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C.0.P.E.C. Commission Reports. Volume XIT 
 
 HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 OF THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
C.O.P.E.C. COMMISSION 
 
 Votume I. 
 
 If. 
 
 IV. 
 
 REPORTS 
 
 Tue Nature oF Gop AnD His 
 PuRPOSE FOR THE WoRLD 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 THe Home 
 
 ‘THE RELATION OF THE SEXES 
 LEISURE 
 
 Tue TREATMENT OF CRIME 
 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 
 CHRISTIANITY AND WAR 
 INDUSTRY AND PROPERTY 
 Poxirics AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 Tue Soctat Funcrion oF 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 HisroricaL ILLusTRATIONS 
 OF THE SocraL EFFects 
 oF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 
 
a torical Illustrations 
 of the Social Effects 
 of Christianity 
 
 Being the Report presented to the Conference on 
 Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship 
 
 at Birmingham, April 5-12, 1924 
 
 Published for the Conference Committee by 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4 
 NEW YORK, TORONTO 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1924 
 
BASIS 
 
 Tue basis of this Conference is the conviction 
 that the Christian faith, rightly interpreted and 
 consistently followed, gives the vision and the 
 power essential for solving the problems of to-day, 
 that the social ethics of Christianity have been 
 greatly neglected by Christians with disastrous 
 consequences to the individual and to society, and 
 that it is of the first importance that these should 
 be given a clearer and more persistent emphasis. 
 In the teaching and work of Jesus Christ there are 
 certain fundamental principles—such as the universal 
 Fatherhood of God with its corollary that mankind 
 is God’s family, and the law “‘ that whoso loseth his 
 life, findeth it ’—which, if accepted, not only 
 condemn much in the present organisation of 
 society, but show the way of regeneration. Christi- 
 anity has proved itself to possess also a motive power 
 for the transformation of the individual, without 
 which no change of policy or method can succeed. 
 In the light of its principles the constitution of 
 society, the conduct of industry, the upbringing 
 of children, national and international politics, the 
 personal relations of men and women, in fact all 
 human relationships, must be tested. It is hoped 
 that through this Conference the Church may win 
 a fuller understanding of its Gospel, and hearing 
 a clear call to practical action may find courage 
 to obey. 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 Tue present volume forms one of the series of 
 Reports drawn up for submission to the Conference 
 on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, 
 held in Birmingham in April 1924. 
 
 In recent years Christians of all denominations 
 have recognised with increasing conviction that 
 the commission to “go and teach all nations ” 
 involved a double task. Alongside of the work of 
 individual conversion and simultaneously with it 
 an effort must be made to Christianise the corporate 
 life of mankind in all its activities. Recent de- 
 velopments since the industrial revolution, the vast 
 increase of population, the growth of cities, the 
 creation of mass production, the specialisation of 
 effort, and the consequent interdependence of 
 individuals upon each other, have given new sig- 
 nificance to the truth that we are members one of 
 another. The existence of a system and of methods 
 unsatisfying, if not antagonistic to Christian life, 
 constitutes a challenge to the Church. The work 
 of a number of pioneers during the past century 
 has prepared the way for the attempt to examine 
 and test our social life in the light of the principles 
 revealed in Jesus Christ, and to visualise the require- 
 ments of a Christian civilisation. Hitherto such 
 attempts have generally been confined to one or 
 two aspects of citizenship; and, great as has been 
 their value, they have plainly shown the defects of 
 
 Vv 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 sectional study. We cannot Christianise life in 
 compartménts: to reform industry involves the 
 reform of education, of the home life, of politics 
 and of international affairs. What is needed is not 
 a number of isolated and often inconsistent plans 
 appropriate only to a single department of human 
 activity, but an ideal of corporate life constructed 
 on consistent principles and capable of being applied 
 to and fulfilled in every sphere. 
 
 The present series of Reports is a first step in 
 this direction. Each has been drawn up by a 
 Commission representative of the various denomina- 
 tions of British Christians, and containing not only 
 thinkers and students, but men and women of large 
 and differing practical experience. Our endeavour 
 has been both to secure the characteristic contri- 
 butions of each Christian communion so as to gain 
 a vision of the Kingdom of God worthy of our 
 common faith, and also to study the application of 
 the gospel to actual existing conditions—to keep 
 our principles broad and clear and to avoid the 
 danger of Utopianism. We should be the last to 
 claim any large or general measure of success. ‘The 
 task is full of difficulty: often the difficulties have 
 seemed insurmountable. 
 
 But as it has proceeded we have discovered an 
 unexpected agreement, and a sense of fellowship 
 so strong as to make fundamental divergences, where 
 they appeared, matters not for dispute but for frank 
 and sympathetic discussion. Our Reports will not 
 be in any sense a final solution of the problems with 
 which they are concerned. They represent, we 
 believe, an honest effort to see our corporate life 
 
 Vi 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 steadily and whole from the standpoint of Christi- 
 anity; and as such may help to bring to many a 
 clearer and more consistent understanding of that 
 Kingdom for which the Church longs and labours 
 and prays. 
 
 However inadequate our Reports may appear— 
 and in view of the magnitude of the issues under 
 discussion and the infinite grandeur of the Christian 
 gospel inadequacy is inevitable—we cannot be too 
 thankful for the experience of united inquiry and 
 study and fellowship of which they are the fruit. 
 
 It should be understood that these Reports are 
 printed as the Reports of the Commissions only, 
 and any resolutions adopted by the Conference on 
 the basis of these Reports will be found in The 
 Proceedings of C.O.P.E.C., which also contains a 
 General Index to the series of Reports. 
 
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LIST OF COMMISSION MEMBERS 
 
 The Commission responsible for the production of this Report 
 was constituted as follows :— 
 
 Chaivman :—THE Rev. J. VERNON BARTLET, D.D. 
 Professor of Church History, Mansfield College, Oxford. 
 
 Members of the Commission :— 
 
 LICHFIELD, THe Ricut Rev. THe Lorp BIsHoP OF. 
 
 Chairman of Executive Committee of the Industrial Christian 
 Fellowship. 
 
 BAYNES, Norman H., Eso. 
 Reader in the History of the Roman Empire in the University 
 of London. 
 
 KEEBLE, Tue Rev. S. E. 
 Wesleyan Minister; Founder and First President of the 
 Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service; Fernley 
 Lecturer (1921) on “‘ Christian Responsibility for the Social 
 Order”; Author of: Industrial Day Dreams, The Ideal 
 of the Maierial Life, A.B.C. Annotated Bibliography on Social 
 Questions ; Editor of: The Citizen of To-morrow, and The 
 Social Teaching of the Bible. 
 
 LITTLE, Pror. A. G., M.A., F.B.A. 
 Reader in Paleography in the University of Manchester. 
 
 McNABB, THE Rev. FATHER VINCENT, O.P. 
 
 RAVEN, Tue Rev. C. E., D.D. 
 Rector of Bletchingley; sometime Fellow and Dean of 
 Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Author of: What think ye 
 of Christ? Apollinarianism, etc. 
 
 RYDER-SMITH, Tue Rev. C., B.A., D.D. (Lond.). 
 Professor in Theology, Richmond College, Surrey; Author 
 of: The Bible Doctrine of Society, etc. 
 
 1X 
 
LIST OF COMMISSION MEMBERS 
 
 SPENCER, THE Rev. Matcoum, M.A. 
 Secretary of the Free Church Fellowship. 
 
 TAWNEY, R. H., Esa. 
 Lecturer London School of Economics. 
 
 WOOD, H. G., Esg., M.A. 
 Director of Studies, Woodbrooke; Professor of New Yesta- 
 ment Literature and Church History at the Selly Oak 
 Colleges, Birmingham. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Basis . : ; : ; 
 GENERAL PREFACE . y , i 
 
 List or Commission MEMBERS . 4 ; , 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Tue Brarinc or CuRIsTIAN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE ON 
 SocraL RELATIONSHIPS ! . 
 
 SECTION I 
 THE SOCIAL IDEAL IN CHRIST’S OWN TEACHING 
 
 SECTION II 
 THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 (A) Avostozic AND Primitive CHRISTIANITY j 
 
 (B) Tue Earty Parristic Periop: Iren#us to Con- 
 STANTINE . : : : 
 
 e . e 
 
 (C) Tue Larter Parristic Pertop: FRom CoNsTANTINE 
 To GREGORY THE GREAT 
 
 SECTION III 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 (A) Berort Hitpepranp . ; ; : 
 (B) Hinprpranp ‘AND AFTER . , : 
 
 xi 
 
 “eo 
 
 42 
 
 52 
 
 78 
 80 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION IV 
 
 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 SECTION V 
 
 THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH 
 CENTURIES 
 
 (A) Tue Risr or THE New Soctat Orper (1770-1820) . 
 
 (B) Tue Reten oF Inprvipvatism (1820-70) 
 
 (C) Tue Reaction From InDIVIDUALISM (1870-1920) 
 
 SECTION VI 
 RETROSPECT 
 
 xii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 oT, 
 
 12! 
 
 133 
 
 144 
 
 16I | 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Tue BEARING OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT AND 
 PRACTICE ON SociAL RELATIONSHIPS 4 
 
 Tue subject has two aspects, one dealing with the 
 Christian ideal of life, the other with the ways in 
 which that ideal has in fact worked as a power in 
 human society. In the light of both we may see 
 our own present Christian duty more clearly, and 
 how Christianity can most effectively meet the 
 present crisis in the social relations of mankind. 
 
 As regards the Christian social ideal,” it is to be 
 sought in the classic literature of its first and most 
 creative period, the New Testament. Its workings 
 in history need to be studied with special attention 
 to the three great periods of civilisation into which 
 Christian history naturally falls. ‘The first of these 
 is the period during which the Church was forming its 
 ideals of a Christian social order within the ancient 
 world of the Roman Empire, which was, to begin 
 with, an alien environment, but later became a 
 professedly Christian society. ‘This latter phase, 
 in which the ‘Kingdom of God’ is viewed as 
 
 1 For a Bibliography of the Survey as a whole see p. 5, and for 
 more detailed Bibliographies see pp. 25, 73, 95, 117, 158. 
 
 * This subject is more fully treated in the Report of the Com- 
 mission on the Nature of God and His Purpose for the World, 
 
 ch. i. 
 B 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 already present in principle, is reflected in Augustine’s 
 City of God. ‘This great landmark is also the prelude 
 to the next period, the Middle Ages, when efforts 
 were made in Western Christendom to realise 
 Augustine’s ideals under very different political, 
 economic and social conditions. ‘Towards the close 
 of this long period comes a stage of gradual transi- 
 tion, beginning about the fourteenth century, and 
 becoming marked in the next two centuries. But its 
 full effects, constituting a fresh period, the Modern, 
 emerge only gradually. The rise of Capitalist 
 commerce, the Industrial Revolution of the 
 eighteenth century, and the political revolution 
 from its close onwards, for half a century and more, 
 successively reveal this period as an epoch of social 
 change comparable to the two already mentioned. 
 
 The following survey is an attempt to show how 
 Christian social principles have actually been applied 
 in theory or practice during the whole of this long 
 story of past experience. It is put forward with a 
 full sense of its inadequacy, due partly to the 
 difficulty of attaining just perspective, and partly 
 to the danger of overlooking the less obvious 
 tendencies actually at work. Yet, such as it is, 
 it may be better than none. At least it will recall 
 the fact that there is a Christian past which still 
 lives about us and in us, as ideas and usages, power- 
 fully influencing the actual situation. 
 
 Accordingly the purpose of the following pages 
 is, first, to draw out the social principles inherent in 
 the Gospel of Christ and of the first generation of 
 His followers ; and, next, to recall “‘ that there is an 
 
 historical background which should be borne in mind 
 2 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 in any attempt to formulate the application of 
 Christian principles to the practical problems of 
 our own nation and of the present age.” For, as 
 the document! from which the above words are 
 taken (and on which we draw freely throughout, 
 often only with inverted commas in acknowledg- 
 ment) goes on to say, 
 
 “It is the natural disposition of each generation to identify 
 Christianity with those aspects of it which, for one reason or 
 another, happen at the moment to receive most emphasis: to 
 exclude and minimise as unessential or impracticable those 
 elements in Christian thought which it finds uncongenial to its 
 temper, or inconvenient to its habits or disturbing to its peace of 
 mind; to place, as it were, its own gloss upon Christian teaching ; 
 and to regard that gloss as the only natural, sometimes indeed as 
 the only conceivable, interpretation. Of the errors arising from 
 that process of selection and omission, of over-emphasis at one 
 point and under-emphasis at another, knowledge of the past is the 
 natural corrective. . . . It should help to deliver the mind from 
 undue acquiescence in the assumptions of the present, by offering 
 a standard with which the present may be compared, and thus turn 
 the flank of prejudices.” 
 
