme 
 social duty of the industrious citizen." " Econ- 
 omists, politicians, moralists, and even preach- 
 ers," he says, "urge on the enterprising 
 capitalist that the industrialist does best his 
 duty by society who does best his duty by him- 
 self. Banker, merchant, manufacturer, proprie- 
 tor, tradesman, and workman alike submit to 
 this strange moral law. It is assumed as beyond 
 proof that the rapid increase of business, the
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. 1 67 
 
 great accumulation of wealth, is a good per se 
 — good for the capitalist, good for society. No 
 account is taken of the business ruined, of the 
 workmen thrown out of employment, of the 
 over-production, of the useless, mischievous, 
 rotten trade created, and of all the manifold 
 evils scattered broadcast among the producers 
 and every one within range of the work. It is 
 enough to have made business, to have accumu- 
 lated wealth, without coming within the grasp 
 of the law." " Here, then," concludes Mr. 
 Harrison, " is the all-sufficient source of indus- 
 trial maladies. We have come, in matters in- 
 dustrial, to treat duty to others, and duty to 
 society, as only to be found in duty to self." 
 
 If any one doubts the fundamental antagonism 
 between existing civilization and the teachings 
 of Jesus, let him read certain editorials in the 
 New York Post, which is the ablest organ of 
 the new bourbonism and of the present order 
 of things. These editorials are not exceptional 
 in their tone, but are indeed fairly typical of the 
 protests which abundantly issue from the public 
 press, the political platform, the representative 
 pulpit, the academic chair. Certain college pro- 
 fessors, whose crime is that they have sought 
 social justice through the application of Jesus' 
 teachings to social conditions, are classified as
 
 1 68 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 " offenders who must not escape." These seek- 
 ers are accused of inflaming the masses " with 
 passion to overthrow the courts, to the end that 
 they might place themselves where ' law cannot 
 touch us ' — that law which college professors 
 told these poor men, many of them new-comers 
 in America, was only a synonym for injustice. 
 They have told the ignorant who looked up to 
 them for instruction that Jesus Christ was an 
 anarchist, and that every good Christian nowa- 
 days should be the same, and sent away their 
 audiences with murder in their hearts." "We 
 have said," continues this editorial, "that these 
 men and their like have not been indicted, and 
 probably cannot be punished under any law on 
 the statute-book — though their offence differs 
 little in its essence from that of Parsons, the 
 Chicago anarchist, who was convicted and 
 hanged for inciting others to murder, rather 
 than for actual participation in the killing." 
 Hear the conclusion : " Even if the statute- 
 book does not yet contain a penalty for such 
 offenders, they can still be made to suffer. The 
 power of public opinion can be brought to bear, 
 and the indignation of the right-minded can be 
 directed against them. They should be made 
 to feel that the people recognize their guilt, and 
 will take care that a repetition of such incite-
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZA Tl 'OX. 1 69 
 
 ments to crime shall be properly punished." 
 In another editorial, the tender wisdom and 
 touching discrimination of this same writer ap- 
 pears : " The church for ages did excellent work 
 in preaching content to the poor and unfortu- 
 nate, for there was then really no escape from 
 their misery. These teachings have now been 
 dropped, or fall on leaden ears. The new doc- 
 trine that no man should be content, that all 
 should try to rise, has been converted into a 
 proposition that all can rise, and that if anybody 
 does not rise, it is because somebody is keeping 
 him down. Herein lies the source of all our 
 woes. Anybody who goes about spreading this 
 view is really an accessory before the fact to all 
 anarchist crimes." Put over against all of this 
 a cry from the beautiful soul of George William 
 Curtis, not long before he left us : " Is there 
 anything more certain than that the Christen- 
 dom which actually rejects the Christian ideals ^ 
 and principles as impracticable, denounces most 
 savagely those who practically illustrate them, 
 even if they theoretically reject them?" 
 
 As I have already tried to point out, in pre- 
 ceding lectures, the conflict between Christ 
 and civilization is made very specific, to us of 
 this day, by the economic problem. The prob- 
 lem has been made threatening: to our nation
 
 170 BETWEEN GAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 by the subversion of every human interest to 
 money. In no nation on earth is there such 
 abject submission to mere money, in both church 
 and state, as here in America. The emancipa- 
 tion of life, of our nation and its institutions, 
 from the rule of money is our religio-economic 
 problem in its first and political aspect. It pre- 
 sents the national and social situation for which 
 we are each responsible. It points out the de- 
 liverance for which we must individually and 
 collectively give ourselves, and that with divine 
 urgency. 
 
 Organized money menaces the integrity and 
 perpetuity of every existing government. It is 
 causing the peoples international to question, 
 as never before, the utility of government ; they 
 are beginning to distinguish between govern- 
 ment and the nation, between legalism and law, 
 between power and liberty. From St. Peters- 
 burg to the plains of the Dakotas, toilers and 
 producers are asking why they should toil to 
 produce billions to support governments which 
 are the instruments of the privileged classes to 
 further exploit them. They are asking why 
 they must support navies, armies, and parasitic 
 legislatures to protect them from each other, 
 when they are in reality brothers and need no 
 such protection. The idea of government as
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITN CIVILIZATION. 171 
 
 fraternal co-operation, as brotherhood, as friend- 
 ship, is the living dynamite that is getting un- 
 derneath the thrones of the Old World, and 
 underneath the legislatures of our American 
 money lords. 
 
 It is time for the Christian apostle to plainly 
 examine and challenge the social right of great 
 possessors of wealth to their possessions. Of 
 this wealth, the possessors are neither the crea- 
 tors nor the rightful owners ; it was created by 
 the people, and to the people it belongs. To 
 say this may be dangerous ; but there is infi- 
 nitely greater danger in leaving it unsaid. 
 
 If the teachings of Jesus are dangerous and 
 destructive, if he spake impracticable things 
 which he did not understand, if his words are 
 the cries of an over-wrought enthusiast, then 
 let us quit worshipping him, and put an end to 
 this colossal thing we call Christianity. If 
 Jesus is the Son of God and the Redeemer of 
 man, if he is the true teacher of practicable 
 teachings, then while it is yet clay, before dread- 
 ful judgment comes on, let us begin to preach 
 what he taught, and to divinely enforce the jus- 
 tice of his love. 
 
 We shall meet with misunderstanding and 
 complaint, as we speak against the existing 
 order of things in the name of Christ, but we
 
 172 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 may meet it with loving faith. We have the 
 whole of Christian history behind us ; it was to 
 show this, that I briefly and rudely sketch ed 
 two great scenes in the on-going drama of Chris- 
 tian conquest, and pointed to our own place in 
 the scene now upon the stage. What else can 
 the humblest disciple do, and be true, than 
 stand for an order of life that shall incarnate 
 the ideal of his Lord ? " Revolution is for us," 
 says Mazzini, " a work of education, a religious 
 mission." No disciple, without being apostate, 
 can suffer any order to exist or crystallize short 
 of Jesus' goal of the realized kingdom of heaven. 
 We are not here to preserve the existing order, 
 but to establish the Christ order. " The exist- 
 ing order of things," said Judge Gaynor in 
 Brooklyn, not long ago, " may be the worst pos- 
 sible order of things. The existing order of 
 things crucified Jesus because he was a de- 
 nouncer ; and in this enlightened nation the 
 existing order of things, even during the life- 
 time of those of us who are still called young, 
 was that one human being might own another, 
 and good men were mobbed for objecting to it. 
 We owe all that we have to the steady advance 
 of the human race against the compact mass 
 who always cried out, and still cry out as lustily 
 as ever, 'Don't disturb the existing order of 
 things.' 
 
 > j»
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. 1 73 
 
 No doubt the thought of love as law is still 
 the most revolutionary idea that can be intro- 
 duced into society. The liberating truth for 
 which Jesus gave his life, for which the proph- 
 ets before and the apostles after him gave their 
 lives, is certainly disturbing to much of what 
 we have learned as truth in our schools and 
 churches, in our politics and commerce. " No 
 book could be distributed among the servile 
 population more incendiary than the Bible, if 
 they could only read it," said Mr. Lowell in his 
 famous Tract Society address. A great Eng- 
 lish ecclesiastic declares that the application of 
 Jesus' teachings would destroy existing civili- 
 zation to the foundations. Shall we therefore 
 be silent ? Nay, it is our silence for the sake 
 of peace that has brought upon us our present 
 universal tragedy. No superstition is so gross 
 and dangerous as the superstition that it is 
 dangerous for a man to speak the truth he 
 sees. In liberty only is safety found, and we 
 are atheists to the extent that we fear to trust 
 liberty. If the Anglican bishop is right, then 
 safety lies in building a civilization that will 
 stand the test of the highest truth we know. 
 We really do not care what becomes of what 
 is called civilization ; we care only for what 
 becomes of human beings. The risht of the
 
 174 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 humblest human soul to the resources and lib- 
 erty needful for living a complete and unfear- 
 ing life is infinitely more sacred than the whole 
 fabric and machinery of civilization. We may 
 serenely bless every passing of institutions or 
 systems that makes way for what our one great 
 poet calls " the institution of the dear love of 
 comrades." 
 
 And when that word love is spoken, the 
 whole problem of society is stated. "What 
 is the disease from which our entire civiliza- 
 tion suffers," asks Richard Wagner, "but want 
 of love ? " Yet is it the want of love, or the 
 lack of faith in it, that ails civilization ? Surely, 
 the thought of love as law could never have 
 been born, if love were not the substance and 
 reality of the common life, in spite of the strife 
 and tragedy of historic experience. With each 
 new experience, with the appearing and van- 
 ishing of each problem and its crisis, humanity 
 is anew and more fully committed to the law 
 of love as the sole bond of unity, and the sole 
 ground of liberty. That this love will triumph 
 at last, and have the human future for its own, 
 is the world's beatific hope that will not die. 
 The successive steps by which this hope may 
 be fulfilled, I cannot tell, nor lives there a man 
 who can. We ought not to be told by an indi-
 
 CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH CIVILIZATION. 1 75 
 
 vidual, for the clay of the individual initiative 
 has gone by, and the day of the people is com- 
 ing. Man's destiny of organized love will be 
 wrought out by the common experience, the 
 common suffering, the common faith, the inven- 
 tion of the common love. But, though I can- 
 not see the steps that lead to the goal, I see 
 that the social future of love is sure, and I 
 am not wrong in pleading that we commit our- 
 selves to the vision. Already human life is so 
 settled in discontent with all that is not love, 
 so glowing with brotherly feeling and so active 
 with saving forces, so near to breathing the 
 heavenly breath and so watchful for the holy 
 city, that it may be that the social crisis will 
 open the gates of the nations for the universal 
 revolution of love, and the peoples enter upon 
 the strifeless progress of the ransomed society.
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH 
 CHRISTIANITY.
 
 Revolution is then for us a work of education, a religious mis- 
 sion. Had we naught to sustain us in our struggles but the impulse 
 of anger or of reaction, we should long ago have been disheartened 
 by doubt and wearied by delusions. Had we drawn our inspiration 
 from the love of power, we could, by sacrificing our convictions in 
 part, have at once satisfied the low desire. As there exists no 
 church save one hostile to the spirit of the truth, and degenerated 
 from its first institution, we are now the Militant Church of Precur- 
 sors to the temple which shall be rebuilt, invoking the kingdom of 
 God, upon earth as it is in heaven. We are the Church of Precur- 
 sors until the virtuous who feel the necessity of a true and living 
 faith, as the unifier of all human efforts, and inspirer of all human 
 faculties, having assembled in council, having interrogated progress, 
 having explored the evils, and decreed the remedies for our state, 
 shall lay the first stone of the Universal Church of Humanity. And 
 then only, the world being conquered by his teaching, Jesus will be 
 able to repeat to the Father with an ineffable smile : " I have mani- 
 fested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the 
 world; thine they were and thou gavest them me; and they have 
 kept thy word." — Joseph Mazzini.
 
 VI. 
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST WITH 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 I was then carried in spirit to the mines where poor oppressed 
 people were digging rich treasures for those called Christians, and 
 heard them blaspheme the name of Christ, at which I was grieved, 
 for his name to me was precious. I was then informed that these 
 heathens were told that those who oppressed them were the followers 
 of Christ, and they said among themselves, " If Christ directed them 
 to use us in this sort, then Christ is a cruel tyrant." — John Wool- 
 man. 
 
 Among all classes, there is a growing feeling 
 that some sort of a new religious movement is 
 the sole hope of a peaceful social revolution. 
 As the problem of society grows more porten- 
 tous and complicated, as the stress and strain 
 of soul increase, it is seen by all that the revo- 
 lutionary methods of the past will not help us ; 
 that we must somehow look for the incoming 
 of spiritual forces sufficient to procure a revolu- 
 tion of love and fraternity. The social con- 
 science craves a religion, the social shame and 
 woe cry for a salvation, the world waits for a 
 faith, for which men are once more ready to die 
 179
 
 l8o BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 or live with equal joy. We need, as Mazzini 
 said, "a social faith which may save us from 
 anarchy, the moral inspiration which may ex- 
 press that faith in action and keep us from idle 
 contemplation." And the faith for which men 
 seek death, he says, " is neither the frenzy of 
 culpable agitators, nor the dream of deluded 
 men ; it is the germ of a religion, a providen- 
 tial decree." 
 
 It is also felt by all that the spiritual move- 
 ment for which we wait, if it answers the uni- 
 versal social need, must come m the terms of 
 the economic problem. The religious question 
 of to-day is an economic question ; the spiritual 
 task before religion is that of making property 
 a medium and an expression of spiritual aspira 
 tions and ideals. The economic question can 
 never be separated from the religious ques- 
 tion, nor the religious question from the eco- 
 nomic ; the two are one, from Moses to Jesus, 
 from Buddha to St. Francis, from Wyckliffe to 
 the present time. Emile Zola is right in de- 
 claring "that an economical question is invari- 
 ably hidden beneath each religious evolution, 
 and that, upon the whole, the everlasting evil, 
 the everlasting struggle, has never been aught 
 but one between the rich and the poor." The 
 life of man is objectively an economic life,
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. l8l 
 
 grounded in religion, and showing forth its fun- 
 damental faith in political conditions. As I 
 have already said, political corruption is the 
 overflow of economic corruption ; and behind 
 economic corruption lies an inadequate and 
 unethical religious experience and organiza- 
 tion. 
 
 But there are some who feel the need of this 
 religious movement most deeply, and who wait 
 for its coming most intently, who will yet nobly 
 object to my association of the economic prob- 
 lem with the name and teachings of Jesus. The 
 idea is gaining ground, among pure and heroic 
 men and women, ready to lay down their lives 
 for the brethren, that we must give up the 
 Christian terminology, in order to procure the 
 great human movement toward a co-operative 
 society. Largely because of the attitude of 
 professional Christianity, there is subtly at work 
 the same deadly scepticism that wrought such 
 disaster in France, both before and after the 
 Revolution. It is bearing the social leadership 
 of our nation toward the same abyss. And to 
 maintain one's integrity of faith against the 
 social unfaith of organized religion on one side, 
 and against the doubt of that faith on the part 
 of holy servants of men on the other, is some- 
 times the most strenuous spiritual test of those
 
 1 82 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 who believe that the name of Jesus is able to 
 summon mankind to the social task. 
 
