time: the refreshing river 



Biology would be in an etiolated condition if it were not bound up 

 at every point with stockbreeding, agriculture, medicine, the fisheries, 

 and sociology. With physics and chemistry the case is even more 

 obvious. "Historically, the sciences grow out of practice, the pro- 

 duction of ideas arises out of the production of things."^ It is true 

 that in science we must not set out, in general, to solve problems 

 because the answer will afford some new invention, but it is often 

 tlie technical practice which suggests the problem. The great difference 

 w^hich we must recognise bet^^een mediaeval theology and modem 

 science, is that an economic structure was directly and logically 

 derivable from the former, and no clear system in such matters has 

 as yet arisen from the latter. The former incorporated a system of 

 ethics, in tlie form of moral theology. The latter has not as yet pro- 

 duced one. 



Where, then, is the moral theology of to-day .^ The only possible 

 answer is that communism provides the moral theology appropriate 

 for our time.^ The fact that a doctrine of God is apparently absent 

 from it is unimportant in this connection; what it does is to lay down 

 the ideal rules for the relations between man and man, to affirm that 

 the exploitation of one class by another is immoral, that national 

 wars for markets are immoral, that the oppression of subject and 

 colonial races is immoral, that the unequal distribution of goods, 

 education, and leisure is immoral, that the private ownership of the 

 means of production is immoral. It dares to take the "love of our 

 neighbour" literally; to ensure that by the abolition of privilege each 

 single citizen shall have the fullest opportunities to live the good life 

 in a community of free and equal colleagues. It continues and extends 

 the historic work of Christianity for woman, setting her on a complete 

 equality with man. Its concept of leadership is leadership from within, 

 not from above. 



Only because christian theology three centuries ago gave up the 

 attempt to apply a very similar ethic to human affairs has this state 

 of things come about. The essential weakness of the modern clerk 

 resides in the fact that vast progress in art or science appears at first 

 sight to be theoretically equally compatible with national capitalism 

 or with international communism. The economic doctrines which he 



^ Bukharin, N., Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism 

 (Kniga, London, 1931, p. 5). 



2 Cf, for example die essay "Communism and Morality" by A. L. Morton in 

 Christianity and the Social Revolution, 1935? ^"^ "Marxism and Morality" by J. Hunter 

 in University Forward, 1941, 6, 4. 



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