 In our reading, however, of the past we must 
 remember to allow for variable elements in it. 
 Two variables of the first rank may be cited as 
 examples of the sort of considerations to be borne 
 in mind. One is the degree to which the Christian 
 factor, the Church, has, or has not, been conceived 
 chiefly as an institution armed with authority of 
 
 1 Christianity and Industrial Problems (p. 26). ‘The report of 
 a Commission appointed in 1917 by the Archbishops of Canterbury 
 and York. For the use we make of this document we have the 
 full permission of the Chairman of the Commission and of the 
 publishers of the Report, the Society for Promoting Christian 
 Knowledge. 
 
 3 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 social discipline, whether purely ecclesiastical in 
 its sanctions or with the added coercive legal power 
 of the State. Church and State have acted upon 
 society sometimes as rivals or foes, sometimes as 
 allies, and again in relative mutual independence. 
 Prior to the conversion of Constantine, the State’s 
 influence was totally lacking to the Church, nay, it 
 was ranged against Christian society as such. In 
 the Middle Ages the two were largely unified. Now 
 the time has once more come when the Church is 
 mostly distinct from the State, even where the latter 
 is predominantly Christian in its sentiment and 
 standards. Another variable is the form of organisa- 
 tion which has marked the Church and conditioned 
 its social functioning at different times and places. 
 Both of these are but relative elements in Chris- 
 tianity ; yet they affect the degree to which certain 
 principles have exhibited their distinctive quality and 
 efficiency in practical working. 
 
 Christianity is a religion of the spirit rather than 
 the letter. All attempts to embody the principles 
 of such a religion in the severely conditioned form 
 of ‘working’ social ideals and practices, adapted 
 primarily to the special needs of special times, must. 
 needs involve a contingent or temporary element i in 
 the results. Nor is this all. Even the Church’s 
 social ideal itself was not given to it by its Founder 
 in the definite form of a formal body of principles, 
 but under the concrete form of a personal ministry 
 amid particular and limiting conditions. Ina oe 
 Christ’s own social teaching is historical in form. 
 This means very much. For its practical applica- 
 tions, being primarily for the guidance of those to 
 
 + ; 
 5 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 whom He spoke, must be subject to the whole 
 context of time and place, and so to the general 
 historical law, ‘things so being and remaining’ 
 (rebus sic stantibus). ‘There is laid, then, on the 
 Christian consciousness of every generation the 
 unavoidable duty of interpreting, by the aid of the 
 abiding Spirit of Christ, the inner intention of its 
 Lord’s essential thought, and of reinterpreting its 
 present applications in terms of the changed con- 
 ditions of its own day. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE SURVEY AS A WHOLE! 
 
 For the whole of this survey, the following may be consulted :— 
 
 Christianity and Industrial Problems (Report of the Archbishops’ 
 Committee, $.P.C.K., 1919), ch. iii. 
 
 The Soctal Gospel, Harnack and Herrmann (Williams & Norgate, 
 1907, 225 pp.). 
 
 Christianity and the Social Crisis, W. Rauschenbusch (Macmillan, 
 1912, 430 pp.). 
 
 Christian Responsibility for the Social Order, S. E. Keeble (The 
 Epworth Press, 1922, 306 pp.), Pt. IT. 
 
 Christ and Civilisation (Memorial Hall, 1910, 546 pp.). 
 
 Gesta Christi, G. Loring Brace (Hodder, 1882, 496 pp.). 
 
 Regnum Dei, A. Robertson (Methuen, 1901, 401 pp.). 
 
 The Church and the World in Idea and History, W. Hobhouse 
 (Macmillan, 1910, 411 pp.). 
 
 The Influence of Christianity upon Social and Political Ideas, 
 A. J. Carlyle (Mowbrays, 1912, 129 pp.). 
 
 Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, E. 'Troeltsch 
 (Tiibingen, 1912, 994 pp.). 
 
 See also the Bibliography at the end of the first of the above 
 
 works, 
 
 B. 2 For Bibliographies of the several periods see pp. 25, 73, 95, 
 117, 158. 
 

 
I 
 THE SOCIAL IDEAL IN CHRIST’S OWN TEACHING 
 
CCAS ts 
 WA 
 
 1) 
 ih 
 
 
 
I. THE SOCIAL IDEAL IN CHRIST’S 
 OWN TEACHING! 
 
 Tue foundation of Christian social ethics is the 
 historical account of the teaching and practice 
 of Christ, unfolded and applied in the New 
 Testament and in the practice of the early 
 Church. In approaching, however, Christ’s own 
 teaching and practice, we are met by a serious 
 difficulty. For it is just in the sphere of civic, 
 economic and political relations—with which our 
 Conference most concerns itself—that the teaching 
 of Christ is least explicit and detailed. ‘This was 
 inevitable, His special mission being what it was: 
 moreover, it has saved His Church from the danger 
 of treating what would necessarily have been, after 
 all, relative applications as if absolute laws, binding 
 on all Christians under all conditions. Yet His 
 silence on certain social problems (such as slavery) 
 is striking, and calls for explanation. ‘This lies in 
 the practical form of Christ’s ministry and Gospel. 
 It was relative to a given historical setting both of 
 facts and of ideas, which it takes for granted, and 
 also to a supreme religious crisis which set all 
 human interests and values in a special perspective. 
 This twofold historical situation conditions much 
 of the form of Christ’s social teaching. First, then, 
 we must have before our minds— 
 
 1 For Bibliographical Note on this section see p. 25. 
 9 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (a) The historical background implied in the Old 
 Testament and ‘fudaism—The background taken 
 for granted by Jesus’ explicit teaching as to ‘ the 
 Kingdom of God’ was fundamentally a given social 
 order. ‘ Righteousness’ is the best single word to 
 describe the social doctrine of the Old Testament,} 
 because of its religious tinge. As interpreted by 
 the prophets, it included four qualities—justice, 
 mercy, truth, and peace—each of them answering to 
 some side of the social question, ‘ How ought men 
 to treat each other?’ ‘The ground of the prophets’ 
 demand was always religious; they challenged 
 Israel to be righteous because her God was Himself 
 righteous. Social duty is itself religious: ‘To do 
 justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
 thy God.” This idea pervades the New Testament 
 also: ‘‘ with good will doing service, as unto God 
 and not (only) unto men.” 
 
 Whilst the Old ‘Testament idea of ‘ righteous- 
 ness’ had great moral power, for a time it lacked a 
 due sense of the intrinsic worth of the individual, 
 and therefore of his right to reverential treatment. 
 And when this emerged in the course of Hebrew 
 prophecy, it came through the individual’s relation 
 to God. A man, as such, is of worth to other men 
 because he is of worth to God. 
 
 In modern times thinkers have taken for granted that men are 
 * individual,’ and laboriously proved that they are ‘social.’ In 
 Israel, and indeed in every ancient nation, the process of thought 
 was exactly the opposite. Yet while in it the claims of society were 
 axiomatic, at different times ‘ society meant primarily different 
 
 1 See Christ and Civilisation, ch. i; Ryder Smith, The Bible 
 Doctrine of Society, ch. iii. 
 IO 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 things—the family, the village, the nation. In the last centuries 
 of Old Testament thought, however, another unit of society 
 began to assert itself—the world, or all mankind. But it was a man- 
 kind united by the common worship of Israel’s God, now thought 
 of as ‘ God of the whole earth’ (e. g. Isa. 11. 1-4). 
 
 Here lies the distinctive social concept of the Old 
 Testament: always and everywhere its social 
 teaching is derivative: men’s relations to each 
 other depend upon their relation to God. Further, 
 it is in relation to world-unity that the ‘ Messianic 
 idea’ of Israel, as God’s Anointed Son and Servant, 
 gains much of its social significance. 
 
 Jehovah, the King of His chosen people Israel, was also the Most 
 High, to whom by right belonged the sovereignty of the whole 
 earth, ‘ the nations’ at large. Such wider unity as was attempted by 
 any of these nations, by conquest over others, was based ultimately on 
 _brute force, not on distinctly human or humane qualities (see Dan. 
 vil.). It was the special prerogative of Israel’s God to inspire a true 
 humanity in His own people, and through them in all men. The 
 ‘people of the Most High’ was to become, by a special or super- 
 natural anointing with His Holy Spirit, the vicegerent of God’s 
 effective ‘ Kingdom,’ when He should in fact ‘ reign over all.’? This 
 is the message of the apocalypse in Daniel vii., where Israel is 
 symbolised by a human figure, ‘ one like unto a son of man? —man 
 as planned ‘ in the image of God.’ Another aspect of the vocation 
 of Israel is set forth in Isa. liii, ‘There, in order to fulfil the function 
 assigned to it in God’s providence, Israel as God’s ‘ servant’ 
 becomes fruitful for the blessing of others only through rejection 
 and sacrificial suffering. 
 
 Here we have the historical preparation for the Messianic fulfil- 
 ment of Israel’s ideal vocation in Jesus as the Son of Man, in whom 
 that vocation was representatively realised, and through whom as 
 Head of the New Israel, the Church, it was to attain its final 
 fulfilment.? 
 
 1 This reference to Jesus as ‘ the Son of Man’ holds good on 
 almost any probable view of the exact meaning of that much- 
 debated expression. 
 
 II 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The ‘fulfilment’ in Christ’s teaching of the 
 social preparation in the Old Testament may be 
 traced for each of the three ideas specially named— 
 righteousness, the individual, society. Jesus gave 
 the final definition of ‘ righteousness’ when He 
 selected and fused into one the ‘two great com- 
 mandments’ of love to God and love to one’s 
 fellow. None has ever valued ‘ the individual’ as 
 Jesus did, the basis of His valuation being that every 
 man is ideally a child of God. The final unit of 
 ‘society,’ again, is mankind as destined to become 
 the ‘ Kingdom of God,’ the family of the universal 
 Father. 
 
 (b) Lhe special perspective of ‘fesus’ teaching.— 
 It was for a religious reason that Jesus left on one 
 side certain of the social problems of His own day, 
 
 even as He left most of its political ones ; namely con- 
 
 centration on the special mission He had then to 
 fulfil. But, further, the form in which His teaching 
 appears in the Gospels owes something to another 
 element in the historical situation in Israel, its 
 peculiar religious urgency. ‘This lay in the brevity 
 of the provisional period before the crisis in the 
 coming of the Kingdom which Jesus counted on in 
 some form or other.! This perspective of religious 
 crisis certainly conditions both what appears and 
 does not appear as Christ’s social teaching in the 
 Gospels. What, then, we have chiefly to observe 
 is its spirit ; and this is to be found in the emphasis 
 
 1 The substance of this statement would be accepted by nearly 
 all historical students of the Gospels, whatever their views as to the 
 degree in which current apocalyptic forms of thought may explain 
 the terms and conceptions used by Christ and the Apostles to 
 
 describe the imminent crisis in question. 
 12 
 
 ~ _—— _— 
 ae ee ae ee 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 on certain religious ideas which is distinctive of 
 Christ’s modification of the Jewish tradition on 
 social relations, to which its particular form, as 
 addressed to its actual hearers, was of necessity 
 relative. ‘This special form was determined by 
 the time or ‘season’ of Christ’s ministry in Pales- 
 tine, 7. ¢. the eve of the breaking in of the Messianic 
 ‘ Kingdom of God.’ 
 
 It must never be forgotten that Christ’s social 
 teaching is part of a message of ‘ Repentance,’ 
 a radical change of attitude to God and His will for 
 human life which was needful to secure the setting 
 up on earth of God’s Kingdom or actual reign, on 
 a new basis of spiritual reality. Relative to so 
 unique a situation all was bound to be more or less 
 exceptional, and particularly the relations of the 
 two fundamental factors and values of human well- 
 being, the physical and the spiritual—bodily goods 
 and ‘soul’ or personality.t The balance between 
 these had to be redressed decisively ; and this at a 
 period of crisis meant such emphasis on the higher 
 values as necessarily involved exceptional sub- 
 ordination of the lower ones. ‘There is indeed no 
 ultimate dualism between the two, both being parts 
 of God’s method of producing human children.? 
 But there is a real, though temporary and relative, 
 dualism in their functioning, so long as the uses 
 made of material things remains unadjusted to the 
 well-being of the person as a whole. Accordingly, 
 
 1 ¢ Personality ’ is often the best modern equivalent for Christ’s 
 use of ‘ soul.’ 
 