 It is true that I speak as one who believes 
 that Jesus disclosed elemental and universal 
 principles of life : principles which not only give 
 us a social ideal and philosophy, but which are 
 capable of practical realization. The feeling 
 deepens with me that we shall not have social 
 rest, nor a harmonious and happy progress, until 
 we adopt these principles as a law and mode of 
 society. But I do not appeal to Jesus because 
 I wish to claim for him any superimposed au- 
 thority, or in order to convert any one to what 
 is known as the Christian religion. I am quite 
 aware that other teachers and religions, that 
 philosophers and modern sciences, have reached 
 many of the same ideas and principles that Jesus 
 reached. I am sure that many will come in 
 other names than his, from the east and the 
 west, from many points of view and schools of 
 thought, from fields of noblest effort and highest 
 sacrifice, to sit down with him in the realized 
 kingdom of God. But I think that all will agree 
 that he more vividly generalized certain great 
 truths, and that he more fully focussed them in 
 his life, than any other teacher or personality 
 we know. It is just because that Jesus gathered 
 up and dramatized what is common to the world's
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 83 
 
 best thought and highest aspiration that I ap- 
 peal to him. My interest is in human life, its 
 meaning and destiny ; and I turn to Jesus be- 
 cause of his matchless interpretation of life and 
 its problems. I find no other interpretation 
 which offers so universal a basis for that re- 
 ligion which the social conscience craves. 
 
 Now, the most significant fact of the hour is 
 the appeal of the social conscience from Chris- 
 tianity to Christ. The rising faith of the peo- 
 ple and the discernment of both scientific and 
 economic prophets are alike turning to Jesus, 
 while turning from the church. To the Chris- 
 tian religion and its official attitude, there is the 
 strongest antipathy and social distrust; for Je- 
 sus, there is an increasing reverence and social 
 loyalty, having in it heroic elements, and strong 
 enough to call churchless men to martyrdom 
 for his name's sake. Not long ago, no less a 
 materialist than Professor Lombroso expressed 
 his conviction that the solution of the anti- 
 Semitic and social problems lies in a new re- 
 ligion, " which should take as its standard the 
 new social ideas which Christ has already 
 preached ; " it would be a " neo-Christian so- 
 cialism," in which Jews and Christians might 
 at last unite. "God only knows the remedy," 
 said Louis Kossuth, speaking sadly and gloomily
 
 I §4 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 of "the manifold crimes which society has com- 
 mitted against the people ; " but " if the doc- 
 trines of Christianity, which are found in the 
 New Testament, could be applied to home so- 
 ciety," he said, " I believe the solution of the 
 social problem could be got at." 
 
 But we can have no such revival as that for 
 which we wait, until we have in mind a clear 
 distinction between the Christian life and the 
 life that is conventionally religious. There can 
 be no more reckless or mischievous misuse of 
 language than the indiscriminate way in which 
 the term Christian is used. To accept the ex- 
 isting Christian religion may be very remote 
 from accepting Christ and the order of things 
 for which he stood. A man may be devout, 
 generous, good, and just, according to the best 
 current standards of the church, and yet be in 
 no sense a follower of Christ. The Christian 
 life is not in our creeds as a theory, much less 
 in our practice as a Christian society. It is not 
 in our religious doctrines, much less in our life. 
 The church does not even profess faith in Christ 
 in the sense of taking him at his word, and 
 believing his life livable and workable in the 
 world. I know of no church that requires or 
 expects, or that pretends to require or expect, 
 that its members shall really do the things
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 85 
 
 which Christ commanded. "The disastrous 
 results of a diffusion of Christianity at the cost 
 of its intensity," says Canon Gore, " is very ap- 
 parent to those of us who are greatly interested 
 in the social problems of the present moment." 
 " How is it," he asks, " that we have reached a 
 condition of things when men cannot only utter, 
 as multitudes of men always have done, the 
 maxims of worldliness and selfishness, but utter 
 these maxims without any sense that, by simply 
 giving expression to them, they are repudiating 
 Christianity, as far as words go quite as really 
 as if they were denying the Christian creed, or 
 as if in the old days of persecution they had 
 offered incense to the divinity of the Roman 
 emperor ? " 
 
 In a profound sense, the religion of Jesus is 
 coming upon the world as practically a new reve- 
 lation. In the discussions which have come and 
 gone with the centuries, in the theological bat- 
 tles in which councils and kings, imperial armies 
 and massacred peoples, have played their part, 
 the essential question of the religion of Jesus 
 has not been touched ; nor has it been touched 
 by either the vulgar or the scholarly debates 
 between so-called believers and so-called infidels. 
 The debates and wars of the church have been 
 over questions that are not essential, so far as
 
 1 86 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Jesus is concerned ; they have been about things 
 that have nothing to do with his religion and 
 programme. The real proposition of Christian- 
 ity is this : that love is the elemental law of 
 being, in God, in man, in nature. No man, no 
 philosophy, no religion, has ever disputed the 
 law of love ; no scepticism has ever argued 
 against it. To destroy Christianity, we would 
 have to destroy the law of love ; to believe and 
 practise Christianity, we must believe and prac- 
 tise the law of love. And love has as yet had 
 so little to do with the motives that direct social 
 organization, that we have no data by which to 
 determine what society might be under its rule. 
 "The power of love has been but meanly and 
 sparingly applied," says Thoreau ; "it has pa- 
 tented only such machines as the almshouse, 
 the hospital, and the Bible Society, while its 
 infinite wind is still blowing, and blowing down 
 those very structures, too, from time to time." 
 To bring Christ " into history, to found on him 
 the relations of the people, to create the love of 
 our neighbor in the historical sense, — that is 
 the mission " which Sienkiewicz sees before his 
 Slavic world, and which we may see as the mis- 
 sion of all who have grasped the thought of love 
 as law. 
 
 Jesus did not make the law of love, but it
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 87 
 
 made him ; he simply interpreted and drama- 
 tized the love which had always been the law of 
 all being, whether he had come into the world 
 or n ot — the law which never had a beginning 
 and which can never have an ending. It is the 
 law which has always governed man, whether 
 he knew it or not, whether he would have it 
 govern him or not ; only man has compelled love 
 to govern him retributively, instead of through 
 his willing acceptance of its rule. It is this law 
 of love that the cross stands for ; and it is this 
 which is bringing Christ into conflict with the 
 Christianity which claims his name. 
 
 Christianity began, so far as it issued from 
 Jesus, not as a new religion, but as a mode of 
 living by this law of love. In religion as a 
 thing in itself Jesus was not interested ; rather, 
 he looked with profound distrust upon what was 
 then, and is now, both officially and popularly 
 understood by religion. Religious forms and 
 dogmas he regarded as of little consequence, 
 except as they darkened and oppressed human 
 life. A religious cult was something he could 
 not tolerate ; an official religion was an usurpa- 
 tion. Religion as a thing in itself, as an absor- 
 bent of life, was to him the worst blasphemy, a 
 cruel and outrageous imposition. He presented 
 no system of religion for acceptance, and noth-
 
 1 88 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 ing indicates that he came expecting to found 
 a new religion. Neither the people who heard 
 him gladly, nor the disciples who followed him, 
 had any thought that a new religion was being 
 founded. It was human life that interested 
 Jesus, and that seemed to him, even at its worst, 
 to be the sacred matter of concern. Every 
 phase and expression of life caught and held his 
 attention to the point of intensest fascination. 
 Forming no cult of worship, in fact avoiding 
 such as the most deadly moral fatality, his bless- 
 ing was upon those who divinely gave themselves 
 to the service of humanity. "As I understand 
 it," says Amiel, " Christianity is above all reli- 
 gions, and religion is not a method, it is a life." 
 Human life is the real presence of God which 
 Jesus taught men to see and worship. 
 
 Jesus had nothing occult or transcendental, 
 mysterious or supernatural, to teach. Although 
 we idly distinguish between natural and re- 
 vealed religion, it was to show natural religion 
 as right relations that Jesus taught and worked. 
 The spirituality of the natural, the naturalness 
 of the spiritual, the social oneness and ethical 
 sympathy of spirit and nature, was the ground 
 of his faith. To have proposed a supernatural 
 mode of life directly opposed to the natural 
 organism in which it was to be lived would
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 89 
 
 rtave been moral insanity. To rid the human 
 mind of the distinction between the natural 
 and the supernatural — a primitive pagan su- 
 perstition which still clings to us — was one of 
 Jesus' most faithful efforts. He knew that 
 this false distinction was fatal to sane or right 
 relations ; V_at it was the ground upon which 
 official religion built its tyrannies. It was the 
 superstition that peopled the unseen world with 
 demi-gods, invested priestcrafts with their 
 authority, forever hiding the face of God from 
 his people, keeping man ignorant of his divine 
 sonship. To show forth his own divine son- 
 ship as the natural life of man, with the brother- 
 hood it brought as the normal human order, was 
 to Jesus an unfailing inspiration. 
 
 He put life before men as an unending spirit- 
 ual adventure and discovery. He invested 
 the pursuit of righteousness with a fascination 
 which no romance has ever given to an absorb- 
 ing love. He made goodness supremely attrac- 
 tive, from whatever source it came. He made 
 truth a glorious quest, through whatever depths 
 the quest led him. The only people he seemed 
 unable to tolerate were the virtuous who had 
 lost their enthusiasm. He had a deep-seated 
 aversion for what we call moderation. He 
 could get along with almost anybody, or any-
 
 190 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 thing, except the "judicious," the " impartial," 
 and the "safe." The respectable moral dull- 
 ness of professional religion he abhorred as 
 wickedness in its worst and stupidest disguise. 
 If a man could not find a righteousness that 
 exceeded the best current righteousness, then 
 he was not interested in righteousness at all, 
 and could in no wise enter the kingdom of 
 heaven. To be content with the existing order 
 of things, was downright apostasy and atheism, 
 from Jesus' point of view. 
 
 Yet we must not mistake Jesus for a mere 
 teacher of ethics, either individual or social. 
 While no teacher is so ethical as Jesus, he 
 never dreamed of presenting a mere system of 
 ethics, or even of giving a final ethic. A sys- 
 tem of ethics can have only a relative ethical 
 value. Obedience to ethics may not result in 
 an ethical life, and it is as idle to assume that 
 God has given a final revelation of ethics as to 
 suppose that he has given a final revelation of 
 astronomy or theology. It is the unfolding 
 life alone that is ethical, and life increases only 
 to know a better ethic to-day than it knew yes- 
 terday. It was as a teacher of elemental life 
 and law that Jesus came. 
 
 He did not come as one teaching something 
 new so much as one unfolding what was old ;
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 191 
 
 he came as an interpreter of what had been the 
 human meaning of religion from its beginning. 
 Many of his sayings are an assimilation and 
 living reproduction, a rich bloom and perfect 
 fruit, of what was best and hid in current 
 Hebrew teaching. He had abundantly fed his 
 spirit upon the thought of the later Isaiah, and 
 had formed his ideals in part from that prophet's 
 glowing visions of the redeemed nation, leading 
 the world into a regenerated civilization. He 
 talked in an ethical and social language that was 
 then no more unknown to the Hebrew church 
 than it is now unknown, in another way, to the 
 Christian church. It was the language of the 
 redeemed society, calling men to repentance as 
 the condition of its realization ; the tongue of 
 the kingdom of God, calling men to a new 
 moral birth as the first condition of citizenship. 
 In neither Old nor New Testament, does the 
 term kingdom of God, or kingdom of heaven, 
 mean other than a righteous society upon the 
 earth. It was the term commonly used to sig- 
 nify social justice — a justice to be fully realized 
 when the Messiah should come. It was ex- 
 pected that he, whenever he came or whoever 
 he proved to be, would bring in an order so just, 
 so free from oppression and righteous in free- 
 dom, that it would be nothing else than the
 
 192 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 direct reign of God in human affairs, the mani- 
 fest and indisputable setting up of his govern- 
 ment in the world. While Jesus' ideal of the 
 kingdom was surpassingly purer than the popu- 
 lar or orthodox ideal, and his conception of the 
 kingdom's law and method radically different, 
 it was none the less this same kingdom of 
 heaven he came to initiate ; it was a social de- 
 liverance that he brought. He did not expect, 
 nor did he once lead the people to expect, any- 
 thing other than the realization of the kingdom 
 of heaven as a holy society of universal justice. 
 His interpretations of the kingdom have far 
 more to do with relations, with social facts and 
 forces, than with what we understand by reli- 
 gion. His teachings disclose the kingdom of 
 God as not only a subjective condition, a state 
 of mind, but as an objective and perfectly or- 
 ganized society. They furnish not only a social 
 ideal, but a working principle and a dynamic for 
 its realization. They deal more specifically 
 with questions of economic equity, and far more 
 frequently with the subject of property, than 
 we care to know. It could not be otherwise, 
 with the early Christian apostolate borne on by 
 Jesus' idea of the kingdom of God as a heavenly 
 economy of the earthly life, with all its things 
 and persons.
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. I93 
 
 For the redemption of human life to this 
 kingdom, Jesus endured the cross, with his 
 glorious disgrace, and gained the secret of 
 power. Through the knowledge that his broken 
 life and shed blood would be the living meat 
 and drink of the world, that out of the travail 
 of his soul would finally issue the salvation of 
 the righteous society, he carried with joy the 
 shame heaped upon him by a faithless church 
 and nation. For this he drank his cup of sor- 
 row to the dregs, bore without murmuring the 
 sufferings by which he learned obedience, and 
 went shelterless into the assailing storms of 
 avenging evil. The righting of wrong, the 
 realization of the brotherhood, was the sancti- 
 fying motive that raised him to the moral glory 
 of the cross, and makes his sacrifice the world's 
 highest social revelation. 
 
 The age that finally changed the revelation 
 of Jesus from a social ideal to an official reli- 
 gion, from a mode of life to a theological system, 
 was one of moral and religious anarchy, insanely 
 wicked and licentious. It is a strange thing, 
 but not so strange as the small account we 
 make of it, that the great councils that formu- 
 lated the church's system of truth were com- 
 posed of members from whom the sense of 
 truth had almost died out. The facts about
 
 194 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 their riots of creeds and destroying factions 
 we probably can never know. As Dean Farrar 
 says, with reference to this time, " we can never 
 trust the accounts given either of the opinions 
 or characters of men by their theological oppo- 
 nents." The Nicene council, which laid the 
 foundation for all subsequent theology, was so 
 without sense of right and human honor, as to 
 appall even the ethical decency of Constantine, 
 who scarcely pretended to be other than an 
 atheist as to morals and a sceptic as to faith, 
 though fabled the first Christian emperor. It 
 is a far downward journey from Jesus to Atha- 
 nasius, farther than from Athanasius to either 
 Hildebrand or Calvin. When the philosophers 
 of Alexandria and Athens finally got the Chris- 
 tian directorate, and the Roman upper classes 
 began to make Christianity a fad, its spring- 
 time of moral glory had gone, while the sum- 
 mer was soon ended, and the long winter of 
 the faith of Jesus began. The organized cult 
 of worship, the great ethnic religion, that has 
 grown up bearing his name, is something that 
 Jesus never contemplated. We need not call 
 it evil, and doubtless it was an inevitable his- 
 torical process in the evolution of the universal 
 society and religion. But it is foreign, and in 
 a large measure antagonistic, to the idea and 
 outlook of Jesus.
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 95 
 
 Of course, the church has been receiving 
 moral discipline, yet to bear its best fruit, during 
 these centuries of wandering in the wilderness 
 of theology and ecclesiastical politics. But this 
 wilderness, in which we still wander among the 
 bones of our fathers, is not the land of social 
 promise which Jesus viewed for his nation, and 
 his human race. Though men know not what 
 they see, and see it dimly yet, the recovery of 
 Christianity from the system of religion im- 
 posed upon it by Greek theology and Roman 
 law, from the baneful moral and social effects 
 which this system has so deeply wrought, with 
 the restoration of the idea of Jesus to Christen- 
 dom, is the process now at work in society, and 
 is the beatific vision mightily and hopefully 
 attracting the common life to a wider and 
 nobler faith. "Jesus will always supply us 
 with the best criticism of Christianity," says 
 Amiel ; " and when Christianity has passed away 
 the religion of Jesus will in all probability 
 survive." 
 
