matter under its purely practical aspect, and asking how any Christian clergymen—­men presumably sane and educated—­can propose, whether their programme be really Christian or no, to reorganise society on the basis of a moral conversion which is confined to the few only—­which would exact from the able minority the maximum of effort and mortification, and secure the maximum of idleness and self-indulgence for the rest of the human race?

To this question it may be said that there are two answers.  Admirable in character as are multitudes of the Christian clergy, nobody will contend that all of them are beyond reproach; nor will any such claim be made for all those of them who profess socialism.  And for some of this body it is hardly open to doubt that the preaching of socialism is nothing better than a species of ecclesiastical electioneering.  In the language of the political wire-puller, it affords them a good “cry” with which to go to the people.  Why, they say in effect, should you listen to the agitator in the street, when we can give you something just as good from the pulpit?  What the message really means which they thus undertake to deliver, they make no effort to understand.  It will attract, or at least they think so; and for the moment this is enough for them.  Having probably emptied their churches by talking traditional nonsense, they are willing to fill them by talking nonsense that has not even the merit of being traditional.  We will not linger, however, over the case of men like these.  We will turn to that of others who are morally very much more respectable, and whose condition of mind, moreover, is very much more instructive.  Of these we may take the author of “The Gospel for To-day” as a type.  He, we may assume, advocates his socialistic programme, not because he thinks that to do so is a shrewd clerical manoeuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at once Christian and practicable.  How does it come about, then, that an educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous?  Let us examine his arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer.

By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing things as they are.  But he sees them from a distance only, as though they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual configuration he has no idea whatever.  Thus when he contemplates the inequalities of men’s economic powers, these appear to him alternately in two different forms—­as genuine powers of production and as powers of mere seizure—­without his discerning where in actual life the operation of the one ends and the operation of the other begins:  and, though for a certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some able men are