 2 See the Report on the Nature of God and His Purpose for 
 the World, ch, ii. 
 
 13 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 the negative aspect of renunciation remains still 
 present even after the positive message of the nature 
 and relation of God and man, added by Jesus to the 
 Forerunner’s message, had given the call a new 
 accent, and so turned it as a whole into ‘ Glad News’ 
 or Gospel. 
 
 It was, then, 7 a special historical perspective, 
 that of the inauguration in Israel of ‘ the Kingdom 
 of God’ as the true order of human life, that Christ’s 
 social teaching was originally given; and so it must 
 be read, to be really understood. This explains 
 both Jesus’ silences and the special emphasis in much 
 that He does say. In particular it explains what is 
 so challenging to the modern mind, with its concern 
 for better and more equal social conditions, viz. 
 Christ’s detached attitude towards political, civic 
 and economic interests, and His call at times to 
 renunciation even of family life, for the soul’s good 
 or the Kingdom of God. 
 
 (c) Some points of relative or temporary emphasis.— 
 Christ taught with such emphasis the spiritual gain 
 of freedom from the entanglements of riches, and so 
 the happiness of poverty, that His teaching on this 
 cardinal point is apt to appear paradoxical. As, 
 moreover, it conditioned all His teaching as related 
 to economics and their place in life, and has affected 
 Christian social theory and practice all down the 
 ages, one must deal with this fundamental matter 
 rather fully. 
 
 First, however, the problem must be seen in its true, that is, its 
 historical scope. For us to-day wealth is no mere matter of bodily 
 pleasures or of selfish use of material goods. Apart from the full 
 
 normal enjoyment of the bodily senses (which Jesus traces to God’s 
 fatherly goodness), wealth affords means for the training of the 
 
 14 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 sense of Beauty and the thirst for Truth, and so is instrumental to 
 the soul’s culture. But in this aspect—one not usually present to 
 the mind in Palestine, where art and mental development were not 
 native interests—it was hardly a practical issue for Jesus’ preaching. 
 The issue then narrows itself to wealth as seen in a particular 
 perspective, and to the question, How far, in such a setting, was 
 Jesus’ outlook on life ascetic? 
 
 ‘The way in which Jesus viewed wealth, and so the 
 whole economic order of society, is often misleadingly 
 styled ‘ other-worldly.’ It was simply an essentially 
 religious view of human life—that of the soul’s 
 relation to God and its capacity for sharing His very 
 life—at a special and brief world-crisis. ‘ First 
 things first ’ is the true law of living. As to material 
 things, which “the Gentiles seek after,” as the 
 goods of life, “‘ your heavenly Father knows that ye 
 have need of these things. But seek ye first the 
 Kingdom and His righteousness ; and all these things 
 shall be added unto you. Therefore worry not ”— 
 about them and their amount. As personal, man’s 
 real wealth lies in the quality of his personal life, 
 not in the amount of his material goods (Luke xii. 
 15). Hence he can afford to sit loosely by them. 
 Indeed, only so is he free to find or realise his true 
 self as a person. Material ‘ possessions’ are apt to 
 possess the man himself; and wealth tends to be 
 telied on, instead of God and His fatherly grace, 
 for making life worth living. But to be poor is to 
 feel one’s human dependence.! It prompts the soul 
 to look behind and above the material world to a 
 Higher Power, and to rely on Him for its real good. 
 
 1 Jesus has not in mind the grinding, demoralising poverty so 
 
 rife in modern industrial life, but rather the lot of the normal 
 artisan or peasant-worker. 
 
 15 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 So to do is to be at peace within. Earthly 
 
 ‘treasures’ can neither give nor take away true 
 happiness. 
 
 It was His own joyously sure possession of this 
 religious faith and experience of ‘the poor,’ of 
 whom He was Himself one, that made Jesus preach 
 His ‘Good News’ of the Kingdom as first and 
 foremost for ‘the poor’—in fulfilment of the 
 message of Hebrew prophecy (Luke iv. 18). But no 
 more than the Hebrew prophets did He teach that 
 poverty in itself is man’s true lot. Rather the 
 moderate sufficiency preferred by Hebrew ‘ Wise’ 
 men, the happy mean between ‘riches’ and 
 ‘poverty’? (Prov. xxx. 8 f.), was probably to Jesus 
 also the normal best. But relative to the needs of 
 the hour, and pending those normal conditions which 
 tt was the function of * the Kingdom’ to bring about, 
 ‘the poor,’ as most predisposed to respond to Jesus’ 
 message, were happier in their lot than the rich. 
 For ‘ the rich’ as such were terribly hindered from 
 entering ‘the Kingdom of God’ (Mark x. 25 ff.), 
 the blissful order of man’s perfected relations with 
 God, and with others as His family. Within the 
 Kingdom of God, however, when really come, all 
 anomalies, all dualisms in society—as a brotherhood 
 or commonwealth of persons—must needs cease. 
 Now of all social dualisms, that between rich and 
 poor is the most radical and far-reaching. Hence 
 as a standing breach of love, or deep humansympathy, 
 it cannot accord with the perfected Kingdom of 
 God. When that Kingdom’s coming is complete, 
 
 1 ‘The poor ye have always with you’ ceases to apply just so 
 
 far as the Kingdom has come. 
 16 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 men being completely willing and God’s power 
 fully in play, every anomaly will be at an end. 
 
 That the above view is correct, namely, that Jesus held no 
 ascetic view of material goods as such, is further confirmed by two 
 facts. First, He contrasted His own practice, as non-ascetic, with 
 that of John the Baptist; and next He promised those of His 
 followers who had left their homes or property for the Gospel’s 
 sake a fuller measure of enjoyment of the like goods ‘in the 
 Kingdom,’ here and now—in virtue surely of its spirit of loving 
 fellowship, which would make men share all their blessings. Strictly 
 speaking, then, as is recognised by Troeltsch,! who of recent 
 writers has gone into the matter most carefully, “ Jesus’ preaching 
 is not ascetic.” ‘“ There is no setting aside of sense-life and of 
 enjoyment as such, no glorifying of poverty for its own sake.” 
 His teaching on riches is simply part of ‘ the religious radicalism ” 
 of His message of the imminent ‘ Kingdom of God.’ 
 
 Thus ‘Jesus’ ethics are heroic rather than 
 ascetic.” Such ‘ heroism’ was tempered to human 
 nature by the message of religious trust in God. 
 From this standpoint there follows of itself Jesus’ 
 attitude to State, Society, Labour and Possessions. 
 Of the State there is no talk. “The hopes of 
 Jewish nationalism are decidedly denied”: the 
 ‘Kingdom’ is God’s, not the Jewish people’s—“‘ even 
 if Israel appears as the kernel of the coming world.” 
 
 In such a light the industrial order has for the 
 time practically no importance; while even re- 
 nunciation of all goods may be for some the condition 
 of closer attachment to the lot of missionary dis- 
 cipleship ? proper. Relative to such a message, in 
 
 1 Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912), 
 pp: 45 #. 
 
 2 Such is the true meaning of the case of the ‘ Rich Young Man.’ 
 It is a mistake, as Troeltsch observes (p. 46), to base on it any general 
 view as to Jesus’ teaching on earthly possessions. ‘The demand for 
 
 Cc 17 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 its original historical setting, riches have no positive 
 value, save as means of expressing love to others: 
 otherwise they are a danger to man’s true life. 
 
 Even in its earlier stage, when the prospect of 
 its acceptance by Israel seemed fairest, this Gospel 
 made appeal to the heroic element latent in all men. 
 “Be ye perfect (disciples) after the pattern of the 
 Heavenly Father,” was its note. But as Jesus’ 
 ministry met with more and more opposition from 
 Israel’s religious leaders, emphasis on the call to 
 heroism increased. ‘Thus in the later part of the 
 Gospels—to which the teaching on renunciation of 
 normal social life mainly belongs—the conditions 
 immediately in view are those of a crisis, both for 
 Himself and His disciples—‘* not peace but a sword.’ 
 Only by His own self-renunciation, yea, even unto 
 death, could God’s people actually be redeemed or 
 brought by Divine love to inherit the Kingdom and 
 life eternal, for which thus far they were proving 
 unready. In this path of fruitful self-renunciation 
 Jesus called for the special co-operation of the more 
 devoted of His disciples, those who were able to go 
 all lengths with Him in proclaiming the Kingdom 
 of God (see Luke ix. 57-62). Social duty for those 
 so called to exceptional service was set in a yet 
 higher key, of crisis and urgency. 
 
 While, then, all the social teaching in the Gospels, 
 
 as relative to the supreme religious crisis of human 
 
 their literal renunciation, as also of family ties, seems to have been 
 exceptional, where the ‘heroic’ degree of ‘ following’ was a 
 fitting form of discipleship. ‘ Abstract teaching’ on such a matter 
 was alien to Jesus, who adapted His demands to individual ability | 
 to comply, and therein find gladness and peace. 
 
 18 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 history, calls for some adjustment to other and less 
 exceptional circumstances, this particular part or 
 stage of it needs special transposition into the key 
 of normal conditions, before it is generally applicable 
 in later phases of the one ‘ Kingdom of God.’ 
 
 Such transposition has in part been made during the Christian 
 ages; but in part it has not; for the need and its reason have not 
 been clearly realised prior to the rise of the historic method of study. 
 
 “ Distinguish the times, and the Scriptures will accord,” said 
 St. Augustine, in contrasting the teaching of the Old and New 
 Testaments. The maxim is applicable also to Christ’s differing 
 sayings as to the social conditions and relations of life—sometimes 
 more positive, sometimes more negative or world-renouncing, 
 according to the different contexts! of His ministry. Further, 
 ‘distinguish persons’ is also a needful precept. Naturally, too, 
 such special conditions were temporary, though somewhat analogous 
 situations may recur. 
 
 Our own problem to-day involves answers to such questions as 
 these: What ought to be the normal attitude of Christianity to 
 social relations and their progressive reform? Again, what are the 
 duties proper to the exceptional cases? Until these distinctions 
 are fairly faced, men’s reading of the New Testament, and of the 
 Church’s experience in history, is bound to lead to rather 
 conflicting results. 
 
 (d) The essential principles of Chris’s social 
 teaching. —Having thus reckoned with the historically 
 conditioned, and so far relative and variable, aspects 
 even of Christ’s social teaching, we can now dis- 
 tinguish and deal with its essential underlying 
 principles. ‘These, as representing the spirit of 
 
 1 These, however, are not always preserved exactly in our 
 several Gospels, which here differ a greal deal; so that correction of 
 one by another is sometimes needful in order to reach the original 
 setting and so the real meaning of Christ’s words. Without this, 
 impressions derived from reading the Gospels are largely confused 
 and yield no sure result. 
 
 a9 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Christ’s Gospel, constitute also the essence of 
 Christianity as an abiding leaven of social well-— 
 oye and reform. That Gospel is in itself timeless _ 
 ‘eternal’ in idea. ‘‘ Christ views social oe | 
 mena from above, in the light of His religious vocation. 
 He approaches them from within, through the. 
 development of personality. He judges them ia 
 their end, as contributing to the Kingdom of God.” 
 But as ideals are the great dynamic of radical 
 change, so this religious vision of what ought to be, 
 as God’s will, contained the real potencies of a new 
 social order. | 
 “Four great principles stand out clearly from His 
 teaching. God is our Father and all men are our | 
 brethren. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Life. 
 is the measure of true value. All disciples are | 
 stewards.” 1 ‘Ihe practical efficacy of these ideals, 
 however, depends on their organic unity as rooted 
 in the first of them. | 
 Firstly, “In the world-view of Jesus, God was_ 
 Father, all men were brothers : the relations between - 
 God and man and of men themselves were essentially 
 the same as the relations ina family. Jt was a social 
 world-view. Family affection thus was made by Fesus 
 the type and pattern for all relations between men. 
 Sacrificial love, such as might be shown by a father 
 towards his children, was to be the redeeming force 
 in our human world. ‘That explained why the new 
 type of life was to be established, not by physical 
 
 1 Christianity and Industrial Problems, p. 27. ‘The brief, 
 positive exposition which follows should be read along with that 
 in the Report on the Nature of God and His Purpose for the 
 World, ch. i. 
 
 20 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 force, but by faith, hope and love; by gentleness, 
 kindness, and mutual service; by the inherent 
 power of truth and right.”,+ In so basing His social 
 ethics on the family, the fundamental social unit, 
 Jesus went behind the predatory or competitive 
 type of society, with its ‘ barbarian’ ethics of force. 
 This meant virtually a new type of Social Order for 
 mankind at large, as one great family of God, with 
 Jesus Himself as the typical Son and universal 
 Brother. 
 