 Before Jesus can have his day and social way, 
 there will have to be done for Christianity what 
 Jesus did for Judaism. The Christian religion 
 we know is not the religion of Jesus ; he is 
 no more the author of existing Christianity 
 than Moses was the author of the Judaism out
 
 196 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 of which Christianity was born. The sum of 
 what is taught and practised as his religion 
 represents Jesus in only the most meagre sense, 
 and in a large sense represents the things his 
 soul hated ; the things he came to save men 
 from. We preach in his name the things he 
 did not preach, while the things he preached, 
 as well as the things for which his name really 
 stood, we leave unproclaimed. The pulpits in 
 which the ministry of Jesus' actual word would 
 be tolerated are few and scarcely representa- 
 tive. The church has become of the world, 
 even as Jesus was not of the world. It has lost 
 its power of moral appeal, and has no programme 
 of faith to offer the social cry. It is impotent 
 to effect the social synthesis, or to initiate the 
 religious movement which alone can bring social 
 salvation. Social things which are the worst 
 abomination in the sight of God are not more 
 highly esteemed in the world than in the church. 
 It is to the church, rather than to the world, 
 that the cross has become foolishness, in 
 this day of material values and measurements. 
 There is practically no organized effort to put 
 into practice the mode of life which Jesus 
 initiated as redemption ; no real attempt on the 
 part of the church as a whole to learn, much 
 less to preach or to practise, Jesus' religious
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 97 
 
 idea or social ideal. The problem of getting 
 Christianity, or the church, to accept Christ is 
 the most momentous difficulty which the social 
 situation presents. " The socialistic theories," 
 says Dr. Edwin D. Hatch, "which formulate 
 in modern language and justify by modern con- 
 ceptions such an exhortation as ' Sell what thou 
 hast and give to the poor,' meet with no less 
 opposition within than without the Christian 
 societies." " The conversion of the church to 
 Christian theory," he says, " must precede the 
 conversion of the world to Christian practice." 
 " We have," says Herbert Spencer, " a thin 
 layer of Christianity overlying a thick layer of 
 paganism. Christianity has the nominal honor 
 and the professed obedience ; while paganism 
 is nominally discredited but practically obeyed." 
 It is this antithesis between Christ and Chris- 
 tianity which leads President Tucker to declare 
 that the arrest of foreign missions is due to the 
 fact that the heathen are finding us out. 
 
 In saying that the religious ideal prevailing 
 in the church must have an end, I do not 
 denounce the church, or question the effective 
 faith or martyr-effort it has wrought, or doubt 
 the noble men and women who work within it, 
 any more than I denounce a garment, or deny 
 its past utility, by saying that it is worn out,
 
 I98 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 and that a fitter and more useful garment can 
 be conceived ; I merely say that the present 
 organization of Christianity has done its work, 
 however great its value as an historic provision, 
 and that it is hence no longer adequate and 
 constructive, but rather baffling and destruc- 
 tive. To conserve the present religious sys- 
 tem in the face of the social epoch, means 
 death to faith, and anarchy to action. To con- 
 tinue in the system because of what God has 
 wrought through it in the past, is to be guilty 
 of the very apostasy that hurried Jesus to 
 the cross. If we, at this moment of greatest 
 human effort toward righteousness, suffer the 
 past to circumscribe our religious thought and 
 social faith, we are recreant to the Jesus we 
 worship and preach. It is not simply that we 
 have the same right to think and act that 
 Moses and Paul had, or that Athanasius and 
 Calvin had, but that we are under the same 
 obligation to God and man to think and act ; 
 to think and act, too, with the spiritual adven- 
 ture by which their faith achieved progress. 
 Only that spiritual adventure which made 
 Jesus the Christ, which spoke by the mouths 
 of prophets and apostles, which has prepared 
 every highway of progress, can save the church 
 as the shrine of the people.
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 1 99 
 
 You say we have been making progress. Of 
 course. For some thousands of years the world 
 had been making progress before Jesus was 
 crucified by " the conservatively progressive." 
 The world had been making progress before 
 Bernard and Francis came ; before Huss and 
 Luther arose ; before Oliver Cromwell was 
 hurled as the incarnate judgment of God 
 against political vice and religious tyranny. 
 The world had been making progress before 
 the French Revolution put history backward 
 as well as forward, changing the shadow of 
 progress on the dial of history. When the 
 Hebrew church gave birth to Christianity the 
 sun grew dark, the earth trembled like a 
 stricken life, the natural elements articulated 
 the universal travail, the dead were driven 
 from their tombs by the new life, and the 
 heart of God was broken. Whether the social 
 birth be a universal tragedy or a universal 
 harmony, depends on whether we hide our 
 guilt and sloth in the progress bought by the 
 shed blood of the past lovers of man, or 
 whether we press on to live for our brethren 
 and the social future. As Dr. Josiah Strong 
 says, though he would by no means endorse 
 my application of his saying, we have only to 
 keep on making our present kind of progress
 
 200 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 long enough and our destruction is inevit- 
 able. 
 
 The present attitude of the church cannot 
 be charged against the clergy alone; it is quite 
 as much the fault of the men upon whom the 
 clergymen depend. The pastor is involved in 
 a religious system which has become thor- 
 oughly dependent upon the economic system. 
 In fact, almost more than any other class, the 
 men who minister from our pulpits are becom- 
 ing the helpless victims of the most brutal 
 intimidations of money interests. If they 
 preach the truth which Jesus preached, they 
 will disrupt their congregations, destroy their 
 own reputations, and will be practically black- 
 listed by the churches. Long years of prepa- 
 ration are required for their calling, and the 
 financial returns to ability are small. Help- 
 less economic dependence is not a good school 
 in which to train men for spiritual boldness 
 and liberty. With the doors of the church 
 closed against him, after years of preparation, 
 and with a dependent family about him, it is 
 not wonderful that the pastor seeks truth in 
 the terms of the existing order. Yet, notwith- 
 standing all this, some of the best social agita- 
 tion of America is proceeding from the young 
 men in the pulpits, or from young men who
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 201 
 
 have been trained for its ministry. The most 
 eager listeners to social discussions, and the 
 most anxious inquirers, are the pastors. It is 
 no exaggeration to say that probably a hundred 
 clergymen are studying the social problem, 
 where one politician has given it any consider- 
 ation, or has even remotely heard of it. Here 
 in Chicago, the various ministerial associations 
 will invite the labor leader, the socialist, the 
 philosophical anarchist, to come and address 
 them ; I do not hear of the Board of Trade, 
 or any of the various commercial associations, 
 doing anything of this sort. There is a saying 
 in Italy to the effect that there has never been 
 a revolution in Europe without a monk at the 
 bottom of it ; and when the social crisis culmi- 
 nates here in America, you will find behind it 
 the hundreds of young ministers of the gospel 
 who are getting ready to throw away their 
 churches, their reputations, and their lives if 
 it need be, in order to follow Christ in the 
 social redemption that is to set the people free. 
 Whether the church go with them or not, they 
 will go with Christ, and share with him the fate 
 of the people. 
 
 So we come back again to where this lecture 
 began : to the economic question as the su- 
 preme question which Christianity has now to
 
 202 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 answer. It is this which makes the social 
 crisis the crisis of the organized religion which 
 bears Christ's name. Without regard to the 
 institutions of Christianity, the question as to 
 whether love is law is the field on which the 
 economic battle is to be fought out. If the 
 church would furnish the faith which the people 
 crave, and deal with the human fact we now con- 
 front, it must bring forth a new Christian syn- 
 thesis, in the form of an economic statement of 
 the teachings of Jesus — an economic of his law 
 of love. It must accept the full logic of his 
 teachings, with all the communism and the lib- 
 erty from institutional authority which these 
 teachings mean, if it would absolve mankind 
 from social guilt. It must call this civilization 
 to Christ's judgment seat, or it will itself recede, 
 and a new form of Christianity arise from the 
 midst of the people. 'If the church is in such 
 relations to the existing order, and is so de- 
 pendent on its money, that it cannot examine 
 the social titles of organized wealth, nor cry 
 aloud and spare not against our political and 
 economic crimes, then the sceptre of redemp- 
 tion will pass from it, and a new redemptive 
 organ will arise. 
 
 Whatever becomes of the church, the new 
 social faith in Christ comes not to destroy, but
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 203 
 
 to fulfil the church's present and past history ; 
 only the church's fear and conservatism can 
 destroy it. "The necessary revolution which 
 would change the spirit of Christianity without 
 changing a dogma, a rite, a priestly gesture," 
 says James Darmsteter, "would make of the 
 church — now an obstacle — a living force." 
 " On that day," he says, when the words of the 
 prophets and of Christ are again heard from 
 the pulpit, " will the church take a new lease 
 of life, and be able to assume once more the 
 supreme direction of human society." It is to 
 this end that the new social faith has asked 
 the church to lose its present life in the cause 
 and service of the people. It sees, what the 
 religionist and the sceptic alike see, what in- 
 dustrial wrong and political craft fear, that if 
 the idea of Jesus should once be given an 
 economic interpretation, and again be taken 
 with apostolic seriousness, with an organized 
 initiative and support, there would be an end 
 of the civilization which now exists. This so- 
 cial faith sees, too, that if the men who cry so 
 devoutly for "the simple gospel," whenever the 
 industrial problem is approached in the name of 
 Jesus, were once to hear that gospel, they would 
 cry for almost anything else under heaven. 
 But "the application of the gospel must be
 
 204 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 made," wrote Dr. George B. Cheever in 1857; 
 "nor is there any time to be lost, since the argu- 
 ment of possession, custom, and law is every- 
 day growing stronger." "If the probing" of 
 "every dear, cherished, fashionable evil," he 
 says, "occasions agitation, anger, strife, that 
 very thing is the proof of so dealing with it, and 
 if it is warmly contested not to be an evil nor a 
 sin, that itself just clearly shows the danger 
 and ruin of letting it alone and the necessity of 
 pouring the light of God's word upon it. If it 
 be interwoven with the politics of the state and 
 of society, so much the more hazardous to med- 
 dle with it, but so much the more necessary." 
 
 But, after all, what becomes of the church is 
 really not an important question ; it is the de- 
 velopment and freedom of human life that is 
 alone important. God is not dependent upon 
 the present organization of Christianity to save 
 the world ; and man and truth do not exist for 
 the sake of building and perpetuating institu- 
 tions. An institution of religion is inherently 
 a spiritual aristocracy, and can have no place 
 in a pure democracy, except to remain as a 
 shrine for those who need it. John saw no 
 temple in the perfected humanity, and Jesus 
 taught that worship consists in spirit and in 
 life, and not in locality or institution.
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 205 
 
 The peoples are turning away from the 
 churches, not because they are becoming less 
 religious, but because they are becoming more 
 religious, more reverent toward God and man ; 
 because the meaning of religion is at last being 
 disclosed in the relations of the common life. 
 The religious movement for which we hope 
 will not be hostile to the church ; indeed, it will 
 probably move on almost in ignorance of the 
 church's existence. It will be a distinctly human 
 revival, drawing its motives and supports from 
 human need and yearnings. It will have little 
 or nothing to do with the church, but will have 
 everything to do with human life as the real 
 presence of God. It will displace our wanton 
 distrust of moral enthusiasm with a passion for 
 righteousness so sacred as to again be called 
 the baptism of the Holy Ghost. It will come 
 with the joy of the springtime, a new religion 
 springing from the human soil, and that because 
 Christ is in the soil. 
 
 If there is not in the people a spiritual reserve 
 sufficient to bring forth such a religious move- 
 ment, then the social revolution will doubtless 
 come through force instead of love. I thor- 
 oughly believe and advocate Jesus' doctrine of 
 non-resistance. I am opposed to war in every 
 form, military, industrial, or theological. But
 
 206 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 a mere conservatism always compels progress 
 to make its way through conflict and tragedy. 
 " The stubborn opponents of reform are invari- 
 ably the real parents of revolution," says Kos- 
 suth. If Christianity cannot be made to see the 
 day of its visitation, nor be persuaded to accept 
 its messianic opportunity, God may conclude 
 that revolution of the sort that wrested the 
 Great Charter from King John, or wrote the 
 Declaration of Independence, would be nation- 
 ally healthier than the moral apathy with which 
 we tolerate organized money, from the money 
 lords of the Senate down to the rural legislator, 
 to prostitute every sacred national interest, to 
 debauch every holy national function, for private 
 and corporate profit. 
 
 We Americans have yet to learn from Jesus 
 that love alone is the fulfilling of liberty ; that 
 the social service, not the material gain of the 
 individual, is the end of freedom. Our national 
 wealth, in which we ignorantly glory, has be- 
 come both spiritual and economic poverty, and 
 faithlessness to trust has become with us a na- 
 tional characteristic. Our mad individualism, 
 now heavy with the conscience of Cain, has 
 fastened upon us such tyrannies that the eco- 
 nomic problem is now with us a problem of 
 national existence. The problem of American
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST 207 
 
 law and liberty is a problem of how to realize 
 the love of Christ as industrial and social law. 
 
 Whether we would have it so or not, Jesus 
 holds the key to the social situation, and the 
 initiative is his. From his cross, his ideal has 
 passed into the vision of humanity, and is now 
 the richest social value in possession of the 
 race. With each crisis and change, the out- 
 lines of his kingdom of heaven appear more 
 distinct amidst the world's thought and activity. 
 After all that has come and gone, he remains 
 the most interesting and fascinating, the sweet- 
 est and strongest, the most wholly human figure 
 we know. His simple, matchless figure is still 
 the world's greatest moral attraction. He has 
 suffered always, as he suffers still, in the house 
 of his official friends ; in monstrous frameworks 
 of hard, unsympathetic and unsocial systems ; 
 in cruel doctrines of God, and wicked doctrines 
 of man. Yet he lives, and grows in stature 
 and in favor with men. We love him, we cling 
 to him, as the bone of our bone, the flesh of our 
 flesh, the soul of our soul, the light of our social 
 future. As we behold him praying, on his last 
 mortal evening, for peace and power to drink 
 all his cup, to finish all his work, we feel that 
 here is one who has found perfect poise, found 
 eternal ground for human hope, in what is ele-
 
 208 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 mental and universal. Who he was, how he 
 came to be what he was, what we are to do with 
 his idea, what is to be the end of what he did, 
 — these are still questions of absorbing con- 
 tent, affecting as no other the destiny of the 
 race. As never before, the feet of Jesus stand 
 solid in the human fact, and his hands are in the 
 human clay, with his ideal the mould in which 
 God will cast and recast our social forms and 
 unmake and remake our human facts, until 
 made perfect in that ideal. 
 
 But let us not seek the living among the 
 dead, as many devout souls would have us do. 
 The Christ we need is not in the tomb of meta- 
 physics, where theology has stood guard these 
 many ages, obedient to ambition in the church, 
 agreeable to craft in the state. The messianic 
 idea is risen, and goes before us in the sons of 
 men committed to the social redemption, to lead 
 on to the holy society. The Jesus of reality, 
 whose beauty of life our pagan ethics yet dis- 
 figure, whose hope for man our wealth and 
 theology would crucify afresh, is being glorified 
 in the rise of human faith to his ideal, and in 
 the social expectancy of his initiative. 
 
 Then not back, but on to Christ, is the divine 
 meaning of the social cry ; and the universal 
 suffering that raises it waits for the social faith
 
 THE CONFLICT OF CHRIST. 2CK) 
 
 in his name to answer and save ; no other name 
 among men has so great power to summon the 
 world to its social task. The recovery of the 
 lost cross, yesterday abandoned by the church 
 to gain the world and lose its soul, yet to be 
 found in the strife of to-day and the woe of to- 
 morrow, is the fundamental social need. Only 
 the reaching light of the Lord Christ's cross 
 can disclose the social heaven in human fact. 
 They who plant that cross in the social fore- 
 front, to be seen and read of men in its real 
 meaning, to have its law interpreted in terms of 
 labor and justice, freedom and growth, will bring 
 the peace of good-will, through the justice of 
 love, to human society.
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS AND SOCIAL 
 IDEALS.
 
 It is clear, however, that this unbridling cannot last. The mod- 
 ern soul is better than its doctrines, and beneath the scum on the 
 surface the fount of the ideal flows on as deep as ever. The soul 
 well knows that this cannot be the final expression of the emancipa- 
 tion of thought ; but that there must lurk somewhere a dishonoring 
 and deadly sophism. The impulse which drives a part of the young 
 generation to mysticism is nought but the first reaction of conscience 
 seeking an outlet towards the pure air, — a sterile reaction, — for 
 mysticism is death for the soul, but the forerunner of a fruitful revolt. 
 In endeavoring to retrace its steps and bend again under the yoke 
 which it had broken, the modern soul attempts the impossible. It 
 knows that it cannot abjure science, and it knows, too, that it can 
 only be saved by an assertion of conscience to which science cannot 
 dictate, and which should control science. 
 
 The truths that would save us are not far to seek. They are cur- 
 rent in the streets, but anaemic and bloodless. In order to become 
 again living and triumphant realities, they require only to be conveyed 
 to us by a voice speaking with authority. The one heard eighteen 
 hundred years ago is hushed, because some of its words are repealed, 
 words that were spoken to help men to die, and not to help them to 
 live, and impotent in a world eager for justice, for life, for light. 
 And now, behold humanity unwittingly ascending towards the higher 
 source, towards the misunderstood masters of Christianity, " whose 
 disciples we are, we all who seek a God without priests, a revelation 
 without prophets, a covenant written in the heart." — James Darms. 
 teter.
 
 VII. 
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS AND SOCIAL 
 IDEALS. 
 
 When a man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral fact he 
 sees plainly enough that that fact cannot come into the actual world 
 all at once — not without first a destruction of the existing order of 
 society — such a destruction as makes him feel satanic ; then an in- 
 tellectual revolution ; and lastly only, a new order embodying the 
 new impulse. When this new impulse has thoroughly materialized 
 itself, then after a time will come another inward birth, and similar 
 changes will be passed through again. So it might be said that the 
 work of each age is not to build on the past, but to rise, out of the 
 past and throw it off ; only of course in such matters where all forms 
 of thought are inadequate it is hard to say that one way of looking 
 at the subject is truer than another. As before, we should endeavor 
 to look at the thing from different sides.— Edward Carpenter. 
 
 For every man who has an ideal, the most 
 difficult lesson is that of learning that ideals are 
 formed for men, and not men for ideals. The 
 most seemingly worthless life has rights that 
 eternally transcend the loftiest ideals of right ; 
 and life is eternally more than any of its ideals 
 and forms. The ideal life is indeed not a pur- 
 suit of ideals, but of life itself ; it is the life that 
 uses its ideals for the day, and returns them to 
 213
 
 214 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 God at night, to be consumed, or to be changed 
 and enlarged. An ideal is an outline for the 
 moment, for the man, for the age, for the millen- 
 nium, to be taken clown as the larger outline 
 opens to view. But the fatal mistake of ideal- 
 ists in the past, and of social reformers in the 
 present, is that of each treating his ideal as an 
 end in itself, just as religions and institutions 
 are made ends in themselves. He who, without 
 a second thought, would be burnt to ashes for 
 his ideal, defeats its leadership through refusing 
 to attach it to the conditions and movements he 
 means it to lead. When one resolutely deter- 
 mines upon an ideal in such way that it detaches 
 him from human facts, and he thus becomes a 
 mere moral or spiritual absolutist, he crushes 
 where he means to heal, obstructs instead of 
 leads ; he falls to worshipping his ideal instead 
 of God, and will henceforth have God's will 
 done only in the terms of a self-will and unfaith 
 which he mistakes for fidelity ; he takes the 
 ideal which was sent to liberate and to lead, and 
 establishes it over himself as an impersonal ty- 
 rant ; he makes a new house of bondage more 
 impregnable than the one from which he has 
 escaped — more impregnable, because he binds 
 his soul with the truth that was meant to set 
 him free.
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 21 5 
 
 The problem of the idealist is the problem 
 of how to attach his ideal to the conditions and 
 movements which seem to be its antithesis. 
 The world of fact has no patience with the 
 idealist ; the idealist detaches his ideal from 
 the world. The practical man has no faith 
 in the power of the stars to safely draw his 
 chariot ; the stars lose their friendship for the 
 practical man, with his stupidity and compro- 
 mises. 
 
 Jesus seems to have solved this problem for 
 himself and his friends. He was the most 
 radical of idealists; but he was also the most 
 rational and hopeful of men in his attitude to- 
 wards the wrongs he confronted. His economic 
 of progress was one of fulfilment, not of de- 
 struction. He used his ideal, but did not let 
 his ideal use him. It was an ideal that united 
 him with all the facts and forces of his times, 
 and separated him from nothing. He was al- 
 ways seeking to disclose the principles of that 
 ideal in the monstrous things which the world 
 mistook for realities. He pointed to the seeds 
 of regeneracy that lay within every degeneracy ; 
 to the right that was the reality of every wrong ; 
 to the good that was the substance of every 
 evil ; to the truth that supported every false- 
 hood. He looked for the new and the lasting
 
 2l6 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 amidst the old and the passing. He sought the 
 elements of the world's redemption in the men 
 and conditions that needed redeeming. He 
 constantly appealed from phenomena to reality ; 
 from apparent and observable facts to facts 
 unseen and substantial. He clearly saw the 
 elemental forces in the things with which he 
 had to deal, and he kept his feet in the human 
 soil, in order that he might use these forces and 
 things to make future out of the past and the 
 present. True to his ideal to the last, he yet 
 never detached it from existing facts ; he always 
 kept his hands in the human clay which his ideal 
 was to mould and make alive. It was thus that 
 he, the most transcendent of all idealists, got 
 his ideal so deeply under human facts and con- 
 ditions that he has ever since made it bear the 
 world on its shoulders. 
 
 With a habit of mind more truly scientific 
 than that of the modern scientific method, Je- 
 sus surveyed the possibilities of righteousness 
 in every movement of his time. From the 
 beginning of his career, he was eager to learn 
 righteousness from any source. We read of 
 his questioning and arguing, when yet a boy, 
 with the doctors of the national religion. He 
 seems to have gone among the Zealots, the 
 revolutionary party of the nation ; and there
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 21 7 
 
 are indications that he considered deeply and 
 well, to finally reject, the method of revolution 
 by force. It is evident that he had been among 
 the Essenes, the strict Puritan party of his day, 
 the leaders of which party may have brought 
 their ascetic doctrines and practices from the 
 Buddhist monasteries of the far east. He 
 learned much from the Essenes, while he saw 
 how impossible to mere asceticism was the real 
 redemption of human life. So to every man 
 and movement, however inadequate or mis- 
 taken, Jesus came with the generous ardor and 
 adventure of the finest spiritual chivalry. He 
 accepted what there was of worth in each, even 
 when holding most loyally to his ideal ; even 
 when the man or movement could take but the 
 feeblest or blindest first step toward the goal, 
 and could see no goal at that. Discoveries of 
 fatal lack did not discourage his faith ; he 
 rather turned from each failure to a more 
 hopeful quest. Finally, he joined himself to 
 the movement of John the Baptist. The Bap- 
 tist did not understand Jesus' ideal, and only 
 in the rudest sense did he represent the cause 
 of spiritual and national liberty. Yet John's 
 initiative was the best that Jesus could find; 
 and whatever was good, it was his purpose to 
 learn from and to help. He would be in the
 
 2l8 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 sweep of whatever righteousness was moving 
 in his day. While thus giving himself to a 
 movement that promised better things to his 
 people, rude and insufficient as the movement 
 was, the heavens of larger truth opened to 
 his vision, and the full tide of his spiritual 
 consciousness swept into his soul. The ful- 
 ness and glory of his ideal was disclosed while 
 he was making his way through the thick of 
 human struggle and baffled effort. 
 
 The ideal of Jesus took possession of his 
 apostles — unlettered fishermen; and vast re- 
 sistless forces — forces of mind, body, and soul 
 — which they knew not existed in themselves 
 or in any men, awoke and moved out of their 
 lives to the moral and intellectual conquest of 
 the world. Intellectual greatnesses and physi- 
 cal endurances, of which they had never dreamed, 
 made them the amazement of themselves and 
 the marvel of the nations. Their spiritual pas- 
 sion burned up their selfishness, and tore open 
 their stupidity ; so that out of the ashes of their 
 dead selves, from their gross Galilean darkness, 
 they emerged as men of Christ, to shine as 
 lights of God across long ages. Out of their 
 ignorance and obscurity they went as the teach- 
 ers of the world ; as the makers of its progress ; 
 as the philosophers of its history. They found
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 2IO, 
 
 their life and its ideals, as Jesus found his, by 
 always attaching themselves to the best discov- 
 erable movements towards righteousness ; by 
 working with facts and conditions ; by seeking 
 to make Jesus' ideal the mould in which every 
 man and movement should at last be cast. 
 
 Now all this may seem quite mystical, but it 
 has a most immediate and practical bearing 
 upon the relation of those of us who seek social 
 righteousness to the facts and conditions we 
 would set right. There are many of us who 
 have widely different ideals of social method 
 and organization, but who are all reaching for 
 about the same goal : that is, we all want broth- 
 erhood, equality of opportunity, and the justice 
 of love for all men. But we are not seeking 
 points of agreement and contact whereby we 
 may summon to action the people, who are not 
 only waiting to be organized, but who are cry- 
 ing out to be led in the first steps towards the 
 achieving of a better civilization. Each of us 
 who have programmes and ideals of social reform 
 is in danger of working for our programmes, 
 instead of making our programmes work for the 
 people. We are not ready, as we ought to be, 
 to help each other's movements toward right- 
 eousness, and to join ourselves to anything and 
 everything that aims at bettering society. We
 
 220 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 are trying to make the wagons of industry hitch 
 themselves to our stars, when we ought to be 
 finding how to hitch our stars to the wagons. 
 If we really have faith in our ideals and pro- 
 grammes, we will risk them in any sort of con- 
 junction, and lend their energy to every kind 
 of effort, that will take a single step toward the 
 liberty, fraternity, and equality that we seek. 
 The effort we join may be very rude and imper- 
 fect, or it may be lame and weak ; it may have 
 a very different motive from ours behind it, and 
 a very different perspective before it ; but if a 
 great love for the people be our master, and if 
 we really trust our ideals, we can join in move- 
 ments that seem to us awkward and inadequate, 
 with the serene faith that only what is best and 
 true will issue from the conjunction at last. 
 Our ideals must stoop to conquer ; they must 
 attach themselves to the efforts they would 
 lead. If our own programme of the kingdom of 
 heaven is not yet clear in our minds, or if the 
 moment has not come for proclaiming it, let us 
 attach ourselves to John the Baptist, to Karl 
 Marx, to Henry George, to Edward Bellamy, to 
 Mr. Gronlund's co-operative commonwealth ; to 
 anything and everything except the mere con- 
 servatism, or the idle and bewildered waiting, 
 which our economic tyrannies are using to build
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 221 
 
 their thrones. If we believe that God is in the 
 midst of the people, and that human life is his 
 real presence, we shall not be afraid of the 
 broadest intellectual and spiritual democracy; 
 we shall not be afraid to trust each other's 
 minds and motives. If we fear to have intel- 
 lectual and spiritual democracy, how can we 
 expect to achieve economic and political democ- 
 racy ? If we cannot have co-operation in mind 
 and spirit, how can we have co-operation in 
 production and distribution ? Or, if we prefer 
 the term, "equality in competition," we must 
 remember that free competition, in a real de- 
 mocracy, means that every man's opinion, with- 
 out regard to our opinion of the man, whether 
 he be fool or sage, blackest sinner or whitest 
 saint, has a moral and social value, worthy of 
 positive and sympathetic consideration. What- 
 ever be our ideals of social reform, they must 
 scale the whole octave of human effort, if they 
 would bring forth the social harmony for which 
 mankind suffers and toils. 
 
 But let me be specific. There are certain 
 beginnings which we all agree to be necessary, 
 before there can be any effective social change, 
 whatever be our programmes of reform. Among 
 these are the initiative, the referendum, pro- 
 portional representation, and kindred measures,
 
 222 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 which look towards a restoration to the people 
 of the power which they have ignorantly and 
 wickedly surrendered to their so-called repre- 
 sentatives. The Marxian socialist, the Fabian 
 socialist, the single taxer, the Jeffersonian in- 
 dividualist, the philosophical anarchist, all agree 
 that representative government has broken 
 down ; that it has become a plutocratic bureau- 
 cracy ; that if the people would effect any polit- 
 ical or social change, they must get into their 
 hands the power by which the change is to be 
 made. All of these are also pretty generally 
 agreed that the present judicial system is an 
 usurpation and a tyranny ; that it is subverting 
 the law-making power of the people, and de- 
 stroying the foundations of popular liberty. 
 Furthermore, the most of these are coming to 
 agree that the private ownership of public utili- 
 ties is practically the private ownership of 
 human beings ; that private property in pub- 
 lic resources is destroying private property in 
 individual resources, making even the owner- 
 ship of their daily bread a wretched uncertainty 
 to the vast majority of human beings. Now, 
 why not pool our differences for a while, and 
 form a national reform trust upon the basis 
 of the things we all want ? Why not at least 
 agree to clear the field for our differences,
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 223 
 
 before we undertake to settle them ? I fear 
 that if we do not very soon come to such agree- 
 ment, we will find no field left on which to 
 dispute ; the most of it is already in intrenched 
 and fortified possession of the common enemy. 
 And if we could waive our differences, and 
 summon the sinking energies of the people, 
 long enough to make the initial movements 
 towards a better civilization, perhaps we should 
 find at last that we had no differences of con- 
 sequence to settle ; that we were being kept 
 apart, while the people suffered, by words and 
 definitions rather than by sympathies and ideals. 
 There is no measuring the power of a common 
 passion for righteousness to consume differ- 
 ences, to enlighten willing minds, to fuse and 
 unify self-sacrificing energy. It is in spiritual 
 passion and action, and not in speculation and 
 argument, that human beings find themselves 
 marching side by side in the same great cause, 
 their hearts beating to the same hope and har- 
 mony, their eyes beholding the glory of the 
 same liberty. 
 
