The spiritual message.
Dean Inge is the holy incumbent of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the central palace of His Most High God. The divine and duly anointed Dean treated Leeds on July 18th to a lecture, “Christianity and Socialism.” The special body of mutually hostile but loving Christians he addressed was the Wesleyan Methodists. Not the Primitive ones, but those who follow the meek and lowly “Suffer not a witch to live” Wesley. The Dean’s address not only smote those “Christian Socialists,” I.L.P.-ers, etc., who find their “Socialism” in the New Testament, but warmed the heart of the rich who frequent St. Paul’s, by showing that Christ had no economic gospel and had no evil designs on their treasure.
“The Gospel had a message of moral and spiritual regeneration, not of social reform.”
The moral and spiritual regeneration message, however, must have been lost in transit. Neither by the wording of Christ nor by the conduct of his countless millions of disciples can we decipher it. The message seems to have missed the sacred Dean himself, for it was not long since that he advised that agitators should be taken (in a brotherly spirit) and put up against a wall—and shot.
Let us, however, get to the cream of the lecture, if there can be any cream in such a spiritual message.
Why they couldn't follow Christ.
“Christ was not in the ordinary sense an ascetic. There was no doubt He used hyperbolical language which could hardly be continued in popular preaching. He did not shun the society of the rich or repel them in any way. His counsel of perfection to the young man who thought that he had kept to the Commandments was not addressed to everybody. In those days perhaps a man could hardly follow Christ in His journeys without giving up or endangering his hoarded wealth. There was no regular investment of capital in those days. It was hardly necessary to say that even if He had wished to lay down a scheme of socialism—and such an idea never occurred to Him—the conditions of Palestine under Pontius Pilate and Herod would have put it out of the question. His travelling missionaries were to live on alms like begging friars, but this proved nothing. His own little band seemed to have carried a bag with money in it and to have bought food when they needed it.Christ was a prophet, not a legislator. He gives us principles, not rules, and we are meant to use common-sense in interpreting them. Some people reject Christianity because they do not understand it; others, because they do understand it. To the latter class unquestionably belong the disciples of Karl Marx. For what excites their passionate hatred to Christianity is precisely that idealistic standard of values which cuts the ground from under the feet of their savage and vindictive materialism.”
“Where your treasure is——”
Christianity is an idealistic gospel opposed to the materialism of the Socialist. The Dean has made that plain. But the reason why you could not expect a man to follow Christ in those days was a base, sordid, material one. The spiritual Dean says that it would endanger a man’s hoarded wealth. There were no Selfridge’s safety deposits then. Amongst such a religious people it would, perhaps, be too much to expect that those who remained behind would not lay hands on “the stuff.” The plundering generations of Christians since then are evidence on that point ! And with what feelings of pain and regret the Dean must have told the audience that “there was no regular investment of capital in those days.” No shares, no Stock Exchange, no dividends, not even an opportunity for eminent clerics to promote peace by buying gun companies’ shares, war loans, or brewery shares for a change. So the sad listeners to Christ must have felt cut up that they could not go and leave their shekels behind safely among the brethren and sistren, nor change it into scrip. Hence this spiritual and by no means material reason prevented them journeying with Christ to snatch souls from outer darkness. These reasons, mind you, are not mine, but those of the immaterial, idealistic Dean Inge.
More materialism.
Another very worldly, material fact that prevented Christ from advocating Socialism was “that the conditions of Palestine under Pontius Pilate and Herod would have put it out of the question.” So, again, the explanation of this opponent of materialism is just an ordinary material one—conditions were unsuitable !
Perhaps the light of St. Paul’s picked up the wrong notes for his lecture. An idealistic standard of values which could not be carried out because of conditions ! A gospel “which wasn’t addressed to everybody,” eminently spiritual, but which had to be modified because of economic facts !
“Special taxation of large incomes might be desirable on public grounds, but it was no substitute for Christian love or charity, and could not claim to be in accordance with Christian economics.”
We were beginning to think that Dean Inge knew the Gospels. He started out by saying Christ dealt with spiritual things, not social ones, and, lo and behold, he discovers Christian economics !
The soothing’ syrup is offered to the rich, that Christ did not mean them to pay high taxes for running their system.
Hearts and economics.
Karl Marx and his followers understood Christianity ! What an admission for one so gloomv as the learned parson. But what the idealistic standard of values of Christianity are, or the nature of savage materialism, we were not informed. How, otherwise than by material alterations, can we deal with the poverty and slavery today? “A new heart and a new spirit,” or “Love and charity,” these phrases that come so easily from the Dean ! The followers of Christ have had two thousand years to display the meaning of these things. From 1914 to 1918 love and charity was quite absent from the language of “the faith” at St. Paul’s, etc.
Challenged for an economic policy to deal with the condition of the workers, these savage idealists can only talk about hearts and spirits, even after admitting that even in Christ’s time the conditions dominated tlhe situation.
It is quite true that Christ had no economic gospel and no Socialism. It is equally true that Christ had no plan of emancipation for the slavery of his time or ours. So we remain materialists with a policy based upon the conditions and lessons of to-day.
The leading Conservative organ of Scotland, The Scotsman, commenting the same day on Dean Inge’s speech, was compelled to adopt much of the materialists’ attitude :
“To some extent social organisation was of little importance to the early Christians, for they lived in the daily expectation of witnessing the end of the world. As Christ refused to interfere in questions of politics—”render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”—so there is no type of economics prescribed for Christians. And in the course of centuries the Churches have in fact changed their ground in relation to certain of the manifestations of economic activity. For example, usury was once condemned by the Church and its existence was disguised by legal subterfuge. The Reformation supplied an ethical basis for the development of capitalism. It was Puritan doctrine that waste of time was a deadly sin, and that everyone must work at his calling. Baxter, indeed, argued that ‘if you refuse a less gainful way you cross one of the ends of your calling.’ Without over-emphasising the connection between Puritanism and capitalism—and it has been over-emphasised by some writers—it is significant that men who appealed for their standards to the Christian religion have extracted from it authority for fundamentally different economic doctrines. There are many sayings in the New Testament which, if put into practice literally, would bring chaos into the legal and economic system of the modern world.”
Dean Inge as long ago as 1888, in his first book—”Society in Rome under the Caesars”—pointed out the material conditions of Rome in its decline promoted the acceptance of Christianity by the slaves whose earthly miseries were so heavy. All that this pillar of the Church can now say in answer to the Socialist case is, “Look at Russia” ! Russia, he claims, is an example of Marx’s ideas in practice, and should be a paradise if Marx’s ideas were sound. Russia, however, is not Socialism in practice, neither is it the result of applying Marx’s theories. Any ordinary mind studying Marx and studying Russia would know that. Lofty and intellectual lights of the Church either don’t know it, or, like Dean Inge, prefer to misrepresent the facts in order to serve his God and Mammon.
Adolph Kohn
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