 Secondly, we have already seen the sense in which 
 Christ taught that the Kingdom of God was ‘ at 
 hand.’ It was ready on God’s side, in the coming 
 of Christ Himself. But the Kingdom is morally 
 conditioned, and so can actually ‘come’ only as 
 men’s wills are ready to accept the Divine purpose 
 and inspiration. ‘Ihis aspect of the Kingdom, that 
 of human responsibility for its gradual appropriation 
 —at times by minor crises of ‘ creative evolution ’ 
 (like growing seed, Mark iv. 28)—is the one to which 
 normal Christianity belongs. “There is to be a 
 Christian society, a People of God, a Church, which 
 shall be the light, the salt, of human life. But this 
 society is rather the means of realising the Kingdom 
 than the Kingdom itself.” It is the latter’s embodi- 
 ment and witness, a ‘ city set on a hill,’ for all men 
 to see. ‘To the other, or ‘apocalyptic’ aspect of 
 the Kingdom, as ‘ coming’ by one supreme crisis, 
 belongs the birth of the Church at Pentecost. 
 Thenceforth the Church is clearly the primary 
 fulfilment of the Kingdom of God; partly in visible 
 
 1 So the sociologist, C. A. Ellwood, Christianity and Social 
 
 Science (1923), p. 56. 
 21 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 form, as organised, corporate, institutional; partly 
 in more invisible and personal form, as diffused in 
 the souls and lives of its members. In both forms 
 the Church is to Christ as a body to its head, the 
 extension and visible expression of His incarnate life, 
 in spite of all its human imperfections. 
 
 Thirdly, while the Life of the Kingdom is “ life 
 at its highest,” personal “‘ knowledge of God, all 
 human life comes within our Lord’s purpose. Life 
 itself is carefully distinguished from the material 
 means of living: the service of Mammon (wealth) 
 is typical of the kingdom of the world,” as an order 
 of selfish life, alien to the love of God and man. 
 Wealth is dangerous, because hard to handle without 
 loss of sensitiveness to spiritual ends; and so moral 
 “detachment from preoccupation with wealth ” is 
 ever an essential “‘ mark of the subjects of God’s 
 Kingdom.” ‘The true riches are those of personality, 
 manhood “‘in the image of God.” Such wealth 
 derives directly from God, as the Father of spirits ; 
 and makes persons sacred to themselves and to others. 
 Even when the Divine image is not yet realised, its 
 potential presence renders every human being the 
 rightful object of love in the Christian sense. 
 
 Fourthly, then, “men are responsible for their 
 fellows, and for the use of the gifts which they 
 themselves possess.” God alone, in fact, has 
 absolute property rights: all human possessions, 
 whether material goods or the mental ability by 
 which these are obtained from God’s store in Nature, 
 are held on trust for His purposes of common good 
 for His whole human family. Hence in every station 
 
 in life there must be fidelity, and not least in the use 
 ’ 22 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 of material things. For these, though of lesser 
 value and most completely ‘ Another’s,’ are the test 
 of a man’s fitness to be ‘ entrusted’ with ‘ the true 
 riches ’ of the soul, which are, under God, more one’s 
 own.! ‘Thus in all relations, with material things 
 as well as with persons, man “ is capable of fellowship 
 with God; and the dominion of the spiritual must 
 be extended over the whole of man’s life in the 
 world.”? So too all the distinctions which cause 
 division between men—possessions (material and 
 mental), class, culture, nationality, sex—lose their 
 divisive effect in the Kingdom of God, especially 
 in the light of its Head, who could say, “‘ I am in the 
 midst of you as he that serveth.” 
 
 Thus in all spheres men are to strive after the true 
 life, alike for themselves and for others, in dependence 
 on a living God. “Not self-development, but 
 mutual service, is to be the law of human life.” 
 Love to one’s fellow-men—that sacred ‘ enthusiasm 
 of humanity,’ inspired by faith in God’s love to 
 every soul of man, which the author of Ecce Homo 
 rightly depicted as the distinctive Christian atti- 
 tude, is the all-embracing motive of the Kingdom 
 of God on its social side, as the Family of God. 
 Brotherliness, then, is the keynote of all Christian 
 conduct, as the earliest synonym for the Church, 
 ‘The Brotherhood,’ amply proves. 
 
 At no point does the newness and profound social 
 effect of Jesus’ principles come out more manifestly 
 than in His attitude to women and children. As a 
 result, the estimate of womanhood has for Christians 
 come to be recognised as a crucial test of the real 
 
 1 Luke xvi. 10-12. 
 23 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 humanity of any civilisation. ‘The female sex,” 
 says Ecce Homo, “in which antiquity—Jewish as 
 well as non-Jewish—saw nothing but inferiority, 
 was understood for the first time by Christ. His 
 treatment brought out its characteristics, its 
 superiorities, its peculiar power of gratitude and 
 self-devotion.” Jesus’ free brotherly (see Mark 111. 
 34) relations with women of all kinds in the Gospels 
 make an epoch in the spiritual history of humanity. 
 Henceforth woman was revealed as man’s co-equal 
 helpmate, not only in body but also in soul.t 
 
 Finally, and very characteristically, the social and 
 the individual aspects of human life are treated as 
 mutually implying each other in the Kingdom of 
 God. ‘This supreme good, as through and through 
 personal, at once transcends and unites Collectivism 
 and Individualism, as one-sided ideals in social 
 organisation. 
 
 Such, then, are the principles or ‘ pattern ideas ’ 
 by which a social order claiming to be Christian 
 must be tested. In their light we have now to 
 review the record of Christendom down the ages, 
 asking, How far and in what ways has the special 
 Christian society, the Church, applied or attempted 
 to apply these master ideas of the Gospel to its own 
 life or that of society at large? 
 
 1 Compare the stories of the woman of Samaria, of Mary of 
 Bethany in Luke x. 39-42, and of the woman in the feast of Simon 
 of Bethany. Incontrast to this, ‘ women, slaves and children,’ were 
 classed together in Judaism as on a lower religious level than free 
 men. 
 
 24 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF 
 CHRIST 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount, C. Gore (Murray, 1899, 218 pp.). 
 
 The Social Gospel, Harnack and Herrmann (Williams and Norgate, 
 1907, 225 pp.), chs. ii, ix, xi. 
 
 Christ and Civilization (as above, p. 5), chs. i-ii. 
 
 The Bible Doctrine of Society, C. Ryder Smith (T. and T. Clark, 
 1920, 400 pp.), ch. v. 
 
 Ecce Homo, J. R. Seeley (Macmillan, 1900, 370 pp.). 
 
 The Social Teaching of Fesus, Shailer Mathews (Macmillan Co., 
 New York, 1902, 235 pp.). 
 
 25 
 

 
IT 
 THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
Pes 
 «OR Wie 
 
 Bens wi % F 
 a Pea et 
 
 
 
IJ. THE ANCIENT PERIOD! 
 
 (A) Apostotic AND Primitive CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Rexiciovs social teaching owes its special practical 
 efficacy to its super-temporal sanction. Here Chris- 
 tianity means ultimately Christ; and His social 
 teaching was made more effective among His early 
 followers by their vivid faith in His person, as God 
 ‘manifest in the flesh —full human nature. The 
 Incarnation did away, in principle, with the oppo- 
 sition in man’s thoughts between the Divine and 
 the human, the spiritual and the material, and 
 between religious duty, on the one hand, and moral 
 or social duty on the other. Human life in all its 
 relations became the sphere of religious loyalty, 
 viewed as the filial attitude to God and His all- 
 inclusive will of Love. ‘* Be ye imitators of God, 
 as beloved children; and walk in love, even as 
 Christ also loved you.” ‘These words are St. Paul’s 
 preface to a detailed lesson in every-day social con- 
 duct. Such religious faith ‘ made all things new.’ | 
 The hallowing light of Divine and redemptive love 
 fell on all human beings and the Christian’s relations 
 to them. ‘“ Thus the Incarnation is the inexhaust- 
 ible spring of brotherhood.” 
 
 (a) The social life of the early Christian com- 
 
 1 For Bibliographical notes for this period see p. 73. 
 2 Eph. ver f. 
 
 a 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 munity.—The social life of primitive Christianity, 
 marked as it was by an intense corporate unity, 
 was the natural expression of a sense of sharing in 
 common the Divine power. Their fellowship was 
 ‘in Holy Spirit,’ inspired in the most literal sense. 
 Springing from the love of God as revealed in 
 Christ, it welled up as enthusiastic love of their 
 fellows in this sacred experience; and the sense of 
 ‘community’ (kotnonia) or spiritual brotherhood 
 with all such overflowed every barrier of self- 
 interest, seeking the completest possible outward 
 forms of expression. ‘Thus, to those who were ‘ of 
 one heart and soul,’ it was simply artificial not to 
 hold what each possessed, alike of spiritual and 
 material goods, as for the benefit and use of all the 
 family of God. ‘For if we are fellows in that 
 which is imperishable, how much more in things 
 perishable ? ”? (Didache, iv. 8). 
 
 Such was the logic of the heart as inspired by 
 Christian faith; and on this it acted, and at first 
 without reflective reserve. Herein lies the social 
 meaning of Pentecost, the fundamental case of 
 “ outpouring ’ of the new Christian experience. And 
 as long as Christian social relations were viewed 
 simply as one aspect of such ‘fellowship of the 
 Spirit ? in the Community or People of God, await- 
 ing the consummation of His ‘ Kingdom,’ Chris- 
 tianity remains of the primitive type, of which the 
 Apostolic age is the classic form. 
 
 There was nothing vague or sentimental in the 
 way the earliest Christians understood and applied 
 
 1 See the essay by C. A. Scott, in the volume entitled The 
 Spirit. 
 
 30 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 the principle of brotherly kindness. To them 
 *“the Christian life was the true human life, and 
 Christians become true men in proportion as they 
 live up toit. All the relations of life, being baptised 
 into Christ, become parts and particular modes of 
 Christian membership.” 1 ‘The sin from which 
 they are saved is self-assertion in relation to God, 
 selfishness in relation to men.” ? ‘ Fellowship with 
 the father’ implies fellowship with one another at 
 every point of contact. ‘* As we have occasion, let 
 us work that which is good towards all men, and 
 especially toward them that are of the household of 
 the faith.” All Christian living is Divine service, 
 even the lot of slaves, who should perform their 
 tasks ‘with goodwill, as unto the Lord and not 
 (merely) unto men.’ For so, ‘ by showing all good 
 fidelity,’ they could in all things ‘ adorn ’ the Gospel 
 in the eyes of those who as yet were ‘ without.’ 
 ‘Love of the brethren’ expressed itself within 
 the Christian society itself by wonderful fellowship 
 in the use of this world’s goods. Besides the special 
 case of the mother Church at Jerusalem, practical 
 community in use prevailed in varied forms and 
 degrees. One form was the ‘ love-feast,’ both of 
 the local Church as such and of a more domestic 
 type. Christian hospitality and care for the poor 
 were treated as vital. Further, while early guarding 
 against abuse of its charity by idlers, the Church 
 felt bound to find work for its members who lacked 
 employment: ‘“‘to the workman, work; to him 
 
 1 Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, pp. 228 f. 
 2 Christianity and Industrial Problems, p. 28: Rom. xii. 1 f.; 
 Eph. vi. 7; 1 Peter ii. 18 (Moffatt); ‘Titus ii. Io. 
 