 The Marxian socialist will say to the single- 
 taxer that merely making the land common 
 property is not enough ; that the resources and 
 instruments of production must be owned in 
 common by the people, or the people in com-
 
 224 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 mon be enslaved. Very well ; that does not 
 prevent the socialist from working with the 
 single-taxer for the freeing of the land, in order 
 that each may have a chance to propose and 
 carry out his programme. The single-taxer will 
 say to the socialist that the public ownership of 
 public utilities will only raise the price of rents, 
 and thus chiefly benefit the landlord, or the 
 already well-to-do and rich, if public ownership 
 be established while private property in land 
 remains. The single-taxer is right ; for without 
 free and common land for the children of God, 
 nothing and no one can be free ; but that does 
 not prevent the single-taxer from working with 
 the evolutionary socialist for the public owner- 
 ship of the utilities which each agree should be 
 publicly owned. In fact, single-taxers and Fa- 
 bian socialists have already adopted programmes 
 that practically come to about the same thing. 
 And there is every reason why the philosophical 
 anarchist of the Kropotkin type, or the Chris- 
 tian anarchist of the Tolstoi sort, or even the 
 Jeffersonian individualist, should work upon a 
 social programme which would take power out 
 of the hands of the few and put it into the 
 hands of the many. The man who believes only 
 in the free and unrestricted play of individual- 
 ity, who believes that the Golden Rule is the
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 225 
 
 natural law which men would practise if they 
 were free, who believes that governments and 
 institutions of force have no natural or ethical 
 right to be, even he ought to see that the only- 
 way into the freedom he seeks is through com- 
 pleting as quickly as possible the experience 
 through which mankind is now passing. For 
 we cannot escape by reversion ; we cannot go 
 back on history ; we cannot prevent the blos- 
 soming of the world. 
 
 I know that what I have been saying is not 
 likely to please anybody, at first. But I know, 
 too, that while we each go our halting and 
 feeble ways of reform, the bulk of the popula- 
 tion of Christendom is being reduced to helpless 
 economic serfdom. While we stand bewildered 
 and disputing, fetters of steel are being forged 
 for every citizen of this nation — fetters that, if 
 not broken soon, will bind our children's chil- 
 dren, to be broken at last by the mortal agony, 
 the bleeding and the dying, of their children. 
 While we argue about what is to be done, there 
 is no question as to what is being done by those 
 who are quickly enslaving the nation ; who are 
 gathering the whole people as grist for the mo- 
 nopolist mill. While we reformers wait to con- 
 vince each other, and the people wait as sheep 
 for the politicians to lead to economic slaughter,
 
 226 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 the legislative, executive, and judicial functions 
 of both National and State governments, with 
 the Constitution and the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence thrown in, are being used to destroy 
 what political and economic independence re- 
 mains, so that our power to even peacefully 
 revolt will soon be gone with our liberties. 
 
 We may well consider, at this point, the 
 power of the nearly three billions of capital 
 organized in combinations, in open defiance of 
 law. If the great steel trust, which has lately 
 been capitalized at $200,000,000, fulfils the 
 possibilities of its charter, that one monopoly 
 alone can wipe private industry and ownership 
 from the face of the earth. It has been granted 
 powers that will enable it, inside of ten years, 
 to destroy the last vestige of the middle-class. 
 In less time than that, it can have the whole 
 wage-earning population so helpless, its unions 
 and organizations so throttled, that the slave 
 before the civil war was an economic freeman 
 in comparison. According to The Banking 
 Law Journal of September, 1898, the articles 
 of incorporation of this trust, which was organ- 
 ized " under the guidance and direction of Mr. 
 J. Pierpont Morgan," whose banking-house is 
 to " finance the new company," " state that the 
 objects of the company are to engage in mining,
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 227 
 
 manufacturing ; the transportation of merchan- 
 dise and passengers on land and water ; building 
 vessels, boats, railroads, engines, cars, wharves, 
 and docks; operating and maintaining railroads 
 (outside of New Jersey), steamship lines, and 
 other lines of transportation ; the buying, im- 
 proving, and selling of lands ; the manufacture, 
 purchase, acquiring, holding, owning, mortga- 
 ging, selling, transferring, or otherwise disposing 
 of, investing, trading or dealing in or with 
 goods, wares, merchandise, and property of every 
 description ; the acquiring and undertaking of 
 all or any part of the business assets and liabil- 
 ities of any person, firm, association, or corpora- 
 tion, and the making and performing contracts 
 of every kind; the holding, purchasing, mort- 
 gaging, leasing, and conveying of real and per- 
 sonal property in any State or Territory of the 
 United States, and in any foreign country or 
 place, and in carrying on any other business in 
 connection therewith. The board of directors 
 is authorized to increase its number without 
 consent of the stockholders, and to make, alter, 
 amend, or rescind the by-laws, to fix the amount 
 of the company's working capital, and to exe- 
 cute mortgages and liens on the property of 
 the corporation ; but there shall be no sale of 
 ail the property except by a vote of two-thirds
 
 228 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 of the directors. The directors may, by major- 
 ity vote, appoint three or more of their number 
 to be an executive committee, with the full 
 powers of the board, to manage the company's 
 business. They shall also determine whether, 
 and at what times and places, and under what 
 conditions, the books of the corporation shall 
 be open to the inspection of the stockholders ; 
 and no stockholder shall have power to inspect 
 the books or accounts except as authorized by 
 statute, by determination of the directors or 
 in accordance with the terms of a resolution 
 adopted at a meeting of the stockholders." 
 The article concludes with warning those per- 
 sons who see only iniquity in the New Jersey 
 laws which permit the incorporation of such 
 trusts that they "are but gnawing a file." In 
 fine, here is a trust which deliberately proposes, 
 by sheer economic might, to centralize the in- 
 dustry of the nation in a single great economic 
 despotism ; that deliberately plans to reduce 
 labor to complete economic subjection ; that 
 already practically owns the machinery of gov- 
 ernment as literally as you own the coat on your 
 back. An authoritative English financial jour- 
 nal, The Investors' Review > reports an eminent 
 American citizen and politician, who is also 
 prominent in the great steel organization, as
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 229 
 
 saying: "We have the mines and the mills, 
 and the railroads connecting them, and the 
 shipping facilities, and many subsidiary enter- 
 prises ; and we are going to manufacture our 
 steel with economies that will make it cheaper 
 than before, and cheaper than it is anywhere 
 else in the world. But we are going to raise 
 the price. In the past we have had to make 
 concessions to our workingmen. As long as 
 the mills were competitors, when one gave way 
 as to hours or wages the others had to do the 
 same. But there is an end to all that sort of 
 thing now." And this subjection of the wage- 
 earner comes at a time when, according to the 
 Engineering and Mining Journal oi Oct. 8, 1898, 
 the average annual earnings of miners in the 
 United States range from $192 in Ohio to $277 
 in West Virginia, while the annual earnings of 
 miners in Germany range from $180 to $282. 
 " In addition to this," says the Journal, which 
 is an organ and friend of the existing order of 
 things, " the German miner is insured against 
 sickness and accident, and is provided a small 
 pension when old age disables him. A small 
 deduction is made from his wages for the insu- 
 rance fund, but that charge is not included in 
 the average wages given. Moreover, the miner 
 in West Virginia and some other States draws
 
 230 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 most of his necessaries from the companies' 
 stores, and it is notorious that many officials 
 depend upon these stores for any margin of 
 profit they may realize in their business. So 
 far as living expenses go, the advantage is with 
 the German. It costs less to live there than it 
 does here." 
 
 The organizers of the steel trust are already 
 asking the public precisely what I am asking 
 you : what do you propose to do about it ? 
 " How long will the American people tolerate 
 this sort of tyranny ? " asks the Chicago Tri- 
 bune, in a recent editorial, which declares " this 
 centralizing of capital" to be "the most impor- 
 tant and the most menacing of all the industrial 
 movements of the present clay." "The sowing 
 is tremendous," continues the editorial, "and 
 the reaping is likely to be momentous and dis- 
 astrous." "Before long," it says, "there will 
 be a savage fight between the plain citizens, 
 irrespective of party, and these gormandizing, 
 law-defying trust vultures. The present state 
 of things cannot last indefinitely in a free re- 
 public ; " for "consumers are absolutely at the 
 mercy of a power that has set itself up to be 
 greater than the people and stronger than the 
 government." 
 
 If we reformers can find no basis of agree-
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 23 1 
 
 ment as to what is to be done, while the indus- 
 try and the moral well-being of the entire nation 
 are massacred by a single trust, then Nero fid- 
 dling while Rome burned is a paragon of inno- 
 cence in comparison with ourselves. If we can 
 do nothing to save the people unless we can 
 save them within the terms of our own particu- 
 lar programmes, or until some day of dreadful 
 judgment forces us together, then the fury of 
 that reckoning may tear all our programmes to 
 shreds, and the people be saved by fire and by 
 suffering unspeakable, because the leaders were 
 too blinded by self-will to see the day of their op- 
 portunity. "My mind," says John Woolman, 
 " is led to consider the purity of the Divine Be- 
 ing, and the justice of his judgments ; and herein 
 my soul is covered with awfulness." " Many 
 slaves on this continent are oppressed," he says, 
 " and their cries have entered into the ears of 
 the Most High. Such are the purity and cer- 
 tainty of his judgments, that he cannot be par- 
 tial in our favor. In infinite love and goodness 
 he hath opened our understandings from one to 
 another, concerning our duty towards this peo- 
 ple ; and it is not a time for delay. Should we 
 now be sensible of what he requires of us, and 
 through a respect to the private interest of some 
 persons, or through a regard to some friendships
 
 232 . BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 which do not stand upon an immutable founda- 
 tion, neglect to do our duty in firmness and 
 constancy, still waiting for some extraordinary 
 means to bring about their deliverance, God 
 may by terrible things in righteousness answer 
 us in this matter." 
 
 But there is an infinitely more important 
 reason for considering this centralization of 
 economic power than the tyranny and wrong it 
 presents ; we need to discern whether or not it 
 discloses a method and basis for economic jus- 
 tice and industrial liberty. It is the Christian 
 and historic method to always look within the 
 problem for its solution ; to find the ways and 
 means of redemption in the conditions and men 
 that need redeeming. We must look for our 
 revelation of God in human life, and seek our 
 ideals in the facts and forces in which we and 
 our times are caught. Tyranny builds for 
 freedom without knowing it, and the worst is 
 but the inverted best. Every historic wrong 
 has carried in it the means of its own righting, 
 and the old is always pregnant with the new. 
 Within every evil order or exhausted system 
 may be discerned the outlines of the order or 
 system that is good. Christianity followed the 
 lines of organization drawn by Greek democ- 
 racies, and took the Roman universality of the
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 233 
 
 Caesars for its perspective of spiritual conquest 
 and universal brotherhood. By this method, 
 we may see that our combinations of capital, 
 or trusts, are not merely matters for fear ; we 
 may behold them as revelations of the safety 
 and liberty that are from God. Centralization 
 and unification seem to be the providential 
 decree which has gone through all the world. 
 We can no more withstand it than we can 
 restrain the stars from pursuing their courses. 
 Our part is to co-operate with this manifest 
 revelation ; to see to it that the centralization 
 of production and distribution, as well as of all 
 things else, is by and for the people, who are 
 the sole lawful owners of the earth's resources, 
 and who alone can safely wield the power that 
 springs from their possession and usage. In 
 spite of their monstrous purposes, the monopo- 
 lists are the providentially bad builders of a 
 finally good civilization, which the people are 
 too stupid, indolent, and selfish to build for 
 themselves. As Laurence Gronlund has said, 
 " Providence is actually under our very eyes 
 making human greed and lust of power forge 
 weapons against themselves, train men in co- 
 operation and organization, and, indeed, con- 
 struct the whole new social order, so that all 
 that will be left to do is to knock down the 
 scaffolding."
 
 234 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Yes, in their positive and important aspect, 
 our combinations of capital are revelations of 
 God and his purposes ; and in them we may- 
 discern the outline and goal of future social 
 evolution. If we the people have not the 
 moral gumption and social foresight to organize 
 the industries of the nation for our common 
 good, let the Federal Steel Company do it for 
 us. We may smartly say that we will dismiss 
 the trust, when it has done for us in a terrible 
 way what we ought to have nobly done for our- 
 selves. But if, through our failure to co-oper- 
 ate with each other in the pursuit of social 
 good, we fail to co-operate with the providential 
 decree writ large in our industrial conditions 
 and tendencies, so that the glorious purposes 
 of God shall have to be wrought out for us by 
 the hands of the enemies of those purposes, 
 then unreckonable suffering is the price we will 
 have to pay for social obedience and sanity ; 
 and the trust builders will not be dismissed 
 until we have paid the uttermost farthing. 
 
 But there is still time for a better way ; for 
 what the glorified woman, to whom this hall is 
 a memorial, calls "the frictionless way." "I 
 would take," she says, " not by force, but by 
 the slow progress of lawful acquisition through 
 better legislation as the outcome of a wiser bal-
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 235 
 
 lot in the hands of men and women, the entire 
 plan that we call civilization, all that has been 
 achieved on this continent in the four hundred 
 years since Columbus wended his way hither, 
 and make it the common property of all the 
 people, .requiring all to work enough with their 
 hands to give the finest physical development, 
 but not enough to become burdensome in any 
 case, and permitting all to share the advan- 
 tages of education and refinement. I believe 
 this to be perfectly practicable." This is the 
 order, she concludes, which will eliminate " the 
 motives for a selfish life," and enact " into our 
 every day living the ethics of Christ's gospel." 
 
 The co-operation and method by which this 
 may be done is not compromise, but democracy 
 and brotherhood in service. It is the divine 
 opportunism by which all evolution proceeds; 
 by which God makes all things work together 
 for good to those who love the good. I do not 
 compromise my ideal by availing myself of 
 every step and agency by which that ideal can 
 be realized ; by co-operating with every man or 
 movement or experience that I can make to 
 carry my ideal the least part of its way ; by giv- 
 ing joyous sympathy and help to every man 
 or movement or ideal seeking to emancipate or 
 renew human life.
 
 236 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 This divine opportunism may often lead us 
 into associations we do not like, and join us to 
 movements and men that are judged scandal- 
 ously disreputable. It cannot be otherwise, if 
 we would look truth in the face from day to day, 
 and walk fearless and hand in hand with God's 
 kind of progress. For truth is always showing 
 up just where we do not want to see it, and the 
 best things that come to us are never booked 
 in our contracts with our ideals. Christ is al- 
 ways appearing in the wrong quarter ; he com- 
 promises us by coming from among the mongrel 
 folk of Nazareth, when he ought to have come 
 out of Jerusalem, clothed with the authority of 
 the church, and arrayed in the glory of a conquer- 
 ing state. He comes as an unlettered laborer 
 with his hands, speaking the rude and familiar 
 accents of the common people, when we ex- 
 pected him from the imposing ignorance of the 
 schools. He comes eating and drinking with 
 publicans and sinners, fraternizing with the mob 
 and the discontented, chivalrously receiving the 
 affection of outlawed women, when we looked 
 for him among our "good citizens." He calls 
 us to repentance and judgment in socialist plat- 
 forms, or in the revival meetings of the single- 
 taxers, or by the dread notes of the anarchist, 
 when we listened for him in the churches. He
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 2$J 
 
 comes in clouds of social threat and storm, 
 when we supposed him to be upholding the 
 pillars of the existing order. He proclaims the 
 peace of good-will among men in the material- 
 istic terms of the social democracy of Germany, 
 while the churches of the empire atheistically 
 celebrate in his name the triumphs of material- 
 istic force. This eternally embarrassing habit 
 which truth has of appearing in disreputable 
 clothes and company will have to be reckoned 
 with, if we wish to keep company with truth, 
 and follow its leadership. It is God's test of 
 our own spiritual reality; for it judges whether 
 the love of self or the love of our brothers be 
 the motivity in which we live. When we are 
 ashamed of any fellowship into which truth 
 leads us, we are false to both man and the truth. 
 "The most unblemished virtue," says Edward 
 Carpenter, " erected into a barrier between 
 one's self and a suffering brother or sister — 
 the whitest marble image, howsoever lovely, set 
 up in the Holy Place of the Temple of Man, 
 where the spirit alone should dwell — becomes 
 blasphemy and a pollution." It is Browning 
 who says : — 
 
 "Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great, 
 Our time so brief, 'tis clear if we refuse 
 The means so limited, the tools so rude
 
 238 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 To execute our purpose, life will fleet, 
 
 And we shall fade, and leave our task undone. 
 
