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other modern students. "Christianity," says the Italian economist Nitti, "was a vast economic revolution more than anything else." "Poverty was an indispensable condition for gaining admission to the kingdom of heaven."1 With still less self-restraint an American writer advances to more sweeping generalizations. "The Sermon on the Mount," he writes, "is the science of society. It is a treatise on political economy." "The rejection of his [Christ's] social ideal was the crucifixion he carried in his heart." "An industrial democracy would be the social actualization of Christianity. It is the logic of the Sermon on the Mount." 2 These extravagances of exegesis indicate how sharply the pendulum of interest has swung from a Christology which ignored the social question to one which finds the social question the centre of the gospel.

1 Nitti, "Catholic Socialism," 1895, pp. 58, 64.

2 Herron, "The New Redemption," pp. 30, 34, 80; compare p. 143, “The worst charge that can be made against a Christian is that he attempts to justify the existing social order." See also the other writings of this self-sacrificing advocate of revolution, e.g. : "The Larger Christianity; " " A Plea for the Gospel ; " " Between Cæsar and Jesus." "No man can read the Gospel himself without seeing that Jesus regarded industrial wealth as a moral fall and a social violence." "The Church as a whole does not know what Jesus taught, and so far as it knows does not believe his teaching practicable," ," "Between Cæsar and Jesus," p. 107. "I dread nothing more than the influence upon the social movement of existing organizations of religion," Boston Address, 1895. "If we would follow Jesus in the social redemption, it will be by storming the citadel of monopoly." "We can only save the people from being ground to profit by capturing the 'machine,'" The Industrialist, July, 1899.

Indeed, as has been lately suggested, it would not be difficult, under these principles of interpretation, to re-edit the New Testament as a socialist tract.1 Jesus drove, we may suppose, the swine into the sea in order to testify his indifference to the institution of private property. When meeting the multitude his first care is to feed them, in order to indicate the precedence of economic problems over spiritual questions. He scourges the moneychangers from the temple in order to bear public witness against capitalism and its sins.

However unfounded in history such a conception of the person of Christ may be, it is welcomed with enthusiasm by great numbers of plain people. For the Church and the theologians, the modern revolutionist has, as we have already seen, scant respect. The Church is to him the bulwark of the propertyholding class, and the theologians are distracting the minds of the unfortunate by promises of prosperity elsewhere. "We'll give them back some of their heaven," said Felix Holt, "and take it out in something for us and our children in this world." For the person of Jesus, on the other hand, regarded as a working-man, a friend of the poor, an outcast, a preacher of condemnation against scribes and Pharisees, the working-class movement offers fresh reverence and homage. The real Jesus seems indeed, to many hand-workers, to have been rediscovered by them, as though beneath some mediaval fresco of an unreal and mystical Christ there

1 Contemporary Review, March, 1896.

had been freshly laid bare the features of the man of Nazareth. "Christ," answered one German working-man to an inquirer, "was a true friend of the working-people, not in his words alone, like his followers, but in his deeds. He was hated and persecuted as is the modern socialist, and if he lived to-day he would, without doubt, be one of us."1 "Christ," wrote another, "was a great revolutionist; if any one now preached as he did, he would be arrested." "He would have accomplished more," adds a third, "if he had given his efforts rather to economic and scientific ends than to religion." "He was a man of the common people," concludes a fourth, "who fought a hard fight for their moral and economic welfare." In short, it has come to pass, as the author of the "Kernel and the Husk' anticipated, that the hand-workers are saying, “We used to think that Christ was a fiction of the priests; . . . but now we find that he was a man, after all, like us, a poor working-man, who had a heart for the poor,—and now that we understand this we say he is the man for us." 2

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Here, then, is a perplexing situation. To a vast

1 See the exceedingly interesting series of opinions collected by Pastor Rade, in his paper before the Ninth Evangelical Social Congress, 1898, "Die Gedankenwelt unserer Industriearbeiter." Compare also Pflüger, "Kirche und Proletariat," 1899, s. 4: "The first proclaimers of the gospel, especially Jesus himself, belonged to the proletariat; ... the preachers of the gospel to-day belong to 'good society.'"

2 "The Kernel and the Husk" (Am. ed. 1887), p. 334 (quoted also, Contemporary Review, March, 1896, p. 429).

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majority of those who are most concerned with the social question, the Christ of the churches is an object of complete indifference, if not of positive scorn; while to a Christ far removed from the traditions and creeds of Christian worship, - an unmysterious, human leader of the poor, there is given an honor which as a supernatural being he no longer receives. On the other hand, to the vast majority of Christian worshippers this conception of Jesus as a labor-leader and social revolutionist appears a most inadequate and unhistorical picture of the Christ of the gospels. What have we here but a clean break between the tradition of the past and the need of the present? On the one hand is the ancient and precious story of the relation of Jesus to the individual soul, his revelation of the Father to the child, and his revelation of the child to himself, his message to the religious life in its experiences of sin, repentance, and spiritual peace; and on the other hand is this new and unprecedented appreciation of the external ills of environment and misfortune, of social wrong and injustice, and the discovery that here also Jesus Christ has a message of stern rebuke and pitying love. Is there, then, a permanent chasm set between the work of the Christian Church and the need of the modern world? Is there no unity to be discovered beneath these diverse conceptions of the teaching of Jesus? Must it happen that the force of the Christian religion shall be limited to spiritual and personal renewal,

and shall have no part in directing the social movement of the time; or if, on the other hand, the person of Jesus finds a place in the social question, must it be at the cost of his spiritual leadership and religious significance? Must we choose between Christ the Saviour and Jesus the Demagogue; or is there in the religion of Jesus a quality and character which of themselves create a social message such as the modern world needs to hear? These are the questions which confront one as he observes the alienation between Christian teaching and social needs, and which invite to fresh inquiry concerning the social teaching of the gospel. 1

1 The literature which is of importance in its new appreciation of the social teaching of Jesus may be said to begin with the "Ecce Homo" of Professor Seeley, 1867. The main thesis of this remarkable book-that Jesus was the founder of an external and legislative commonwealth may be regarded as an inadequate or even a misleading statement of the purpose of Christ (“Christ announced himself as the Founder, the Legislator, of a new State," p. 80; "To reorganize a society and to bind the members of it together by the closest ties were the business of his life," p. 103; "The first propelling power . . . is the personal relation of loyal vassalage of the citizens to the Prince of the Theocracy," p. 95). Yet the extraordinary insight of this book into the spirit of the gospels and its beauty and vigor of expression make its publication an epoch in the interpretation of the teaching of Jesus.

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A second contribution of much originality and power was the Bampton Lectures of Canon Fremantle, "The World the Subject of Redemption," 1885 (2d ed. 1895, with an introduction by Professor R. T. Ely, and with important appendices of illustrative literature). Less academic, but of the highest spiritual insight, and of an importance not generally recognized by his readers, are the Bohlen Lectures of Phillips Brooks, "The Influence of Jesus," 1879.

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