 31 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 who cannot work, mercy (alms). Both were but 
 forms of the justice of the Golden Rule. On the 
 other hand, the piling up of riches was viewed as 
 involving breach of such justice; and so, like luxury 
 in the use of wealth, it was alien to the love of 
 God.” : 
 
 ** Hence though there is in the New Testament,” 
 and in primitive Christianity generally, “ no hint of 
 revolutionary changes in the existing political and 
 social order; though St. Paul and St. Peter enjoin 
 loyal obedience to the ‘ powers that be’ (unless such 
 obedience clearly means disobeying God); very 
 powerful solvents of the established social system 
 were nevertheless set to work.” For “ the Gospel 
 
 . spiritualises the irresistible impulse which draws 
 one man to another. In this way it essays to recast 
 contemporary society.” 3 
 
 (b) Hindrances to its complete operation.—Here we 
 touch a serious question for the influence of the 
 ancient Church on social relations. The fact 
 that Roman law, while standing on the whole for 
 justice and order, was severe on all movements 
 seeming to threaten the State’s stability by anything 
 like anarchist or immoral innovations, was itself 
 reason enough for not challenging certain social 
 evils, due to a non-Christian lack of regard for the 
 sanctity of human life. This explains the flagrant 
 anomaly, as it seems at first, between Christian 
 
 1 2 Thess. iii. 10 ff.; Pseudo-Clement to Fames, 8; cf. Didache, 
 ae 
 2 James v. 4, iv. 1-6; 1 John iii. 17. 
 3 Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity, Vol. I. 
 p. 185. 
 32 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 theory and practice even in the New Testament, 
 its acquiescence in slavery for the time being. It 
 comes under the general rule, “‘ Meantime go on in 
 the lot wherein God’s call came and was received ” ; 
 and so the Apostle Paul does not insist that even 
 the Christian master shall free Philemon, a brother 
 in Christ. If, however, a slave be offered his 
 freedom, he had better embrace the chance,! since 
 this is allowable even in pagan eyes, and will not be 
 judged revolutionary. Such a policy seemed doubly 
 expedient when the existing world-order was ex- 
 pected soon to be done away by the visible return 
 of Christ. In such a perspective the risks of any 
 radical attempts at reform of the whole social or 
 economic framework did not seem worth running; 
 while for Christians themselves the new joy and 
 hope were enough to transfigure for the ‘short 
 time ’ all outward lots. 
 
 Similarly the brief and provisional nature of the 
 last hour of ‘ distress,’ the darkness before the dawn 
 (now practically breaking), settled the attitude of 
 primitive Christians to all the normal experiences 
 of life—sorrow, joy, acquiring of material goods— 
 in a word, the use of the material world, and espe- 
 cially the married state. ‘For the present phase 
 of this world is passing away.’ How soon it might 
 be gone, who could say? ‘The right course, then, 
 was to avoid all needless anxiety and diversion of 
 thought from ‘ pleasing the Lord,’ during the few 
 days ere His ‘appearing,’ by abstinence from the full 
 normal enjoyment of the life of the senses and feelings. 
 
 Accordingly only to this extent, viz. as an excep- 
 
 1 t Cor. vii. 17-24. The tense of ‘ use’ implies a single action. 
 
 D 33 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 tional measure for a brief season, was the social 
 ideal of Apostolic and early Christianity ‘ other- 
 worldly ’ and ascetic. Save for this, and until it 
 felt the influence of non-Biblical thought, the 
 normal application of its principles (apart from 
 individual vocation) was quite different ; that is, it 
 acted redemptively on the whole of normal human 
 life. But this, its inherent tendency, could not 
 take full effect until apocalyptic millennarianism, on 
 the one hand—which, unlike St. Paul, realised only 
 the negative or brute-force aspect of the Roman 
 Empire in coercing even conscience—and, on the 
 other, the hostility of the Roman Empire, ceased to 
 hinder its operation. By that time the spirit of 
 primitive Christianity had already waned, and with 
 it any instinct for radical social reform. 
 
 (c) Lhe Family the primary sphere of Christian 
 influence.—From the first, however, there was little 
 to prevent the full application of Christian prin- 
 ciples to the prime unit of social life, the family. 
 Here the Gospel at once established its stronghold, 
 and has maintained it down to our day. Thus 
 social life was regenerated at least at its prime 
 spring. ‘This was true not only of marriage, but 
 also of the parental relation, through the new sense 
 of the sanctity of human life as such, even in infancy 
 and childhood, and the spiritualising of natural love. 
 “ Fathers, avoid irritating your children, in case they 
 get dispirited ” (Col. iii. 21, Moffatt), strikes a new 
 note of considerateness, even if it had a long struggle 
 yet to wage with the old conception of absolute 
 paternal rights (patria potestas), entrenched in 
 human nature. Slavery, too, in the atmosphere of 
 
 34 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 the Christian household, lost its worst effects on 
 self-respect and character. 
 
 That the regeneration of human society should 
 begin with the family, was inherent in the very 
 nature of Christianity. It sees in humanity essen- 
 tially the earthly family of God, ‘ the Father from 
 whom every family on earth derives its name and 
 nature’; ‘ For we are His offspring’; and God’s 
 paternity being the prototype of the human, with 
 the full revelation of men’s relation to God the 
 true idea of the family began to be realised. As 
 the Christian idea of God blends the notions of 
 authority and love, so these two elements unite in 
 the true Christian home. But older and more one- 
 sided notions of authority were deeply rooted in 
 men’s minds, and died hard, especially as Roman 
 legalism and Imperialism reacted in such a way as 
 to obscure Christ’s idea of God as Father, and of 
 the methods by which His love seeks its ends. 
 
 (d) Wider Spheres of Christian Influence—Here 
 we meet a principle which needs to be borne in mind 
 throughout our review. One can form no just 
 estimate of the potential energy of Christian ideas, 
 or of the actual energy generated by them in 
 Christians, unless one reckons with the strength of 
 the opposing ideas already in possession of the social 
 order. Beyond the wis inertie of age-long pagan 
 custom there was the subtly pervasive influence of 
 the system of education based on the classical litera- 
 ture, ever by suggestion counter-working the new 
 ideas and their social applications. Hence uncon- 
 scious dilution, if not worse, of Christian ideas in 
 
 1 Eph. iii. 15, Moffatt’s translation. 
 35 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 their progress outwards, from the family sphere 
 into the order of pagan society; and then tradition, 
 so powerful in religion, came in to stereotype the 
 imperfect work thus far achieved, and so arrest the 
 leavening action of Christ’s original Gospel. 
 Against this we have to see the early Church’s 
 care to educate its converts and children in social 
 ethics. Pliny, the Roman governor of Bythynia, 
 ¢. A.D. 112, reports that the Christians in their 
 early morning worship “ pledge themselves with a 
 religious vow (sacramentum), not to any crime, but 
 against theft, robbery, adultery, breach of trust or 
 denial of a deposit when claimed.” ‘These ideals 
 probably formed part of the instruction or * cate- 
 chism’? in Christian living given to candidates for 
 admission to the Church before baptism, in which 
 they vowed obedience to the terms of their new 
 service,! much as soldiers took the military oath of 
 fealty. The old social attitude renounced was the 
 self-seeking and ‘ over-reaching temper ’ (pleonexia), 
 and the new was ‘love of man’ (philanthropy), as 
 it is put in a primitive manual of applied Chris- 
 tianity.2 Such love, as identifying a man witl 
 God’s interests in his fellows, was felt to contair 
 the promise and potency of all right social relations 
 A Christian apologist ® of the second century 
 could claim, that ‘ Christians in their lives surpas: 
 the laws.’ But owing to the illegal position of the 
 
 1 Renouncing the old, as the ‘way of death,’ and bindin; 
 themselves to the ‘ way of life,’ as set forth in the Didache, 1.-vii. 
 and as Justin, Apol. 1. 15 f., also implies. 
 
 2 The Didascalia, Book I, written down not long after a.p. 25¢ 
 
 3 Jo Diognetus, 5. 
 
 36 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 Church from the first (down to the time of Con- 
 stantine), Christians had no responsibility for the 
 laws, whether social or economic; and so could 
 only make the best of such as existed, save within 
 the special sphere of Church fellowship. But in 
 ‘the holy Church’ itself, the ‘law of Christ’ 
 and its ideals of beneficence and social purity— 
 both rooted in mutual love—held sway, both in 
 aheory and practice, being upheld by corporate 
 action and discipline. This appears in the con- 
 ditions of admission to the catechumenate prepara- 
 ‘tory to baptism—including a long list of trades and 
 -avocations judged inconsistent with Church prin- 
 ciples; and again in the withdrawal of ‘ holy 
 Communion,’ in which Church membership culmi- 
 nated, from those guilty of serious breaches of its 
 essential loyalties.? 
 
 (e) Lhe soctal spirit of Eucharistic worship.2—At 
 the centre of this distinctive life of fellowship in 
 Christ stood ‘the Eucharist.’ In this most solemn 
 yet most joyous act of Thanksgiving, in memory of 
 and in vital union with the sacrifice of Christ, the 
 new Head of humanity, the Church offered itself as 
 well as its, gifts for God’s service in the needy ones 
 of His people—and even beyond its borders—as its 
 ‘sacrifice of praise.’ Strikingly social in form, as 
 well as in idea,® at the first and for some time after 
 
 1 See ‘Terms of Communion’ in The Early History of the 
 Church and its Ministry. 
 
 2 It is outside our province, of course, to speak of other sides 
 of the Eucharistic worship. 
 
 3 Witness ‘ the kiss of peace’ with which it opened, meant to 
 guarantee that their ‘ Sacrifice’ be not profaned by any ill-will 
 (cf. Didache, xiv.). 
 
 37 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (as the Love-feast, detached from it, continued to 
 witness), this central act of ‘holy Communion’ 
 never ceased to emphasise the social function of the 
 Church by its solemn prayer of Intercession for ‘ all 
 sorts and conditions of men.’ We can trace this all 
 along, from the close of the first century, when the 
 Roman Church ! asks that those to whom God has 
 ‘given the authority of sovereignty’ may ‘ ad- 
 minister the leadership given them without stum- 
 bling,’ and so obtain His favour ; and begs 2 * concord 
 and peace ’” both for themselves and ‘ for all dwellers 
 on earth.’ | 
 Further, by its witness to the thought, ‘ of Thine 
 own we give Thee,’ the Eucharist helped to foster 
 the Christian sense of holding all—time, talents, 
 and material possessions—in trust for God and for 
 the good of men. ‘This is the most radical and far- 
 reaching of all social ideals and motives, and the 
 one on which there is the most impressive unanimity 
 among writers of the ancient Church. Nor is there 
 lacking evidence of a wide practical response from 
 the general Christian conscience to its calls, along the 
 lines of duty to one’s neighbour as then understood. 
 
 (f) Certain kindred tdeas at work in society out- 
 side.—Before describing, however, the Christian 
 view of life as a stewardship, something must be 
 said as to ideas at work in certain non-Christian 
 circles that were largely akin, in their humanising 
 
 1 Epistle of Clement, 61. 
 
 2 So Ignatius bids the Ephesian Church “ pray without ceasing 
 for the rest of mankind—for there is in them a hope of repentance— 
 that they may find God. ‘Therefore allow them to be taught at 
 least by your deeds. . . . And be not eager to imitate them in 
 
 return. Let us show ourselves their brothers by forbearance.” 
 38 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 tendency, to the social principles of the Gospel. 
 We begin to get hints of this in the Christian 
 Apologists of the middle of the second century, 
 who are transitional between Primitive Christianity 
 and the earlier type of Catholic Christianity—one 
 more naturalised to its environment. During this 
 earlier Patristic period, from Ireneus to Nicza, 
 there was going on a process of largely unconscious 
 mutual influence, the effects of which come to the 
 surface only under the changed outward relations 
 of the later epoch. To both, however, we may 
 apply, for our present purpose, the famous aphorism 
 of Rothe: “The ancient world built up the 
 Catholic Church on the foundation of the Gospel, 
 and in so doing built itself bankrupt.” At this 
 point, then, it may be well to notice briefly the 
 chief ideas working parallel, as it were, to those of 
 the Gospel, which the Church adapted to its own 
 uses in varying degrees, from the latter half of the 
 second century onwards. ‘These form part of 
 what a Christian thinker, Eusebius, later on called 
 the general providential ‘Preparation for the 
 Gospel.’ 
 
 The ideas in question, which cultured Christians 
 came in time to recognise as of positive worth, as 
 part of what God had imparted even to pagan 
 society, were not those on which that society 
 actually rested. ‘They were what a small minority 
 of philosophers, largely in protest against polytheism 
 and many of its social fruits, had thought out and 
 begun to apply to their own conduct. ‘They were 
 partly due to the shock to the narrow and only 
 half-social notions of man—as separated off by race 
 
 39 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 and local customs into sections, each ‘ foreign’ to 
 the other—which came with the Empire of Alex- 
 ander and its more ‘cosmopolitan’ culture. The 
 universal idea of ‘man’ as man, which gradually 
 emerged in certain philosophic minds, had also its 
 religious, or rather theological, aspect in a mono- 
 theistic type of natural theology or monistic 
 philosophy. This, for men of Platonic or Stoic 
 culture—to name the two chief schools in question, 
 amid the composite thinking of the age when 
 Christianity appeared—lay behind all polytheisms. 
 Thus a new sense arose of the value of the individual, 
 as the unit of world-citizenship. Nay, it was to 
 the universal ‘ city of God,’ behind all that is local 
 and relative in life, that man as man belonged by 
 Divine ordering, according to the law of nature and 
 so of God, as distinct from all variable human law 
 of nation, race, or city. By this Law of Nature, 
 then, as a synonym for ideal Reason, and its doc- 
 trine of equality among men as rational beings, the 
 conventional laws governing the status and relations 
 of the sexes, the family, slavery and even private 
 property were all subject to testing and revision. 
 Such was the social ideal shared by a Cicero, a 
 Seneca, an Epictetus, and a Marcus Aurelius; and 
 so far we seem to have already the theoretic basis 
 for a world-wide commonwealth of humanity, a 
 social order with strong emphasis on the individual 
 and his self-realisation as a rational being. But in 
 practice the Stoic could not think of any radical 
 change in the actual order of human relations 
 brought about by human initiative. His doctrine 
 of Fate, or the conditions of individual life as fixed 
 40 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 by Divine decree, came in as a barrier to the trans- 
 formation of society. 
 
 Here, then, was a parallel development and a 
 potential ally. ‘True, it lacked certain elements in 
 the Christian view of the individual, such as his 
 enhanced value for others, due to the Christian idea 
 of God as personal and loving each and all, and 
 particularly as revealed in redemptive action by the 
 Incarnation and Passion. Such a comparison, too, 
 by the method of difference casts strong light on 
 the greater social efficacy of Christianity—as appeal- 
 ing to the whole man, heart as well as head—when 
 compared with current philosophies, even the reli- 
 gious philosophy of Neo-Platonism, which, with the 
 third century, became its conscious rival. Yet the 
 Stoic philosophy had some practical effect on social 
 relations through the influence of the great jurists 
 of the end of the second century and onwards, who 
 gradually softened the less humane features of 
 Roman law. And it would be a partial view of the 
 facts to overlook the contribution made by such a 
 philosophic preparation for the Gospel, which came 
 ‘in the fullness of the time’ as a supreme new 
 creative power. 
 
 Indeed, much of the difference in the outlook of 
 the central body of Christians on the world generally 
 and their life in it, before and after this transition 
 period of the Apologists, may be traced to such 
 Greco-Roman philosophy,—a mixture of Stoic and 
 Platonic ideas,—as the Christian Apologists adopt as 
 common to them and those they address. Before, 
 the outlook is Jewish and eschatological in form ; 
 after, it is largely non-Jewish and philosophic, in 
 
 41 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 terms of the Law of Nature as Reason, and of man as 
 akin thereto, as a rational being. 
 
 So much it seemed needful to say somewhere, 
 touching the widening outlook of Christianity, as 
 from small beginnings, and often under crude enough 
 conceptual forms, it won its way by purely spiritual 
 means. By persuading the conscience and reason 
 of man, it won control of the mighty Roman 
 Empire, itself using force in defence of a social 
 order the well-being of which it long thought 
 threatened by the ‘ revolutionary’ principles of an 
 alien faith. Christianity overcame spiritually; but 
 not before it had learned how to overcome its own 
 limitations, its first and cruder apprehension of what 
 it had received of God, and so to discern ‘ the soul 
 of good ” in that ‘ world ’ of which the first Christians 
 were able to perceive only the evil or God-denying 
 aspect. By the aid of this further light, the leading 
 minds of the Church were able to see further into 
 the nature of the Gospel and of the world of men, 
 and to read more fully God’s purposes in their 
 mutual relations. Surely a lesson for all ages, and 
 for ours. 
 
 (B) Tue Earty Patristic Pertop: Irenmus To 
 CoNSTANTINE 
 
 What has just been said helps to explain the 
 different attitude to the order of society, and the 
 problems of social ethics, which marks the next stage 
 of Christian development. It is more reflective and 
 so more discriminating. Space will not allow of full 
 
 42 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 illustration. It must suffice to select as typical the 
 manner in which the Church then applied its 
 religious principles, especially stewardship in the use 
 of all God’s gifts, in its theory and practice as to 
 property. 
 
 (a) The Christian view of property, and the soctal 
 principles involved.—Here its basal conviction still 
 was, ‘We are our brothers’ keepers.’ Thus, even 
 late in the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus 
 cites (Oration xiv.) with approval an early, perhaps 
 second-century, Preaching of Peter as follows : 
 
 “Rich is that man who pities many, andgin imitation of God 
 oestows from what he hath; for God giveth all things to all from 
 His own creatures. Understand, then, ye rich, that ye are in 
 juty bound to do service, having received more than ye yourselves 
 need. Learn that to others is lacking that wherein you super- 
 ubound. Be ashamed of holding fast what belongs to others. 
 [mitate God’s equity, and none shall be poor.” 
 
 So Irenzeus more generally: 1 ‘‘ Wherein any can 
 Jo good to his neighbours and does it not, he shall 
 be reckoned alien to the Lord’s love.”? Such was 
 the Christian law of life. The only open questions 
 were, How most wisely? How, in particular, out- 
 side the safeguards of the Christian brotherhood ? 
 
 The answer to the first was, * To the workman, 
 work; to him who cannot work, mercy (alms).” 
 Alms, too, were but a form of justice: “to retain 
 more property than we strictly need is a violation 
 of justice and not merely a failure to perform a 
 work of supererogation.” * This is stated by several 
 Fathers, notably by Lactantius, whose Divine Inst1- 
 
 1 Frag. 10, ed. Harvey, il. 477. 
 2 Bp. Gore, in Property, its Duties and Rights, p. xiv. 
 
 43 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 tutes (c. A.D. 300) may be taken as the clearest 
 expression of the whole Christian theory 4 of social 
 justice. Justice is equity (equitas) between persons, 
 who as such have equal value in the eye of their 
 Maker and Father. ‘Do to others as ye would 
 have them do to you” is essential justice, which is 
 itself the bond of society. 
 
 “Its fountain head ” is in piety, as dutiful knowledge of God: 
 *¢ all its force and method (razzo) is in equity.”” ‘‘ He isignorant of 
 justice,” in the full sense, “‘ who has not religious regard for God. 
 For how can he know it in itself who is ignorant of its source? ” ? 
 None is to God a slave, none his master. For lack of such a living 
 faith in one personal God and Father, the Greeks and Romans 
 have failed to attain social justice. For they have many grades 
 among men, extending from poor to rich, from humble to 
 exalted, and are content to tolerate without scruple inequalities 
 in outward condition and opportunity, ignoring the equality of 
 essential human nature and of our birth into this world. 
 
 The spirit which recognises such equity between 
 man and man is called by Lactantius humanttas, 
 humaneness. 
 
 It is only such full and positive well-doing wherever need 
 exists and one can help from one’s own resources, and not mere 
 abstinence from conscious injury, or aid given in exceptional crises, 
 that satisfies ‘ that true and genuine justice’ which Cicero dreams 
 of, but ‘ the concrete and clearly expressed likeness’? of which he 
 regards as beyond human reach. It is just such a concrete ideal 
 of justice that has been revealed and brought within the reach of 
 
 1 That is was typical of the ancient Church may be seen from 
 quotations in Property, pp. 98-107. 
 
 2 This conception Lactantius develops in a striking simile. 
 Knowledge of God is to the organism of justice, or true morality, 
 as the head to the body, the source of life and intelligence and all 
 the virtues, if these are to exist in organic unity and vital energy 
 (vi. 9). 
 
 44 
 
 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 man, according to Lactantius, in the Gospel of Christ, who has 
 given absolute value to humanity as related to God, even in the 
 most despised of men. “ But in what does the principle of justice 
 consist more than in this, that what is afforded to our friends 
 through affection, that we should afford to strangers through 
 humaneness?) And this is after all afforded to God, to whom a 
 just deed is the dearest of sacrifices.” 
 
 From all this we get some inkling of the spirit 
 dynamic for radical reform which lay in the Church, 
 largely inoperative during the centuries of repression 
 by an alien State, until it had lost much of its 
 original vision and readiness for insistent action. 
 This lay in the passion for equity between man and 
 man, inspired by what Lactantius calls ‘ humanity,’ 
 due to a sense of the Divine origin and destiny of 
 all men and women. It is just what Ecce Homo 
 called ‘the enthusiasm of humanity’ underlying 
 Jesus’? own Gospel. And just as the modern student 
 of the Gospels saw in it the fruitful principle from 
 which Christians were meant by their Master to 
 deduce all social relations, so did the ancient Chris- 
 tian, writing on the eve of Constantine’s adhesion 
 to Christianity, see in it the one religion fitted to 
 supply a better moral basis to social order than the 
 existing State religion could furnish. 
 
 It seemed better to quote thus fully Lactantius’ 
 connected statement on Christian social principles 
 than to cite isolated sentences from writers of 
 various dates. One may add that, while viewing the 
 devotion of property to philanthropic uses as a 
 ‘sacrifice’ to God, the ancient Church was very 
 sensitive about the means by which property or 
 money was acquired. ‘Thus it refused to receive 
 for God’s service—especially the relief of the needy, 
 
 45 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 conceived of as God’s special ‘ altar’ for acceptable 
 sacrifices—anything made from morally doubtful 
 trades, or to accept as members those who persisted 
 in them. Further, any forms of industry felt to 
 involve over-reaching or oppression of persons were 
 condemned. Among forms of tainted money the 
 Church reckoned usury, mainly having in mind the 
 poorer class of borrower in time of distress, who 
 could ill afford to pay the high current rate of 
 interest, and often fell as a debtor into the power 
 of the lender. The lending of capital on terms 
 offering good chances of repayment was not then 
 in question. In the matter of usury, then, we have 
 an instance of the Christian conscience placing the 
 use of property under the law of justice that is also 
 sympathy. On the other hand, it illustrates also 
 the fact that certain Christian judgments are relative 
 to temporary economic conditions, and must vary 
 with economic theory, ¢.g. of money as capital. 
 As it was, interest on its use was sharply distin- 
 guished from house-rent; while the modern mind 
 sees the matter more truly. 
 
 (b) Limitations of the above in certain circles—So 
 far we have been dealing with the more positive 
 aspect of the early Christian idea of property and 
 its social use. But there are certain limitations 
 under which these ideas operated among Christians 
 both under the Roman Empire and in the succeeding 
 period. 
 
 (1) One of these was the feeling that riches as 
 
 1 Cf. the Didascalia, iv. 5-6 (Apost. Const., iv. 6). 
 2 Cf. Gregory Naz., Oration xvi. 18, “ Farming not the land 
 but the necessity of the needy.” 
 
 46 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 such were never allowable for the true Christian, 
 even to administer as a permanent trust: rather let 
 him divest himself forthwith of so great a danger 
 to his salvation. ‘This reading of Christ’s teaching 
 is implied in a tractate by Clement of Alexandria, 
 who sets himself to modify it by boldly discussing 
 the question, Who is the rich man that is saved? 
 But in so doing he shows how strong was the other 
 feeling in the Church of his day. And in fact 
 Clement’s own view was never accepted in the 
 ancient Church, the possession of wealth being 
 rather condoned as a concession—and a risky one— 
 to men aiming only at the second-rate type of 
 Christian life, as yet to be explained. ‘To Clement, 
 however, there was a type of rich man who realises 
 the very highest ideal of personal social life. Every- 
 thing depends on the motive, the attitude of will to 
 wealth. To judge otherwise would be to make 
 impossible even the habit of sharing one’s goods 
 with others. 
 
 *“* Wealth which benefits one’s neighbours also is not to be dis- 
 carded. For it is ‘wealth’ as being useful. It is, in fact, like 
 some material or instrument to be turned to good use by those 
 
 who know how. . . . Such an instrument is riches also. ‘Thou 
 canst use it justly: to righteousness it is subservient. For its 
 nature is to be a servant, but not to rule. . . . So let no one do 
 
 away with possessions, but rather the passions of the soul such as 
 Jo not permit the better use of property, in order that, becoming 
 noble and good, he may be able to use nobly these possessions.” 
 To those who have cast aside the passions of the soul which lead 
 to abuse of wealth, Christ says, ‘‘ Come, follow Me,” as the Way 
 in the use of wealth also. 
 
 Such was Clement’s view of Christian duty as to 
 property, even when amounting to riches. It was 
 47 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 not quite the primitive Christian one, which was 
 relative to expectation of a near end to the present 
 order of things; but it had at its heart the same 
 idea of property, as a stewardship from God for the 
 good of all within reach. “For he who holds 
 possessions as God’s gifts, both ministering from) 
 them to God the giver, unto men’s salvation, and 
 knowing that he possesses them for the brethren’s 
 sake rather than his own . . . not being a slave of 
 what he possesses and not carrying them about in 
 his soul, but ever labouring at some good and divine 
 work ... he is the man deemed blessed by the 
 Lord and called poor in spirit . . . not one who 
 could not live if not rich” (c. xvi.). 
 
 Thus the right use of property is simply the 
 corollary of love, in the peculiarly deep and real 
 sense distinctive of the Christian Gospel. ‘ Love 
 buds into beneficence.’ In contrast to such philan- 
 thropy stands the self-seeking spirit of greed (pleon- 
 exia), which readily attaches to the pursuit of tem- 
 poral gain and prompts to doubtful methods therein. 
 
 Clement can find no Christian warrant for the: 
 man who “‘ goes on trying to increase without limit, 
 ever on the outlook for more, with his head bent 
 downwards” (c. xvii.). The ideal lot is, in fact, 
 that happy mean between riches and poverty for: 
 which the wise man of Proverbs (xxx. 8 f.) prayed, 
 as best for the soul’s welfare. Yet Clement does’ 
 not feel called on to urge that this should be brought 
 within the reach of all, so that every man might 
 have the means of self-expression through the true 
 use of some property of his own, rather than be 
 dependent upon the charity of others, 
 
 48 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 Here we have one of the defects in the early 
 christian carrying out of the principle of ‘ equality ’ 
 ooted in ‘fraternity.2 Even a Clement did not 
 scape it, because he too accepted the existing order 
 yf society too much as it was, and not as subject to 
 eform. On the other hand, he rose above the 
 iteralistic and purely ascetic reading of Christ’s 
 eaching current in his own day. But that 
 eading was soon to express itself in the ideal and 
 sractice of a distinct type of Christian life, resting 
 on vows of poverty and celibacy, and frankly cutting 
 tself loose from the human order as such, in the 
 juest of the ‘ angelic ’ or super-bodily type of life. 
 
 (2) Thus we reach the second of the historical 
 imitations alluded to above, viz. asceticism on 
 yrinciple. ‘This development,! with its pessimism as 
 o the better possibilities of normal society as a 
 phere of redemptive activity, started from the 
 world-renunciation of primitive Christianity, but 
 yave it a fresh and even extreme application. 
 Jriginally the attitude sprang from two causes, the 
 yne temporary and accidental, the other intrinsic. 
 [he former was the expectation of the speedy end 
 of the existing order by Divine intervention. ‘The 
 ntrinsic cause, on the other hand, flowed from the 
 aature of Christianity itself. ‘‘ The Gospel” being 
 “the glad tidings of benefits that pass not away,” 
 “it aims at raising the individual to a standpoint 
 far above the conflicts between earthly prosperity 
 and earthly distresses, between riches and poverty, 
 lordship and service.” 
 
 1 With which, of course, we deal only as related to society. 
 
 2 Harnack in Essays on the Social Gospel (1907), p- 9. 
 
 E 49 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Such ‘ holy indifference,’ in the interests of moral 
 freedom amid all earthly conditions, tended easily 
 to concentrate Christian effort solely upon win- 
 ning the eternal boon of complete spiritual liberty 
 for individual souls. This led on to the neglect 
 not only of material and economic conditions, but 
 also of ordinary social life and its duties. The 
 process went on steadily during the first half of the 
 third century in certain zealous circles, at first 
 without severing those affected from their homes, 
 philanthropic activities, and Church fellowship. 
 They simply lived a more ‘ unworldly’ and ascetic 
 life, as spiritual ‘ athletes ’ in full ‘ training ’ (askests) 
 of both body and soul, or as soldiers on guard 
 (‘vigil’) or picket duty (statzo), in keeping with the 
 general conception of Christians as an army on 
 alien soil. : 
 
 But by the latter half of the third century another 
 and foreign factor was blending with the Christian 
 ones, to produce the later or specialised type of the 
 ascetic. ‘This ideal, as well as its terminology, had 
 its closest analogies among certain contemporary 
 pagan moralists, who practised a like life of ‘ philo- 
 sophy.’ + 
 
 Thus Lactantius meets an outsider’s objection that his teaching 
 on property, as a stewardship for others as well as himself, woul 
 reduce a man to poverty, by saying, “What then? Even th 
 own philosophers praise poverty, and testify that nothing is safe 
 or a more calm haven from anxieties.” But already, half a centu 
 before he wrote, there were Christians living the ‘ perfect’ life of 
 
 discipleship, as they esteemed it—that of poverty and ‘ virginity \ 
 (male and female)—which they came to connect with the example 
 
 1 See Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Chris- 
 tian Church, pp. 148-152, 164-170. 
 50 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 of Christ Himself and of the Apostles.1 This life they lived both 
 singly and in informal groups, but, as yet, for the most part amid 
 the social order of civic life, not in full ‘ retreat’ from the world 
 as ‘ solitaries ? (hermits or monks). 
 
 It was when this latter stage was reached that 
 the influence of the ascetic type of Christians ceased 
 in the main to operate for the renewal of society. 
 ‘The leaven’ was removed from contact with the 
 lump to a degree not true of Apostolic and primitive 
 Christianity. And though such specialised piety 
 came later on to perform, both individually and in 
 eroup-life outside society, valuable social functions, 
 and so to influence indirectly the mass of mankind 
 once more, yet these were only by-products of the 
 ideal. ‘The historic fact is that Christian monas- 
 ticism, sublime in a sense as was its ideal (yet one 
 shared with other and less social religions), began 
 as a reaction by certain earnest souls against the 
 Church’s really increasing worldliness, and expressed 
 despair of any attempt to regenerate the mass of 
 those about them in and through the intercourse of 
 social life. 
 
 Thus, at one and the same time, the ‘salt’ in 
 average Christians was losing something of its 
 ‘savour’ for the preservation of human life from 
 corruption, and the ‘leaven’ in the most earnest 
 sort was losing full contact with society. ‘This bears 
 directly on the new situation now about to arise. 
 
 1 See the so-called Clementine Epistles to Virgins. 
 
 51 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (C) Tue Later Parristic PEriop: FROM 
 CONSTANTINE TO GREGORY THE GREAT 
 
 (a) Partial transformation of civil soctety—The 
 changed conditions afforded by the ‘conversion 
 of Constantine,’ with their unique opening for a 
 new departure, came too late to be fully utilised. 
 The moral dynamic of the Church’s life as a whole 
 was not what it had once been; and where it was 
 intensest it was too specialised and non-natural in 
 form to be suited to the task now open to Chris- 
 tianity, that of ‘ overcoming the world’ in the new 
 sense of transforming it socially as well as individually. 
 
 The key to the ancient Church’s own conception 
 of its function in society, and so to its practice, 
 depended, as it still depends, very largely on its 
 conception of society outside itself, and of God’s 
 purposes for it in relation to ‘the Kingdom of 
 God.’ This must now be defined more exactly in 
 relation to the new situation. 
 
 Christians had started with an overshadowing 
 sense of the alien nature of human society, as 
 animated by selfishness in its myriad forms, summed 
 up in sensuality, greed of gain, and inhumanity in 
 pursuing selfish ends. It was the sphere of the 
 ‘ worldly ’ spirit in a sense incurable save by Divine 
 catastrophicintervention. ‘The notion of its gradual 
 redemption, by Divine patience and self-sacrificing 
 human love, inspired by God’s own, had not dawned 
 on Christians as in the counsels of Divine omni- 
 potence, and so both possible and part of the 
 Church’s function in the world. This idea grew 
 up only gradually, as the centuries passed. 
 
 52 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 On the other hand, Christians had all along, 
 
 latent in their own Scriptures, 1 4 distinction between 
 the actual state of society and governmental order, 
 as sacred in idea because by God’s will fulfilling the 
 function of public justice, however imperfectly. A 
 positive attitude to society in this aspect was thus 
 enjoined, and obedience to its authority ‘for the 
 Lord’s sake,’ wherever its laws did not clash with 
 God’s higher order as revealed in the Gospel. The 
 enormous potential significance of this recognition 
 of an ideal order of justice in society, as distinct 
 from force or even of mere police order, merits 
 most careful attention.’ 
 
 Before the end of the third century the Christian 
 estimate of existing society, as embodying an order 
 that might largely be leavened, had begun to grow 
 more positive. ‘This process was now enhanced by 
 the adhesion of the imperial head of the State. 
 Thus the sense of the alien nature of the social 
 organism amidst which the Church lived and had 
 its being tended to pass during the fourth century, 
 as the Empire became more and more Christian in 
 profession, and paganism lost formal control of 
 society and its customs, while Christian leaders 
 gained ever more influence and even legal standing 
 in the world of affairs. For instance, arbitral 
 functions were given to bishops in civil cases and 
 the right of intercession in criminal ; while the fitting 
 privilege of prison inspection fell to the clergy in 
 the interests of humane conditions.® 
 
 1 Rom. xiii. 1-5, echoed in 1 Peter ii. 13-15. 
 
 2 See A. J. Carlyle, The Influence of Christianity upon Social and 
 Political Ideas, ch. vi. 
 
 3 Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I. 56 ff. 
 
 53 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (b) Soctal effects of Christianity in legislation and 
 practice.—The following are the main social effects 
 in which the working of Christian influence may be 
 discerned in this period. ‘The arbitrary and often 
 tyrannical action of the ancient patria potestas was 
 greatly modified; and this took effect in legislation, 
 including that prescribing due regard for the bonds 
 of blood and family equity in the disposal of pro- 
 perty by will. The marriage relation was raised by 
 legislation, not indeed to the full level of the 
 Christian ideal, yet markedly above its prior level for 
 both parties. The vacillating legislation on divorce, 
 as between different Christian emperors, only shows 
 how strong was the old current against which the 
 new ideal had to make headway. The general 
 position of women, and respect for them, rose in 
 proportion as Christian feeling—based on the atti- 
 tude of Jesus Himself and of the New Testament 
 generally, and but little supported by Stoic theory 
 or practice—came to prevail. Even their legal 
 “tutelage’® was done away with by the Code of 
 Justinian. If in the Middle Ages their ‘ legal 
 emancipation was in a large measure lost,’ this was 
 in the main due to reversion to the lower level here 
 of the Teutons who overthrew the Roman Empire, 
 and partly to the reflex influence of the Oriental 
 view of female inferiority, reflected in measure in 
 the Old Testament and even in a few verses in the 
 New.! Sexual impurity, and particularly unnatural 
 vice—one of the greatest evils of antiquity—felt 
 the touch of Christ most signally; so with the 
 exposure of children by parents, licentious and cruel 
 
 1 Carlyle, as above, p. 5 f. 
 54 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 sports, inhuman treatment of prisoners and of 
 slavest and serfs. ‘The actual emancipation of slaves 
 was also encouraged as a religious ideal.2 On the 
 positive side, philanthropic and charitable institu- 
 tions, to a degree and also in forms unknown to 
 earlier times, even under Stoic humanitarian theory, 
 sprang up on every side in this period—a feature of 
 beneficence in ‘ the Galileans ? which the Emperor 
 Julian strove vainly to get his ‘ Hellenic’ co-reli- 
 gionists to rival. So, too, the dignity of labour, which 
 had long been debased by its association with slavery, 
 was taught, and became illustrated, incidentally and 
 as time went on, in certain monastic communities. 
 Finally, the taking advantage of human need by 
 usury was reprobated by Christian feeling.® 
 
 In all this we see at work the ‘ humaneness’ of 
 which Lactantius showed the religious springs in 
 ‘piety’ to God and man. Behind these lay the 
 idea that man as man, as a spiritual being, was 
 made ‘after the image of God,’ and potentially 
 redeemed by the Incarnation in Christ, the Son of 
 Man, and by His Cross. Such a faith gave new 
 sacredness to manhood as such; and the Golden 
 Rule, apart from any specific words of Christ, 
 mplied the duty of conforming social relations to 
 these religious truths. 
 
 Yet, after all, the changes wrought by ‘ the con- 
 
 1 Christian influence is traceable particularly in the law’s pro- 
 ection of slave women, and in the extending protection of the 
 narriage of slaves by the Canon law of the Church. 
 
 2 Though rather as ‘a counsel of perfection,’ or ‘ work of 
 upererogation ’ conferring merit, than as a simple Christian duty. 
 
 3 For the above, see Loring Brace, Gesta Christi, ch. i-x; 
 2amb. Medieval History, Vol. I. 595 f. 
 
 55 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 version of the Empire’ were not as radical as one 
 looking back tends at first to expect. Why was this? 
 
