Must there not come a time, if we grow in mentality and spirit, when we shall cease to differentiate and quit calling some work secular and some sacred?  Isn’t it as necessary for me to hoe corn and feed my loved ones (and also the priest) as for the priest to preach and pray?  Would any priest ever preach and pray if somebody didn’t hoe?  If life is from God, then all useful effort is divine; and to work is the highest form of religion.  If God made us, surely He is pleased to see that His work is a success.  If we are miserable, willing to liberate life with a bare bodkin, we certainly do not compliment our Maker in thus proclaiming His work a failure.  But if our lives are full of gladness and we are grateful for the feeling that we are one with Deity—­helping God to do His work, then, and only then do we truly serve Him.

Isn’t it strange that men should have made laws declaring that it is wicked for us to work?

Exclusive Friendships

An excellent and gentle man of my acquaintance has said, “When fifty-one per cent of the voters believe in cooeperation as opposed to competition, the Ideal Commonwealth will cease to be a theory and become a fact.”

That men should work together for the good of all is very beautiful, and I believe the day will come when these things will be, but the simple process of fifty-one per cent of the voters casting ballots for socialism will not bring it about.

The matter of voting is simply the expression of a sentiment, and after the ballots have been counted there still remains the work to be done.  A man might vote right and act like a fool the rest of the year.

The socialist who is full of bitterness, fight, faction and jealousy is creating an opposition that will hold him and all others like him in check.  And this opposition is well, for even a very imperfect society is forced to protect itself against dissolution and a condition which is worse.  To take over the monopolies and operate them for the good of society is not enough, and not desirable either, so long as the idea of rivalry is rife.

As long as self is uppermost in the minds of men, they will fear and hate other men, and under socialism there would be precisely the same scramble for place and power that we see in politics now.

Society can never be reconstructed until its individual members are reconstructed.  Man must be born again.  When fifty-one per cent of the voters rule their own spirit and have put fifty-one per cent of their present envy, jealousy, bitterness, hate, fear and foolish pride out of their hearts, then Christian socialism will be at hand, and not until then.