 We will be wise in time : what though our work 
 
 Be fashioned in despite of their ill-service, 
 
 Be crippled every way? 'Twere little praise 
 
 Did full resources wait on our good-will 
 
 At every turn. Let all be as it is." 
 
 Again, this divine opportunism will not let 
 us wait until we can see whither the move- 
 ments we join may lead us. Revelations of 
 larger truth wait upon our obedience to the 
 truth we know, in whatever form or disfigure- 
 ment it comes to us. Better modes and ideals 
 of righteousness are disclosed when we get into 
 the thick of the crude and imperfect move- 
 ments for righteousness already on their way. 
 The heavens opened to Jesus, and showed him 
 what to do, when he joined the multitude gath- 
 ered about the vehement skin-clad prophet by 
 the Jordan. " One never mounts so high," 
 Cromwell used to say, " as when one knows not 
 whither one is going." All progress is led by 
 the moral adventure of the faith that sets out 
 not knowing whither it goes. Nothing is more 
 misleading and dangerous than the demand that 
 we keep silent about social wrong, and hush 
 our appeals for social right, until we can tell 
 every man what to do, and state just how the 
 better social country we seek is to be reached.
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 239 
 
 We can pronounce the doom of the old order 
 and herald the new, as we are divinely commis- 
 sioned to do, long before we understand what 
 the new order is to be, or by what steps it is to 
 come. It was this that John the Baptist did, 
 and that all the prophets who have spoken 
 Christ's larger comings since have done. 
 
 Let us not be betrayed by the demand of the 
 scribes that we wait for their " clear thinking," 
 and that we act with their "moderation." We 
 must keep a divine poise, of course, and be 
 serene withal, but with a serenity shot through 
 with the fires of an exalted enthusiasm for the 
 justice of love, and the liberty thereof. "A 
 deep-seated immorality does in fact lie at the 
 root of the theory and system of the moderates," 
 says Mazzini ; for they constantly sacrifice " the 
 eternally true " " to the wretched reality of the 
 passing day." It is not primarily the sort of 
 moderation and clear thinking for which the 
 scientific and prudent call, but high and holy 
 passion that teaches and changes the world. 
 The light in which progress finds its ascending 
 way always shines from the white heat of spirit- 
 ual passion, without which, says Hegel, "we 
 may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the 
 world has been accomplished." The economic 
 despotism enthroning itself over the people will
 
 24O BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 not be overcome by the so-called clear thinking 
 of the schools, but by the rich social feeling, the 
 exultant faith, of the friends of Jesus who love 
 not their own life unto death. 
 
 Nor can the Christian opportunist wait until 
 he is satisfied with his own spiritual state, before 
 he joins himself to movements for the deliver- 
 ance of the people. It is true that the value of 
 the sacrifice we make in service depends upon 
 the purity of our own lives and motives. They 
 who wage the war of love against social wrong 
 should be men of clean hands and pure hearts ; 
 men whose souls are not lifted up unto vanity, 
 and who are not betrayed by self-deceit. They 
 who ride forth against the economic infidel 
 should be knights of the Holy Grail indeed ; 
 knights who have themselves drunk deeply of 
 Christ's cup, and who bear that cup to the 
 thirsting peoples; knights with souls made 
 white by selfless love, every blemish washed 
 away in the blood of the Lamb ; knights with 
 shields of stainless spiritual honor, with the 
 peace of good-will toward all men in their 
 hearts, with blessings for those who curse them, 
 and with gifts of life for those who would visit 
 them with death. But it is only through suf- 
 fering in the service of our brethren, after all, 
 through the blood and dust of the human strug-
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 24I 
 
 gle, through descending into the communal 
 pain and shame, that the individual soul finds 
 the purification and disentanglement for which 
 it yearns. " If we waited to do any good act," 
 says Dr. John Bascom, " until our motives and 
 feelings were all irreproachable, we should 
 hardly make a beginning." Broken and shame- 
 ful as our lives are in our own eyes, we may yet 
 count that the Father loveth us as we lay down 
 our lives for the sheep. 
 
 And now let me speak for myself. Since 
 this lecture course began, many of you have 
 been trying to classify me, either among those 
 who are of Karl Marx, or of Henry George, or 
 of Leo Tolstoi, or of some other social or reli- 
 gious initiator ; and I have steadily refused to 
 be classified. Perhaps some of you may have 
 seen why. I object to being called a socialist, 
 not because socialism is too radical, but because 
 it is too wholly conservative ; I can see in so- 
 cialism at best but a transition method and 
 period, a new wilderness journey and discipline, 
 on the way to liberty. I object to your looking 
 for me in the single-tax camp, not because that 
 camp is too far in the social advance, but be- 
 cause it occupies no more than the place of a 
 surveying or engineering corps ; when the land 
 is once free, and the depraved system of force,
 
 242 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 fraud, and perjury which we call taxation is re- 
 moved, with the parasitical governmental func- 
 tions which the system entails, we have then 
 merely cleared the ground for the social prob- 
 lem ; the question of human relations and 
 destiny remains to be answered, and to this 
 Mr. George would agree. I object to being 
 named with those who confess their faith in 
 the Christian anarchism of the lofty Russian 
 prophet, not because his programme is extreme 
 in the direction of the future, but because it 
 seems to me very reactionary. Rudely and in- 
 adequately as I interpret him, I prefer to stand 
 before you simply as an interpreter of Jesus, 
 as an advocate of his ideal of human relations. 
 The world is not yet ready for an economy of 
 society that shall incarnate the principles of 
 his teachings. Men are not yet sufficiently 
 emancipated from fear, from faith in evil and 
 material force, to trust the law and liberty of 
 love. But we will come to it at last, this justice 
 of love, perhaps after we have tried the failure 
 of everything else to bring forth the social 
 rest of a strifeless progress. And when Jesus' 
 programme of life and relations is once adopted, 
 you will find that, in comparison with him, 
 Thomas More, John James Rousseau, Karl 
 Marx, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and all
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 243 
 
 the rest, are but rude and conservative pioneers 
 on the social frontier. Judged by the elemen- 
 tal principles of being which Jesus brought to 
 light, the most of what you call civilization i? 
 but an immense negation, a wasteful though 
 necessary tragedy of experience, to pass away 
 when the soul of man awakes to the freedom 
 and sanity of love. Judged by these principles, 
 your governments and institutions of force are 
 but a scourge for the moment, coming out of 
 the sin of dividing the gifts of nature into mine 
 and thine, and having no ethical or final right to 
 be ; they are but travesties, but hideous and law- 
 less outlines, of the inward government or spirit- 
 ual order slowly emerging from them. When 
 the law of love has subdued all men and things 
 unto itself, there will be nothing of what you 
 call economics, for there will be neither mine 
 nor thine, nor any more question of how much 
 one shall have above another than there is 
 question of what price to put upon the sunlight, 
 or of how to divide the air we breathe between 
 us ; there will be neither wages nor profit, nor 
 will anything be bought or sold, but every man 
 will freely have according to his needs and 
 power to use, and will rejoice to make his life 
 a function of the common life and good, while 
 the reward of the man who serves best will be
 
 244 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 the capacity to serve still better. I believe 
 that this ideal of life, which Jesus has lifted 
 into eternal view, which is the ideal of all the 
 dreamers or creators of the ages, is not only 
 practicable and predestined to be realized ; I 
 believe that any other ideal is impracticable, 
 and is a collision with human destiny and with 
 God. This ideal is not only no mere dream, but 
 the lack of it makes the whole of human history 
 and experience a monstrous dream of the night. 
 Following this ideal as our social vision, we 
 shall find ourselves at last in the universal com- 
 munism and liberty which are the outcome of 
 obedience to the law of love. With this con- 
 fession of faith therefore, with Christ's kingdom 
 of heaven as the only social goal I can see, I 
 am yet ready to follow any man, or to work 
 with any programme, or to march in any camp, 
 that will take but the blindest single step to- 
 wards making way for the organizing and evolv- 
 ing power of the peace of good-will among 
 men. 
 
 And if you citizens here gathered this noon- 
 tide are really in earnest about doing something 
 for social righteousness, if it is clear to you that 
 liberty and justice are being overthrown by eco- 
 nomic wrong, if some of you wish to glorify 
 Christ in human facts and conditions, you can
 
 INDUSTRIAL FACTS, SOCIAL IDEALS. 245 
 
 begin by uniting to wrest this city from the 
 hands of its masters, and by giving it back to 
 the people to whom it belongs. You can take 
 this wilderness of ruin and greed, this habita- 
 tion of every conceivable industrial and political 
 monstrosity, and make the people the lords of 
 its despoiled lands and highways, so that the 
 wilderness shall blossom into a municipal and 
 spiritual commonwealth, and the streets rejoice 
 in the traffic and song of the plenty of justice. 
 There is enough of God and manhood left in 
 you, enough of common spiritual reserve, to 
 co-operate to this end if you will. And when 
 you have taken this initiative, you will find a 
 larger and still more uniting programme rising 
 out of your co-operation and experience, to lead 
 you as a flaming ideal by day, and as a vision 
 of God by night.
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 
 
 Originally given, in substance, as an address before the religious 
 
 societies of Harvard University, Nov. 19, 1S95, and 
 
 afterward published in " The Christian 
 
 World Pulpit" London.
 
 When you see a man dragged to prison or to death, do not 
 hasten to say he is a bad man, who has committed a crime against 
 his brother. 
 
 For perhaps he is a good man who has tried to serve his brothers, 
 and who is punished by their oppressors. 
 
 When you see a people loaded with irons and given over to the 
 executioner, do not hasten to say that is a turbulent people seeking 
 to trouble the peace of the earth. 
 
 For perchance it is a martyr people dying for the human race. 
 
 Eighteen centuries ago, in an eastern town, the pontiffs and the 
 kings of that day nailed upon a cross, after having beaten him, a 
 rebel, a blasphemer, as they called him. 
 
 On the day of his death hell trembled, but there was joy in 
 heaven. 
 
 For the blood of the just had redeemed the world." — Lamennais.
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 
 
 I have glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished the work 
 thou gavest me to do. — John xvii. 4. 
 
 This was said of himself by one about to be 
 nailed upon a criminal's cross. His life would 
 soon be going out in what appeared to be 
 wretched failure, with endless disgrace. In a 
 few swift hours, Jesus was dying as an out- 
 law. This was the strange climax of the most 
 daring moral adventure, with the purest and 
 largest purpose, ever undertaken by human 
 faith. 
 
 Jesus was brought to his death by those ac- 
 counted the best and wisest of their day ; by 
 the religious teachers, and the prudent men of 
 the state. To the "judicious" and "conserva- 
 tively progressive," to men of "reasonable 
 minds " and " wise methods," his denuncia- 
 tions of the order of things then existing were 
 exaggerated and outrageous beyond endurance. 
 His manner of life was not respectable; in fact, 
 249
 
 250 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 to the religious and social proprieties, his con- 
 duct was scandalous. The most disreputable 
 elements of society, the worthless and always 
 discontented, the fanatical and revolutionary, 
 vagabonds and publicans, gathered about him 
 as their leader. He came to be regarded as 
 the enemy of religion and government, of faith 
 and morals. His words were taken as inviting 
 the rabble or the mob to the overthrow of all 
 that was sacred. He respected not conserva- 
 tive reasonings nor official positions ; neither 
 had he regard for organized interests or threats. 
 It seemed that nothing was safe so long as 
 Jesus was left alive ; his presence was an in- 
 creasing danger to both temple and nation ; 
 from the standpoint of both patriotism and rec- 
 ognized religion, this man had to be made to 
 die. While the Romans consented to his death 
 that they might be rid of an over-religious 
 troubler and fanatic, the leading Jews de- 
 manded his crucifixion for blasphemy and trea- 
 son. To the political and religious authorities 
 his words had outraged, this death of shame 
 seemed to be the fit ending of Jesus' life. They 
 nervously thought themselves well done with 
 the man, with their interests conserved and 
 saved. 
 
 If we should measure the life of Jesus by
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 25 I 
 
 the notions of failure and success that still 
 prevail, in both church and society, it would 
 prove to have been a failure from beginning to 
 end, mistaken to the point of moral insanity. 
 He divided households ; he drew people away 
 from their authorized teachers ; he ruthlessly 
 beat clown the accepted religion of the day 
 as an intolerable hypocrisy. He built no 
 temples and made no creeds. He taught no 
 system of theology and organized no schemes 
 of work. He was betrayed by one disciple, 
 denied by another ; in the crisis of his seizure, 
 he was forsaken by them all. His beloved na- 
 tion, for which he conceived a universal mis- 
 sion, met his ardent patriotism with deadly 
 rejection. His life was spent among the poor 
 and wretched, the outcast and despised, the 
 diseased and vicious ; and he expressed larger 
 hopes for the vile and ignorant than for strict 
 observers of religious ordinances. He had to 
 go among sinners to get a following ; the reli- 
 gious would have none of him. He had small 
 entrance to what we call the " better classes " 
 of society. He was, says Dr. Young, in "The 
 Christ of History," "without a single complete 
 example of success while he lived." 
 
 When he came from the tomb, to collect, 
 commission, and inspire his disciples, they were
 
 252 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 few in number. He plainly told them that 
 their mission would render them worthless, re- 
 ligious and social outlaws in authoritative opin- 
 ion. The will of their Lord was to bring the 
 disciples into unending conflict with the will 
 of the world, causing them to be hated of all 
 men and persecuted by all institutions. 
 
