Such being the case, then, asks the writer, what does Christian socialism aim at?  It does not aim at making men equal in respect of their ability, for to do this would be quite impossible; but it aims at producing an equality of a practical kind, by inducing the men whose ability is most efficient to forgo all personal claims which are founded on their own exceptional powers, so that the wealth which is at present secured by these powers for themselves may in the future be divided among the mass of their less able brethren.

Thus the crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals.  But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a conversion de luxe which is to be the privilege of the few only, while the many are not only debarred, from the very nature of the case, from practising the renunciation in which the few are to find eternal life, but are actually urged to cherish their existing economic concupiscence, and raise it to a pitch of intensity which it never has reached before.  The competent, to whose energies the riches of the world are due, are to put these riches away from them as though they were food offered by the devil.  The incompetent, with thankless but perpetually open mouths, are to swallow this same food as though it were the bread from heaven.  In other words, according to our Christian socialist, the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is involved in the enjoyment of riches, is not the enjoyment of material superfluities itself, but only the enjoyment of them by men who have been at the trouble of producing them.

That this is what the message of Christian socialism comes to, little as those who deliver it realise the fact themselves, is shown by an illustration obtruded on us by the author of “The Gospel for To-day.”  The evils of the existing situation, and its remoteness from the Kingdom of Christ, are, he says, exemplified in a very special way by the present position of the clergy.  “If we churchmen,” he says, “want money for our own purposes, we have to go to the trust magnates and kneel.  We have to kneel to ‘the steel kings and the oil kings,’ merely because they are rich men.”  Now, how would Christian socialism alter a state of things like this?  Let us consider precisely what it is that our Christian socialist complains about.  He obviously does not mean that he and his brother clergymen have to approach the trust magnates on their knees.  The utmost he can mean is that, if they want these men to give them money, they have to ask for it as a gift, and presumably make, when it is given, some acknowledgment to the donors.  This it is which evidently sticks in the stomach of the humble follower of Christ whose self-portraiture we