and extolled, was only a community of use, not of ownership (Acts iv. 32), and throughout a voluntary act of love, not a duty (v. 4); least of all, a right which the poorer might assert.  Spite of all this, that community of goods produced a chronic state of poverty in the church of Jerusalem.” (Principles of Political Economy.  By William Roscher.  Note to Section LXXXI.  English translation.  New York:  Henry Holt & Co. 1878.)]—­Paul announced the universal brotherhood of man, but he as clearly recognized the subordination of society, in the duties of ruler and subject, master and slave, and in all the domestic relations; and although his gospel may be interpreted to contain the elements of revolution, it is not probable that he undertook to inculcate, by the proclamation of “universal brotherhood,” anything more than the duty of universal sympathy between all peoples and classes as society then existed.

If Christianity has been and is the force in promoting and shaping civilization that we regard it, we may be sure that it is not as a political agent, or an annuller of the inequalities of life, that we are to expect aid from it.  Its office, or rather one of its chief offices on earth, is to diffuse through the world, regardless of condition or possessions or talent or opportunity, sympathy and a recognition of the value of manhood underlying every lot and every diversity—­a value not measured by earthly accidents, but by heavenly standards.  This we understand to be “Christian equality.”  Of course it consists with inequalities of condition, with subordination, discipline, obedience; to obey and serve is as honorable as to command and to be served.

If the religion of Christ should ever be acclimated on earth, the result would not be the removal of hardships and suffering, or of the necessity of self-sacrifice; but the bitterness and discontent at unequal conditions would measurably disappear.  At the bar of Christianity the poor man is the equal of the rich, and the learned of the unlearned, since intellectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth.  The content that Christianity would bring to our perturbed society would come from the practical recognition of the truth that all conditions may be equally honorable.  The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is, we imagine, the sum and substance of the equality and communism of the New Testament.  But we are to remember that this is not merely a “gospel for the poor.”

Whatever the theories of the ancient world were, the development of democratic ideas is sufficiently marked in the fifteenth century, and even in the fourteenth, to rob the eighteenth of the credit of originating the doctrine of equality.  To mention only one of the early writers,—­[For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world’s history—­namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration