persistently row one way they look the other. Many an excellent church-going Mr. Hyde turns during the weekdays into a Dr. Jekyll of the business world. And this is to be expected; it is only another proof that one cannot serve God and mammon. It is strange that although we read this again and again, and although millions are confident that this was said by the omniscient Son of God, no one really believes it. Yet failure to recognize this fact is the one common cause of the defeat of the Church, of the monastic orders, and of the millions of individuals who have endeavored to promote or to live the truly Christian life. The love of mammon, "The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches" choke the life out of every spiritual effort.

The Church that now exists has grown rich and powerful and self-satisfied. It has achieved a wonderful worldly victory, and its servants sit with the mighty, but it long ago gave up the struggle for the kingdom of God on earth. By conforming itself to the world, by becoming subservient to the rich and powerful, and by submitting itself to the dictation of Czars, Kaisers and Emperors, it has become a material success and a spiritual failure. By taking themselves out of the world and hiding themselves in convents and monasteries, certain religious sects, on the other hand, have, it is true, attained a degree of perfection, but they too have failed in the chief work required of Christians-the building of the kingdom of God on earth. A few individuals have failed as Tolstoy failed. They have stayed in the world and refused to worship mammon, but they have been baffled and defeated in every one of their projects. Nothing would work, nothing would succeed, and they were looked upon as fanatics and visionaries, seeking the impossible. Excepting the peasant communists, nearly all Christian sects (and this is true also of Tolstoy) have ignored the necessity of an economic founda

tion for Christianity. When the communistic ideals and practices were crushed out of the early Church, the earthly kingdom of God disappeared, and with it the possibility of the truly Christian life. But now men everywhere are beginning to see that if Christianity is to become something other than "a beautiful and ineffectual angel

as it is to some, or a sham and hypocricy as it is to others, it must have its roots firmly planted in the earth; and if it is to fulfil the purpose of the Savior it must have for its basis a new economic and social order. We must have again on earth the kingdom of God; and this above all we must seek first.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRUTH AND SOCIETY

The people "shall build houses, and inhabit them: and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build and another inhabit: they shall not plant and another eat."

"If any man would not work, neither should he eat.”

They "were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own: but they had all things common."

It is said that St. John in his extreme old age, at Ephesus, was often carried into the church by the disciples, on account of his great weakness, and every time he was brought there he used to say nothing else but this simple and beautiful sentence; "Little children, love one another." Growing weary of hearing the same thing so often, one of the brethren asked him, "Why do you always repeat this same sentence?" St. John answered, "It is the command of the Master and the fulfilling of the law." On another occasion he said, "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth." If this be the law and the gospel, how can Christians endure the society in which we now live, where some men, women and children are at this moment dying of starvation, and many millions are constantly in want of the most meager necessaries of life? How can Christians, in a society of their own making, observe without pain and protest, poverty, slums, child labor, low wages, long hours and all the other known evils of our industrial life?

A former prime minister of England, the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, concluded, after examining the re

149

ports made by Rowntree and Booth, that twelve millions, or about thirty per cent of the population of Great Britain, were living "in the grip of perpetual poverty." (1) L. G. Chiozza Money, the eminent British statistician, after a study of the distribution of the national income in the United Kingdom, estimated that out of a population of 43 millions no less than 38 millions are poor. This does not mean that they are all in want of the actual necessaries of life, but it does mean that they are constantly hovering about the poverty line. He says, in his analysis, “The United Kingdom is seen to contain a great multitude of poor people, veneered with a thin layer of the comfortable and the rich." (2) Very much the same conditions exist in the other countries of Europe. In Russia the poor are proportionately even more numerous. Tolstoy once said that if Booth's definition of poverty were applied to the people of Russia practically all working men and peasants would be below the poverty line.

The present author once attempted to estimate the extent of poverty in the United States, and arrived at the conclusion that there are in this country in ordinary times no fewer than ten million persons in actual poverty. This means that there are at least this number most of the time underfed, poorly clothed and improperly housed. There are in ordinary times about two million men unemployed from four to six months during the year. Not less than one million workers are injured and killed each year while doing their work, and about ten million persons now living will, if the present ratio is kept up, die of the preventable disease, tuberculosis; a disease largely due to bad housing, bad food, worry and overwork. About 14 per cent of the families in Manhattan were evicted during the year 1903, and almost every year about ten per cent of those who die in Manhattan have a pauper burial. Although these estimates and figures were gathered in 1903, and "Poverty"

was published in 1904, later investigations indicate that this general estimate of poverty was altogether too moderate. In America and Great Britain, the two richest societies in the modern world, great masses must undergo a constant struggle against want, while above them is the thin veneer of the enormously rich.

Christianity, then, like the Pagan religions of earlier times, has not been successful in eradicating conditions of misery for the masses. Men have gone on from century to century for 2,000 years, enduring much the same social evils as those which existed in Israel previous to the time of Jesus. The entire western world, to-day, accepts Christianity, and few men, rich or poor, refuse to call themselves Christians. Yet it is evident from the facts and figures of our social life that Christianity has not brought nearer the brotherhood of man, nor has it molded with justice the institutions of society. Certain it is that we do not love others as ourselves, for if we did conditions of poverty for the masses could not exist. This seems a simple statement of an obvious truth, and yet immediately we begin to think at all we must realize how impossible it is in society as it now exists to love others as ourselves. This precept is difficult enough to observe when we limit it to those of our own household, but how can we follow this rule of the perfect life in all the intricate social relations that exist in our present complicated civilization? How can we in vast cities and industrial centers be certain of fulfilling this law? We certainly cannot love others as we love ourselves if we profit from their labor, if we permit them to continue doing hard work, injurious to their health, while we enjoy all the comforts of life. We cannot love those who make our clothes in the sweatshops; nor can we love the children in the cotton mills or the babies in the cotton fields. We all use rubber for many purposes-to keep our feet dry, for instance. Every stormy day we are