of righteousness, and with the impulse towards righteousness, which are so different from those which are functioning at present along the lines of contemporary industrial “reform.”  Justice is a “natural” virtue with a real place in society, but the only saving force today is a supernatural virtue.  This, amongst other things, Christ brought into the world and left as the saving force amongst the race He had redeemed and in the society reconstituted in accordance with His will.  This supernatural virtue is Charity, sometimes expressed in the simpler form of Love, the essence of the social code of Christianity and the symbol of the New Dispensation as justice was the symbol of the Old.  Just in so far as a man or a cult or an interest or a corporation or a state or a generation or a race, relinquishes charity as its controlling spirit, in so far it relinquishes its place in Christian society and its claim to the Christian name, while it is voided of all power for good or possibility of continuance.  Where charity is gone, intellectual capacity, effectual power, and even justice itself become, not energies of good, but potent contributions to evil.  Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of contemporary civilization?  Does it manifest itself with power today in the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest, between nation and nation?  If not, then we have forfeited the name of Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution.

I am not charging any class or any interest or any people with exclusive apostacy.  In the end there is little to choose between one or another.  Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than the nominal religionist.  Nor am I charging conscious and willful acceptance of wrong in the place of right.  It is the institution itself, industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined.  Charity, that is to say, fellowship, generosity, pity, self-sacrifice, chivalry, all that is comprehended in the thing that Christ was, and preached, and promulgated as the fundamental law of life, cannot come back to the world so long as avarice, warfare and hate continue to exist, and through Charity alone can we find the solution of the industrial and economic problem that must be solved under penalty of social death.

V

THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY