CHRISTIANITY AXD SOCIALISM. 



85 



They are still open to the attack that Burke brought to bear upon 

 the French Eevolution. Burke said : " It is the inability to 

 wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the arbitrary assenil^ly 

 of France to commence their schemes of reform with abolition 

 and total destruction. And to make everything the reverse of 

 what they have been is quite as easy as to destroy. Xo difficulties 

 occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in 

 discovering the defects of what has not existed, and eager 

 enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination 

 in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition " 

 {Reflections, Clarendon Press, p. 198). But I scarcely think we 

 can fail to record a comparative failure of Christianity in two 

 respects — (1) intellectual, and (2) moral. 



1. The Manchester school has surrounded the subject with such 

 complicated perplexities that the intellectual way out has not been 

 found. This perhaps is the most difficult place of the subject. I 

 can scarcely conceive that any Christian man will doubt long that 

 it is the duty of Christians and of a Christian nation to obey what 

 is the great law of spiritual gravitation, which binds all the societies 

 of the universe to the throne of God — " Thou shalt love thy 

 neighbour as thyself," as it has been explained by Christ in the 

 golden rule. But to apply it in practice to the transactions of the 

 market place is a difficult}' which has not been intellectually over- 

 come. The man in the street regards the practice of our Church 

 Catechism with a smile of hopelessness or of derision. AVe are no 

 nearer to an intellectual way out than when Moore Ede gave the 

 Hulsean lectures on this subject in 1896. It is this probably more 

 than anything else which fosters defects in practice. AVe need an 

 enlightened conscience. There are conspicuous, honourable and 

 well known examples of those who have found a way out, and 

 found it to poji commercialhj. But they are exceptions still, as my 

 long and varied experience tends to prove. 



2. The haste to be rich and the gospel of comfort, which 

 characterised the last century, have robbed intellectual investio-a- 

 tions in the region of applied Christianity of their sufficient 

 motive. 



That at present Christianity is a comparative failure in its 

 industrial application of the golden rule abundantly appears from 

 the following observations, taken from what I am in daily contact 