 Withal, Jesus was the most wholly and in- 
 tensely human of men ; no other man was ever 
 so finely responsive to every influence. He felt 
 that horror of publicity which every nobly sen- 
 sitive spirit feels ; only his exalted interest in 
 his glorious undertaking, so intense as to make 
 him forgetful of himself, enabled him to endure 
 the public gaze and discussion, in which his 
 offered life was a spectacle to the curious, an 
 opportunity to the religious debaters, an affront 
 to the official classes in church and state. As 
 none of us can, he suffered the sorrow of soul, 
 the helpless ache of heart, which comes with the 
 absence of affectionate and intelligent fellow- 
 ship with one's deepest life. One shrinks from 
 even a momentary look into the holy pain of the 
 enforced loneliness that was his — a loneliness 
 most keen when thronged by the multitudes. 
 We cannot read the Gospels sympathetically 
 without seeing how often and patiently, how 
 eagerly and expectantly, he tried to make him-
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 253 
 
 self understood ; and did ever man so completely 
 fail ? He was always seeking and waiting for 
 the moment when he could take his near disci- 
 ples into his full confidence, which he was un- 
 able to do, even after the resurrection. His 
 soul felt about for friends who could understand, 
 and perhaps help him to understand, his visions 
 of his own life, and of the world life, which he 
 must often have been tempted to doubt. Some 
 of his appeals to his disciples reveal his great 
 and increasing hunger for sympathy with his 
 strangely commissioned life ; for a comprehen- 
 sion of his purpose and work, as, under the 
 deepening and glorious shadow of the cross, he 
 moved towards his destiny, matchless alike in 
 suffering and in service. 
 
 Yet the life of Jesus was the most joyous 
 ever lived among men. Unto the cross and 
 even upon it, through all his measureless sor- 
 rows, he was the glad child of the universe. 
 Compared to others, his life was a song of joy. 
 His was the one free spirit, the gladdest heart, 
 that has ever rejoiced our world which sin has 
 troubled awhile. No one else ever so delighted 
 in the spirit of nature, so rejoiced in the nature 
 of spirit, so enjoyed the fulness of life, to which 
 he opened his soul as the flower opens to the 
 sun. He sensed the sweetness of all life's ele-
 
 254 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 merits, heard the music of its forces, and saw 
 the beauty and concord of its movements. He 
 had no concern for his reputation, no anxiety 
 for his individual future, but trusted himself to 
 the Father's keeping as unquestioningly as the 
 babe rests in its mother's arms. His Father's 
 will was the peace of his soul and the power of 
 his work, so that he went about doing good with 
 the expectant eagerness of a child at play. His 
 deeds were done as the sun shines, and his 
 words spoken as the rain falls. He was free 
 from all care of self, that he might give his life 
 to be meat and drink to the impoverished lives 
 of his brothers. In his character were united 
 the passion of a supreme sympathy for man 
 with the peace of a faultless faith in God. Be- 
 fore him was set the joy of perfect obedience 
 toward God and perfect sacrifice in the service 
 of man — the joy that swallows alike all joys 
 and sorrows. 
 
 The life of Jesus is thus a perfect synthesis 
 of human experience. He became in all things 
 like unto his brethren ; not some things. He 
 was the incarnation of, as well as in, the com- 
 mon life. He accepted all the limitations of our 
 humanity, and linked himself with the widest hu- 
 man relationships. He was tried by our temp- 
 tations, and learned obedience by our sufferings.
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 255 
 
 He submitted to every kind of injustice, and 
 died the most desolate of deaths. He had to 
 conquer doubts that pressed in upon him from 
 without, and walk by faith, as we must walk. 
 In solitary prayer, he had to dedicate himself 
 over and over again, sustaining himself only 
 through continuous consecrations, in order to 
 bring himself into unshrinking obedience to the 
 Father's will. Three times he prayed, in the 
 garden, for the mysterious cup of the world's 
 woe to pass from him, before he arose serene 
 and strong to meet his betrayer and pass on to 
 his crucifixion. Day by day he had to grow 
 to the cross ; grow in the knowledge of his 
 Father's will, as all must grow. The Gospels 
 make it clear that he saw his way to the cross 
 step by step. We can see that his conception 
 of his mission enlarged, and his wisdom deep- 
 ened, with each new experience. There came 
 no time when faith was not the spring of his 
 action. There were things he did not know. 
 He was amazed at the hardness of human 
 hearts, and found it hard to understand the 
 unbelief of his nation. He grieved over the 
 conduct of his disciples, and marvelled at the 
 slowness of their spiritual growth. It is evi- 
 dent that he had, in the early part of his min- 
 istry, expectations of the conversion of the
 
 256 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 Jews — expectations which were not realized, 
 to his inexpressible sorrow and disappointment. 
 Though his faith in the triumph of righteous- 
 ness endured to the end, while his belief in the 
 divine sonship of man was always deepening, 
 and his vision of truth, with his power to love, 
 continually increasing, the sin and shame of 
 the world yet broke his heart before his work 
 was done. 
 
 It is the human reality of Jesus' experiences 
 that is slowly, yet more swiftly than we see, 
 winning for him the world's heart and confi- 
 dence. The world is coming to believe in 
 Jesus as the Christ of God, because it believes 
 in him as a man. His love and faith toward 
 man are the witnesses that God was in him. 
 Because he came to his mission with the 
 familiar garb and language of the people, a 
 peasant born and bred, a carpenter and a car- 
 penter's son, brave and joyous under the heavi- 
 est burdens, a partaker of the common lot and a 
 sharer of the common life, through and through 
 a man, we therefore believe in him as the Son 
 of God. 
 
 Had Jesus' experiences been different, es- 
 caping any of the trials and moral perplexities 
 to which we are subject, he could not have been 
 the Saviour of man ; his life would not have
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 257 
 
 been a fulfilment of our humanity. If his di- 
 vinity had been essentially different from the 
 divine nature and development of other men, 
 his life would not have been the light of human 
 life. 
 
 Jesus' nature thus being whole, and his life 
 perfectly poised in love, it was the necessity of 
 his being that he should either declare open 
 and endless war against organized wrong, or 
 else exhaust his possibilities in a service that 
 would prove a universal spiritual revelation and 
 attraction. Both his faith and his reason would 
 have been left without foundation, had he long 
 sought any middle course between directest an- 
 tagonism and fullest sacrifice. It was his only 
 possible self-expression that he should extermi- 
 nate all the forms and structures of evil, sweep- 
 ing with destruction the religious institutions 
 and their political hypocrisies and tyrannies, or 
 else make the completest sacrifice by which the 
 law of love might be so redemptively drama- 
 tized in human life as to at last draw all men 
 unto that law. 
 
 There are indications that Jesus met, in temp- 
 tations beyond the power of our sympathy to 
 interpret, the question of revolution. Civiliza- 
 tion was a Roman dominion, making one vast, 
 splendid, slave-pen of the earth, with suicide
 
 258 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 the only escape for fettered, crushed, and de- 
 spairing lives. Roman virtues had been terri- 
 ble. But when these virtues were dissolving in 
 still more terrible vices, the earth became the 
 arena of unmitigated suffering, seeming like 
 the creation of devils. Could anything prevail 
 against this exhausted system, save the attack 
 of forces of its own kind — forces it could un- 
 derstand ? Then there was the Jewish church, 
 in which Jesus was born, which he never left, 
 in which he was crucified. This church had 
 become, perhaps not relatively more morally cor- 
 rupt than ours, but a mere professional and offi- 
 cial religion. Its teachers strained at gnats of 
 traditional differences, and swallowed camels of 
 social iniquity, laden with all manner of crimes 
 against the nation. The church made merchan- 
 dise of the truth, dealing out past inspirations 
 as religious wares, while it was always rejecting 
 the God of the living. It had thus come to 
 stand for religiousness rather than righteous- 
 ness, and had become an organized misrepre- 
 sentation of God, making God seem a taskmaster 
 and tyrant like unto the tyrants over the peo- 
 ple. Could anything prevail against this apos- 
 tate church, which had become the friend of 
 oppressors and the mere patron of the op- 
 pressed, save fire and sword ? How could God
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 259 
 
 get at the world through such misery in society 
 and tyranny in state, through such moral athe- 
 ism in organized religion, save in the revolution 
 of terrific and destructive forces ? Could not a 
 strong and intense character, with wide com- 
 prehension and sympathy, in almost any corner 
 of the earth, gather independent spirits about 
 him, sufficient in numbers and in politico-reli- 
 gious zeal, to overthrow both the religious des- 
 potism of the Jewish church and the political 
 despotism of the Roman state, and thus clear 
 the way for God to manifest himself to the peo- 
 ple as their deliverer, and make them his people ? 
 The people, too, would accept with universal 
 acclamation and joy the advent and progress 
 of such a deliverance. And history has never 
 dreamed of such a revolutionist as Jesus would 
 have been, had he taken the sword. 
 
 But Jesus saw in Hebrew history and in na- 
 ture, working out the evolution of human life 
 in a holy society, an eternal force which man 
 had not yet recognized. Perhaps after years 
 of prayer and noble waiting, his brooding 
 thought perceived love to be the real construc- 
 tive force operating in the world of man, and 
 throughout the universe of God. In spite of 
 the failures and expediencies of unfaith, and by 
 the use of them, the love that was in God was
 
 260 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 evolving in man the heavenly moral kingdom. 
 Jesus saw that the kingdom of heaven, which 
 he felt called to reveal and realize on the earth, 
 could be nothing else than the organization of 
 human life in the freedom of perfect love. The 
 establishment of a new civilization, upon what 
 would be merely a new religion, through the 
 power of an appeal to forces the world could 
 then understand, in the place of the order then 
 existing and cursing the world, would have been 
 the failure of the kingdom of God, a failure of 
 the freedom for which man was created. Even 
 if he could have scourged hypocrisy and tyranny 
 to a judgment so terrible that they could never 
 again rise in the old organized religious and 
 political forms, he saw that some time the begin- 
 ning had to be made, never to be taken back, 
 by which human life would be consciously com- 
 mitted to love, with its redeeming and perfect- 
 ing law of sacrifice. 
 
 But, though God would give salvation through 
 the spirit and power of love, the world would 
 have salvation through the power of might. It 
 was thus that by no other than a life of entire 
 mortal failure, could Jesus accomplish his work 
 in perfect oneness with the will of God, and 
 glorify God as our Father. The will of God 
 and the will of the world were squarely antag-
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 26 1 
 
 onistic ; in Jesus they met in mortal combat. 
 The attempt to make his life a fulfilment of 
 both the will of the world and the will of God 
 was the temptation which Jesus met at the be- 
 ginning of his ministry, alone in the wilderness, 
 and conquered in the faith that he was the Son 
 of God. He must lose the world, and suffer 
 death at its hands, before he could save it ; he 
 must fail in the eyes of the world, or the pur- 
 pose of God in man would fail. He saw that 
 the failure of righteousness in conflict with 
 wrong is really the overthrow of wrong ; that 
 the inheritance of the earth by the meek is both 
 the natural law and the manifest fact which the 
 unbelief of power does not see. Between the 
 contending passions of an overturning indigna- 
 tion against wrong, and a saving love for the 
 wronged and the wrong-doer, his spirit seems 
 to have often been troubled and torn. Through 
 faith and vision, through experience and suffer- 
 ing, he learned obedience to the sacrifice of ser- 
 vice as the great law of redemption. Had not 
 Jesus learned and obeyed this law, his ideal of 
 the human world become a kingdom of heaven 
 would have tormented him to his own and 
 perhaps the world's destruction. Trusting that 
 in committing himself to this law he would 
 commit humanity thereto, Jesus made the 
 matchless adventure of his life.
 
 262 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 So, he being what he was, civilization being 
 what it was, the mission of Jesus forced him to 
 choose between the sword and the cross as the 
 weapon by which he should undertake to deliver 
 his nation, and to establish God's royal reign in 
 the world. Others, like Mahomet and Crom- 
 well, have come to this choice, and have taken 
 the sword. In one way and another, so long as 
 the processes of redemption continue, all true 
 disciples of Jesus will have to make his choice 
 between the failure of victory and the victory 
 of failure. Many are called to the cross, while 
 still few are chosen. Between the way of the 
 sword and the way of the cross, the faithful 
 witnesses of Jesus may have to choose, before 
 the law of his sacrifice is accepted as the law of 
 society. No man knows ; but in an hour when 
 we think not the Son of man may come to us 
 in such a choice. 
 
 Jesus committed himself to sacrifice as love's 
 revelation and law, in the faith that love is the 
 mightiest force in the universe, and the ulti- 
 mately triumphant and organizing force in 
 human life. He would put this law to the test, 
 through whatever experiences and to whatever 
 end it might bring him ; though there should 
 come the awful sense, as there did come when 
 he cried from the cross to God as one who had
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 263 
 
 forsaken him, that he had been mistaken, his 
 career a failure in reality. Sometimes strongly 
 tempted to doubt what he did, struggling be- 
 tween the cross and the sword, Jesus accepted 
 the full issues of the law of sacrifice to which 
 he had committed himself, in order that he 
 might reveal it to men as the law of their com- 
 mon unity with God. It was thus that, in the 
 face of the worst to be done to him, he made 
 the holy assertion that he had accomplished the 
 work given him to do, and that he had so served 
 man as to make his Father in heaven appear 
 glorious on the earth ; it was thus that he at- 
 tached so high value to his service, in the face 
 of failure and disgrace. The eternal value of 
 his failure was the revelation of God in human 
 life in terms of social sacrifice. It was the vic- 
 tory of failure. 
 
 The tragedy by which the priests and rulers 
 thought to close the spiritual adventure of Jesus 
 was not due, as Renan says and Dean Farrar 
 hints, to a baffled and overwrought moral indig- 
 nation ; it was not, as Richard Wagner said, in 
 one of his early writings, " the imperfect utter- 
 ance of that human instinct which drives the 
 individual into revolt against a loveless whole." 
 The sacrifice of Jesus was voluntary ; it was 
 his deliberately chosen way of disclosing to
 
 264 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 man what he took to be the whole law of the 
 universe, the secret of all living and growing, 
 the uttermost depth of God's moral nature, so 
 that there need be no more mystery in the uni- 
 verse to seeing eyes. The law of life disclosed 
 by his failure is not a law that is accidental, 
 historical, or merely remedial ; it is the law that 
 holds the stars in their places, that pulls the 
 rose from the bud, that unfolds all life to the 
 measure that it is perfect. Jesus on the cross 
 is the heart of the Father laid bare, so that the 
 heart of man may become attuned thereto, and 
 harmony of heaven thus become the established 
 order of the world. 
 
 The revealing of God's law and way of living, 
 in such manner as to gain men to that law and 
 way, and so redeem them from the independent 
 and lawless ways of life that separate and de- 
 stroy, was the work given Jesus to do ; the work 
 which he accomplished by his failure. In this 
 real and vital sense, the death of Jesus is the 
 redemption of the world ; it is the universal 
 moral revelation. In theological terms, this is 
 called the atonement. But the word largely 
 stands for the opposite of what it means. Not- 
 withstanding the newer theological thinking, it 
 is still used to define one and another arrange- 
 ment by which God is supposed to be satisfied
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 26$ 
 
 with the sacrifice of Jesus as a substitute for 
 a real righteousness in man. The atonement 
 which Jesus made and which his apostles knew, 
 the only atonement to be made or known, is 
 the uniting of man with God in one law of life. 
 And we have not received the atonement until 
 our wills have been united with God's will in 
 obedience to the law of sacrifice by which we 
 are atoned. 
 
 Only through the sacrifice of man does the 
 sacrifice of Jesus effect itself redemptively in 
 the world. Jesus was under no greater obliga- 
 tion to sacrifice himself in bearing away the 
 sin of the world than is every one of us. It is 
 the failure to keep foremost this fact that con- 
 stitutes the shameful weakness of Christendom 
 in the face of the great needs and duties which 
 are calling the church of our day to a new 
 career and a more comprehensive mission. 
 
 But the sacrifice of the Christ-life is not a 
 mere renunciation, as the religious conceptions 
 of the middle ages, as well as of later pietism, 
 would make it seem. Nor is it the negative 
 expression of life it is conceived to be by phi- 
 losophy. Sacrifice is not so much the laying 
 down as the taking up of life. It is not the 
 denial of life, but the denial of self as the centre 
 of individual interest and effort. By sacrifice
 
 266 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 the things of life are not renounced to be de- 
 stroyed ; they are sanctified and saved through 
 right and social usage. Even the largest re- 
 nunciation which Jesus requires is not the giv- 
 ing up of something, but the surrender and 
 consecration of something to its natural and 
 holiest uses. Sacrifice is more than renuncia- 
 tion ; it is the divinely positive expression of 
 life, making life sacred through fitting and 
 ordering it for the common good. True sacri- 
 fice is co-operation with God in his work and 
 ends ; it is the offering of life to God for his 
 service of man, making life fruitful and joyous 
 through fellowship with God in his human work. 
 Through sacrifice, life is detached from self as 
 its centre of interest and effort, and its interest 
 become universal, with its energies a social mis- 
 sion. Life is not crushed and broken through 
 the sacrifice for which Jesus calls, but is en- 
 riched with the fullest moral virility, and made 
 whole through the faith that surrenders it to 
 be God's organ of human service. Our indi- 
 vidual life is not marred, distorted, and thwarted 
 by sacrifice ; by sacrifice life is saved, healed, 
 and glorified. Sacrifice saves and perfects life 
 through bringing it into right relations ; through 
 fulfilling its mission as a social function in the 
 one human life, of which we are all members.
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 267 
 
 The sacrificed life is life becoming whole, while 
 the unsacrificed life is a fragment. 
 
 Now, so long as the will of the world is not 
 at one with the will of God, the apostles of 
 every new human initiative find their souls, as 
 well as their mission, becoming fields of widest 
 and deepest conflict. So long as human con- 
 ditions are not the kingdom of heaven, while 
 the things that are an abomination in the sight 
 of God are highly esteemed among men, no son 
 of man can become the organ through which 
 God shall reveal and do his will, without collid- 
 ing with the will of the existing order, and suf- 
 fering some degree of failure and disgrace at 
 its hands. Hence the real history of the Chris- 
 tian evolution of man is a perpetual book of 
 martyrs. The largest redemptive and social 
 values have been gained for human life through 
 the individual failure inevitable to those who 
 seek to realize the ideal of Jesus, and who con- 
 form not to the mind of organized selfishness. 
 "Christianity," says James Russell Lowell, "has 
 never been concession, never peace ; it is con- 
 tinual aggression ; one province of wrong con- 
 quered, its pioneers are already in the heart of 
 another. The mile-stones of its onward march 
 down the ages have not been monuments of 
 material power, but the blackened stakes of
 
 268 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 martyrs, trophies of individual fidelity to con- 
 viction. For it is the only religion which is 
 superior to all endowment, to all authority, — 
 which has a bishopric and a cathedral wherever 
 a single human soul has surrendered itself to 
 God." 
 
 It is through the sacrifice and failure of the 
 individual idealist that human emancipation has 
 proceeded from the beginning. The prophets 
 the Scriptures glorify were mainly disgraceful 
 failures in the eyes of their times. Jesus and 
 his disciples were outlawed. John the Bap- 
 tist, who prepared their way, was beheaded in 
 the interests of official peace. Paul, that dar- 
 ing spiritual adventurer, was loosed from prison 
 to be led to his execution. St. Francis died of 
 a broken heart. Savonarola was both hung 
 and burned, after fearful agonies of torture. 
 The Protestant reformers were the hunted and 
 hated heretics of their day. Wesley, Edwards, 
 and Finney were driven from their churches. 
 Mazzini and his friends were vagabonds on the 
 face of the earth. Not long ago, Garrison was 
 dragged through the streets of Boston by a 
 commercially inspired mob, and Lovejoy met 
 his death at the hands of political retainers. 
 Which of the prophets of progress, whose faith 
 we glorify with our words, but whose truth we
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 269 
 
 make the refuge of our social cowardice and re- 
 ligious lies, was not outlawed, mobbed, or slain ? 
 
 To eulogize these is easy, requiring no ad- 
 venture of faith or risk of reputation ; to defend 
 them is always safe. " But while we thus ape 
 our fathers," says Mazzini, " we forget that 
 their greatness consisted in the fact that they 
 aped no one." To the prophets gone we are 
 never so untrue as when defending them against 
 the larger truth calling for our own adventure 
 of faith. We truly honor the apostles and re- 
 formers of the past, and best'defend their name 
 and faith, by being as ready as they were for 
 failure and disgrace. Have we their faith to 
 put the righteous judgments of God over against 
 the false judgments of organized covetousness ? 
 Can we bear the shame of no reputation, in 
 order that we may face the religious and politi- 
 cal lies now darkening the social mind, cursing 
 our methods and institutions, and bring them 
 to judgment before the truth of Jesus ? " One 
 must face failure, or one is no true missionary," 
 says a Jewish reformer. Our ability to divinely 
 fail for right's sake is the real measure of our 
 faith. It is the victory of failure that over- 
 cometh the world. 
 
 This gain of human values through failure is 
 not in harmonv with our modern notions of
 
 270 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 success, which prostitute every sacred human 
 power to the gross and hideous lust of money, 
 and make a religion of covetousness. It ac- 
 cords not with the spirit of Anglo-Saxon enter- 
 prise, which exalts rights above service, and 
 rates commercial success above all that makes 
 up the real life. It is not agreeable to that 
 patriotism which consists chiefly in loyalty to 
 one's property. There is no welcome for it in 
 the world of business, the greatest corrupter 
 of nations and enemy of man. The respect of 
 the political economist it has not, nor is it in 
 keeping with the greedy maxims of Benjamin 
 Franklin. It is disturbing to the theologian, 
 and frightful to the ecclesiastic. It will not 
 mix with the moral nostrums prescribed by 
 pulpit and press as, " The Secret of Success," 
 or " The Way to Succeed in Life," and like 
 wretched imposture upon the suffering world 
 by those who are called its teachers. It com- 
 ports not with the vicious motives for excel- 
 lence upheld by the ethical imbecility of much 
 of our so-called education. But Jesus' doctrine 
 of life is either the delusion of history, the di- 
 vine tantalism of hopeless human suffering, or 
 our ruling standards of success are worse than 
 pagan ; they are devilish, and the destroyers of 
 life. The efforts of the church to reconcile
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 27 1 
 
 the commercial morals of modern industrialism 
 with the revelation of social law and life in 
 Christ, is treason to the kingdom of God, and 
 the worst apostasy of the church ; yea, it is a 
 chopping down of the cross, and a setting up 
 of the throne of mammon in its place. 
 
 Our destructive maxims of success all pro- 
 ceed from the doctrine, in some form or other, 
 that personal existence is the chief end of life 
 and its energy. They who thus teach build 
 life on a lie. Not the preservation of personal 
 existence, but the increase of the power to love, 
 is the first law of man's nature. " We must," 
 says Hegel, " banish from our minds the preju- 
 dice in favor of duration, as if it had any 
 advantage as compared with transience : the 
 imperishable mountains are not superior to the 
 quickly dismantled rose exhaling its life in 
 fragrance." Life consists not in duration of 
 years, any more than it consists in the abun- 
 dance of the things one hath, but in the quality 
 of service. All life becomes as great, in the 
 end, as the idea and the affections in which it 
 invests itself ; and these have nothing to do 
 with place or length of days. Life is as valu- 
 able and immortal as the things for which' it 
 sacrifices itself ; and the value of the sacrifice 
 depends on the purity of the victim.
 
 272 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 True, we must " get a living ; " we must work 
 for our bread ; but bread is not the end of work, 
 and man does not live by bread alone. The end 
 of work is distributive justice, social character, 
 the divine individuality of the sons of man ; 
 these are the work of God in human life. Our 
 first and fundamental duty is to seek in what 
 manner and by what work we can best fulfil the 
 righteousness of Christ in the life of the world. 
 Our life has but one meaning, in fact ; and that 
 is the individual and collective seeking of the 
 highest knowable right, in the faith that this 
 universe is so principled and organized that 
 only right can in the end bring food to the pro- 
 ducer, and abundance to the working children 
 of men. Our best service to God or our na- 
 tion, our best gift to our family, is to illustrate 
 in our life the sacrifice of Christ, who is the 
 righteousness of God made manifest for the 
 
 o 
 
 practice of men. He that preserves his life 
 wastes it, while he that wastes his life in lov- 
 ing sacrifice finds it eternally. "Remember," 
 says Thomas Hardy, " that the best and great- 
 est among mankind are those who do them- 
 selves no worldly good. Every successful man 
 is more or less a selfish man. The devoted 
 fail." 
 
 Never was the choice between the sword and
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 273 
 
 the cross, between the failure of victory and 
 the victory of failure, more pressing than now. 
 We stand near the social crisis of the world. 
 The existing order has already served overtime. 
 It is now senseless, and growing worse. To 
 spend and be spent in mending it, is to waste 
 one's life, and to involve the common life in 
 still deeper and wider complications. Too long 
 already have we been laying the axe at the 
 leaves and branches of the tree of economic 
 evil ; the axe must now be laid at the roots. 
 The present order cannot be mended ; it can 
 only give birth to the new order, the regenerate 
 civilization. "The gathering blackness of the 
 frown of God," as the poet Watson calls it, 
 warns us to repent quickly. 
 
 Revolution of some sort is not far off. The 
 social change will bring forth either the revolu- 
 tion of love, or the tragedy and woe of a leader- 
 ship inspired by a love of revolution. Either a 
 revival of love, an outpouring of love through 
 the messianic fellowship of some vast social 
 sacrifice, or a universal French Revolution will 
 come. Either a spiritual movement, producing 
 a revival such as the prophets dimly or never 
 dreamed of, or blood such as never flowed will 
 remit the sins of the existing order. For a 
 religious revival, springing from some vast and
 
 274 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 wondrous social love, Christendom waits in fear, 
 anxiety, and expectancy. 
 
 If the revival comes, bringing in the revolu- 
 tion of love, it will have to be initiated through 
 the sacrifice of those who have settled their 
 accounts with the world, who value not their 
 personal existence, who love their brethren and 
 not themselves, who can live as men who are 
 already dead. Before civilization experiences 
 its redemption, the Son of man will have to be 
 somehow lifted up in offered lives. We need 
 not expect that we, in the midst of this ex- 
 hausted yet sovereign industrialism, can accord 
 with social custom and religious opinion, and at 
 the same time obey Jesus, any more than the 
 disciples who followed him through his conflict 
 with Jewish religion, and then went abroad as 
 his witnesses and martyrs in the Roman civili- 
 zation. Sooner or later they who stand for the 
 social order of the kingdom of God, who believe 
 and teach, in work and word, that the facts and 
 forces of Jesus' life are wise and strong for the 
 perfect organization of society, will meet the 
 existing order of things in clearly denned lines 
 of conflict. The Pilates of monopoly have al- 
 ready made friends with the Herods of the 
 state, and the high priests of the church are 
 blessing their union. It is no longer best to
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAILURE. 27$ 
 
 evade or conceal the divine inevitable : there 
 may have to be some dying done before our 
 social wrongs are thoroughly righted. 
 
 The supreme need of the social crisis is that 
 of strong men willing to fail, that they may 
 prove the justice of love, and the wisdom of 
 love's sacrifice. Above all else, society needs 
 deliverance from the impracticability of the 
 practical man, from the failure of his successes. 
 A single generation of Christians, yea, a single 
 generation of preachers and teachers, great 
 enough to fail, could regenerate the world ! If 
 the religious leaders of our day would be willing 
 to suffer the loss of all things, and become sin 
 that civilization through them might be made 
 the righteousness of God, they could bring in 
 the thousand years of peace. They would not 
 drink of the fruit of the vine until they could 
 drink it new in the Father's kingdom ; they 
 would not enjoy the fruits of the earth until 
 they could enjoy them as sharers with all human 
 life, redeemed to the holy society. As the 
 Father sent Jesus, so sends he each of us, to bear 
 away the sins of the world, and become com- 
 pletest worldly failures, that the social order of 
 his kingdom may appear amidst the wrecks of 
 organized selfishness. 
 
 And yet I could not close this course of
 
 276 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 lectures without saying that I truly have a 
 boundless hope that the Christ may come into 
 human life, this time, without being put to 
 shame at the hands of man. There are mo- 
 ments when I seem to see the revolution of love 
 as a nearing reality, bringing forth the new 
 birth of nations in a day. The full power of 
 incarnate love has never yet been tried, save in 
 Jesus. When it is finally tried, and we in any 
 considerable measure learn how to love, prob- 
 lems may vanish from progress, and a thousand 
 years of yesterday be achieved in a moment of 
 the concord of to-morrow. As the legion of 
 demons left the Gadarene, when confronted 
 with the full vitality of the love of Jesus, so 
 when there are a sufficient number messianic 
 enough to commit themselves to the social 
 power and wisdom of love, with all the spiritual 
 adventure and divine risk involved, what legion 
 of demons they may cast out no prophet can 
 tell. In even the most disastrous failure, they 
 would stir the world's blood to the purer life of 
 a holy and undying discontent, and thus accom- 
 plish the work given them to do. But the fund 
 of love, the spiritual reserve, the distrust of 
 selfish motive and action, the deeds that are 
 better than our creeds, all bulk so large that it 
 may be that the Son of man will now at last be
 
 THE J'ICTORY OF FAILURE. 2 J J 
 
 welcomed by his own. It may be that the truth 
 which we need for to-day and to-morrow will find 
 a prepared highway of love upon which to travel 
 to. victory and freedom. 
 
 The chasm which the social crisis has opened 
 between classes, right here in our American 
 life, had no right to be. Men, you are brothers ; 
 in your heart of hearts you know it. In your 
 better moments, you know that the feeling of 
 manly comrade-love you have for your fellows 
 brings you more of joy, more of all that makes 
 life worth while, than all the possessions of the 
 earth. This affection and brotherhood of sym- 
 pathy are your inheritance from the ages of 
 sacrifice, bloodshed, and heartache ; they are 
 your birthright. You cannot, men, you will 
 not, let strife over mere things, over pieces of 
 iron and paper and gold, array you against each 
 other, and steal your birthright away. You are 
 not enemies ; you are not classes ; you are not 
 the guardians of interests ; you are friends, 
 comrades, and lovers one of another. Your fears 
 about your rights are unmanly and unworthy ; 
 your interests are superstitions ; your gains are 
 delusions ; your classes make you ashamed, for 
 you know that they are not noble. Do not suffer 
 things and prejudices to rob you of your fellow- 
 ship, for that is your life. Rise to the noblest
 
 278 BETWEEN CAESAR AND JESUS. 
 
 that is in you, and dare to trust it. Act as men 
 too strong to be made the tools of interests and 
 things, men too brave to become the slaves of 
 fear and prejudice. And in the conquest of 
 your fears, you will conquer yourself ; and the 
 God in you will conquer the world for love and 
 liberty.
 
 This book is DUE on the last 
 date stamped below 
 
 °*C \ 1 1948 
 JAN f* J * lV7S 
 
 ftEC'D MLD 
 
 too**i * 
 
 
 t9T0 M 
 
 181970 
 
 G 
 
 Sl J un23 
 
 4UW 
 
 R% 
 
 BEC'D 
 URL 
 
 MAY 2 2 973 
 
 1973 
 
 5m-2,'31 
 
 .-INlA 
 
 LIBRARY
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA OOO 821 647 5