 (c) General and practical reasons for their limited 
 extent.—In the first place, Christians were too 
 dazed by the very suddenness and wonder of 
 the great reversal in their conditions to look 
 round calmly and consider the whole new situation 
 in the light of its wider responsibilities. ‘They 
 still felt the strain of their recent terrible struggle 
 against the State. Then they had to repair the 
 havoc wrought in their ranks, and restore their 
 own discipline. ‘The world’ outside had its own 
 governor, the Emperor Constantine, the chosen 
 agent of God’s providence to them, and surely also 
 in the Divine counsels to all his subjects also. To 
 him it fell to care for the order of society as a 
 system of laws and institutions. Their part was 
 simply to go on witnessing as heretofore, only with 
 a fuller liberty, to the laws of Christ within His 
 special sphere, His Church, and to set their own house 
 in order by needful pastoral care and discipline, 
 awaiting the further developments of the Divine 
 purposes. 
 
 Ere this work was finished, the Church’s attention 
 was absorbed afresh by another internal problem, 
 that of its doctrinal faith, in the Arian controversy. 
 And this, be it noted, continued to distract attention 
 from other and more normal aspects of Christian 
 duty for most of the century. The struggle not 
 only terribly divided the Christian society and 
 compromised its influence; it also disabled it from 
 giving its proper witness to Christian brotherhood 
 and fellowship among men. ‘This was quite obscured 
 
 56 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 by mutual persecution in turn. Moreover, the 
 Church’s own vision of the Christian life was thrown 
 out of perspective, owing to the artificial promi- 
 nence given to the intellectual aspects of faith, as 
 compared with the moral, with which the social are 
 most directly bound up. In fact the idea of ‘ the 
 Gospel ? was now changing a good deal, in emphasis 
 at least. 
 
 This change in emphasis was the more serious 
 that even before the dogmatic issue arose, and apart 
 from its continuance, there was some loss of morale 
 in the Church’s consciousness generally. ‘This had 
 been so during the ‘ Long Peace’ before the last 
 persecution, both among the bishops (as Eusebius 
 notes) and the rank and file; and as the Imperial 
 patronage gave the Church more and more prestige 
 in the eyes of his subjects at large, the quality of 
 the Church’s average membership suffered dilution. 
 Hence the sensitiveness of the Christian conscience 
 to ethical issues became less keen. It is, then, 
 hardly surprising if most Christians seem to have 
 been content to accept social and economic institu- 
 tions as they were, without revising them in the 
 light of the Gospel. For instance, in spite of their 
 more responsible use of material goods as held in 
 stewardship for God’s uses, the idea of property as 
 a social institution still remained pagan and, so far 
 as embodied in law, Roman in conception, as though 
 held by an absolute right rather than as relative to 
 the common good of society. 
 
 Slavery, too, which even Stoicism thought an 
 anomaly, remained unchallenged in principle and 
 was even tolerated among Christians, in spite of the 
 
 57 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 reverence for human personality implicit in their 
 faith. Similarly, it was nearly eighty years after 
 the Council of Nicza ere the human outrage of 
 gladiatorial shows ceased at Rome, and that owing 
 to the martyr action of a monk, a devotee to the 
 thorough-going ideal. ‘There were, too, oppressive 
 laws and customs connected with semi-servile labour 
 that continued under all the Christian Emperors, 
 and passed into the Middle Ages, apparently without 
 awaking much sense of incongruity in the Christian 
 conscience. 
 
 The ‘ heroic ’ adventurous spirit of the Gospel of 
 Jesus was no longer diffused enough through the 
 Church as a whole to prompt it to bring moral 
 pressure to bear on the Imperial system, and upon 
 the public conscience generally, sufficiently to set on 
 foot a radical change of all social relations alien to 
 the spirit of Christ, even where there was no letter 
 of His teaching that demanded it. But no less 
 disastrous, both in practice and in theory, was the 
 
 contemporary and partly connected ‘ retreat’? from © 
 
 the normal social order on the part of the most 
 zealous souls, in the interests of a ‘ monastic’ ideal 
 which meant despair of the leavening of society. 
 It implied and enhanced the virtual dualism between 
 true religious life on the one hand,. and civic and 
 economic life on the other. The latter sphere was 
 in principle left by the model Christians of that 
 age to go its way according to its own secular and 
 selfish laws, as a system outside the redemptive 
 control of Christian motives and methods, yet a 
 system in which Christians at large were practically 
 
 involved. 
 58 
 
 | 
 | 
 
 a’ 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 If, then, we repeat the question why the Patristic 
 Church did not now transform social relations in a 
 yet fuller and more Christian manner—why, in 
 fact, it stopped short at amelioration and com- 
 promise with actual conditions, both within and 
 without its own borders—the answer of history is 
 a very complex one. Besides what has just been 
 said, ‘ Christians’ were at first, and indeed con- 
 tinued to be for longer than we realise, only a 
 minority of the subjects of the ‘ Christian’? Em- 
 perors. As statesmen, then, concerned to unify, 
 not divide afresh, the Empire by legislation pro- 
 moted by one religious section of the State, the 
 latter were bound to use much reserve in carrying 
 out any promptings to Christianise the statute-book. 
 Further, Christianity, on its side, laid stress upon 
 the soul rather than upon material things, and did 
 not yet realise the full moral effects of the one side 
 of life upon the other. Again, the very genius of 
 the Gospel, as inspiring the individual conscience to 
 free moral action, made the Church the less ready, 
 at first, to employ the method of State legislation, 
 which was alien to its own past habits of moral 
 suasion, save for the restraint of flagrant wrongs 
 and inhumanities. When, then, the changed rela- 
 tions of Church and State put it in the power of 
 the Christian conscience to take upon itself fuller 
 and wider responsibility for all social conditions 
 affecting the welfare of men, it did not feel called 
 to attempt to impose anything like its own ethical 
 ideal on society at large. Nay more; the Church 
 of the fourth century exhibited no new and con- 
 structive ideal of social and economic brotherhood 
 
 Ly 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 even for its own members, as it might have done 
 by its own discipline, much less for the common- 
 wealth at large. ‘There existed a general assumption 
 of the fixity of the social order as a finished whole, 
 especially in the form of the Roman Empire. ‘That 
 is, the Church simply shared the conventional ideas 
 underlying the existing economic and social order, } 
 and the hand-to-mouth methods of dealing with its 
 anomalies and evils. 
 
 The question as to the social effects of Christianity on the 
 ancient world is sometimes put in the form, How was it related to 
 the ‘ decline and fall of the Roman Empire’? Did it promote 
 or rather restrain this process? It is this question which occasioned 
 Augustine’s City of God ; and his answer still holds good in the 
 main. ‘The cardinal fact is that the Roman Empire was in decline 
 before Christianity had the power to make its social influence 
 appreciably felt. ‘The decline was due largely to an external 
 factor, the impact of barbarian forces upon the higher order of 
 Roman unity (Pax Romana) and general civilisation, and to the 
 inability of that civilisation itself to react to this challenge 
 successfully.2 The process of decay has recently been described 
 and analysed by so competent a hand as that of Prof. Vinogradoff.8 
 In the fourth and fifth centuries, he says, the process “ presented 
 features of decline and renovation at the same time.” But the 
 latter he regards as largely due to the Christian Emperors, especially 
 Constantine, and their Christianising policy, which had construce 
 
 1 Cf. J. N. Figgis, The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s ‘ City 
 of God,’ p. 53. “* This sense of property, as of absolute dominion, 
 has dominated modern Europe through the Roman Civil Law. 
 Yet the other sense . . . is the presupposition of jurists like Ulpian 
 and the Stoics. ‘Their teaching pointed ultimately to the end of 
 chattel slavery. It may point in the same direction in regard to 
 extreme rights of private ownership.” 
 
 2 A. Schweitzer, in The Decay and the Restoration of Civilisation, 
 Preface, is clear that any civilisation that has lost a constructive 
 theory of life and the world contains the seeds of fatal decay. 
 
 3 The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I, ch. xix. 
 
 60 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 tive social effects, so far as the humanising and purifying of personal 
 relations were concerned. ‘Thus Christianity at least retarded the 
 decline by contributing to the inmost factors of renovation. But 
 the stamping out of political liberty by the Empire had led, in 
 the mass of men, to a fatal atrophy of independent thought and 
 initiative, both in political and social matters. 
 
 Here we touch a matter of far-reaching significance for our 
 survey, viz. the form of political authority under which Christianity 
 exists. ‘Thus under an autocracy, however benevolent, Christianity 
 could never have its social effects. For these seem by their very 
 nature and methods (as persuasive rather than coercive) to depend 
 upon the normal action of the diffused Christian conscience 
 becoming freely and promptly reflected, as by a representative 
 system of self-government of the whole community, both locally 
 and at the centre of legislative authority. In this connection it 
 is worth citing, in relation to the next period, Prof. Vinogradoff’s 
 observation that “ society falls back (after the Empire) to a great 
 extent on the lines of . . . aristocratic organisation ” (p. 567). 
 
 On the whole, then, the Church continued, under 
 and after Constantine, to view civil society too 
 much as ‘the world,’ and with too little sense of 
 its human values as conditioning the development 
 of moral personality, with which it rightly felt itself 
 primarily concerned. Society had, it felt, its own 
 responsible head, as God’s direct vicegerent, clothed 
 with a Divine right as well as duty of government, 
 for which he alone was properly accountable to 
 God. ‘To this idea we shall return in connection 
 with the important modification of it which con- 
 nects itself with the name of Augustine. Mean- 
 while we must consider the more general intellectual 
 hindrance already hinted at. 
 
 (d) The Church's lack, at the cructal moment, 
 of a true theory of civil society1—We have seen 
 
 1 This bears on the limited degree to which the Church has at 
 
 any time tried consciously to Christianise society at large; and 
 61 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 that, even before the adhesion of the Emperor 
 to Christianity, there had been growing up a 
 new and more positive attitude among Christians 
 to society at large. It sprang partly from long 
 delay in Christ’s appearing, partly from experience 
 of the actual redemption of social life among 
 Christians themselves. In particular mental culture 
 —letters, science, art—in a word that Humanism 
 which primitive Christians had regarded as of ‘ the 
 world,’ or at least indifferent for the good of ‘ the 
 soul,’ was being seen in its positive or ideal aspect. 
 How far, then, might this progressive experience of 
 ‘the soul of good’ in the existing order not go? 
 If there was no inherent limit in the very nature of 
 things, why should not the old gulf between the 
 Church and society in the end be closed, and a free 
 way be opened for continuity between the two 
 realms, as indeed had happened in certain Christian’ 
 individuals living in and through both the as yet 
 unadjusted spheres? If so, must not such a social 
 issue lead up to the realised ‘ kingdom of God’? 
 The answer given by the ancient Church was 
 that this could really come about only ‘ beyond the 
 veil,’ where alone other dualisms of life here— 
 between matter and spirit, sin and righteousness, 
 nature and grace—would be done’ away. By no 
 mere gradual leavening with Divine grace of the 
 Holy Spirit could God’s Kingdom really come ‘ on 
 earth,’ in the sense implied by the Lord’s Prayer. 
 It could come only on a supernaturally renewed 
 earth, physically as well as spiritually. 
 must therefore be noticed here rather fully. The more technical 
 
 aspects of the subject, however, are relegated to smaller type. 
 62 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 Still a certain change of perspective was in 
 process, which marks off the Church’s later from 
 its earlier conception of the matter. After the 
 fourth century Christ’s intervention ab extra began 
 to be transposed, so as to come not at the beginning 
 of the Millennium but at the end—so ceasing to 
 condition its character. ‘This change was really a 
 revolution, fatal to the social pessimism of the whole 
 millennial idea, as it appears in the Apocalypse. 
 The Millennium came to mean simply the invisible 
 reign of Christ, through His Spirit, in the Church 
 since Pentecost; its traditional Jewish form was 
 taken only symbolically. But, then, how could any 
 of its ‘time and space’ perspective be taken as 
 absolute truth if it was only figurative, and so 
 relative? There might be another time and plane 
 of transforming ‘the kingdom of this world’ into 
 ‘the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.’ ‘To 
 this no real theoretic answer was ever given. ‘The 
 new attitude, involving at least some gradual leaven- 
 ing of society at large, was simply a solvitur ambu- 
 lando conviction that so it was in practice, and 
 must be soin theory. The chief personal influence 
 making for this silent revolution in ideas was 
 Augustine, who himself began by sharing the older 
 Millennarianism.! 
 
 As to the influences behind him in turn, besides his experience 
 of the Catholic Church as a great social institution, naturalised in 
 ever-growing measure within the context of society, there were 
 
 1 See A. Robertson, Regnum Det, pp. 170f. ‘The varying inter- 
 pretations of the Apocalypse all down the Church’s history are 
 symptomatic of the contemporary social outlook, and so valuable 
 for our purpose. 
 
 63 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 two others of very different orders. On the one hand, Neo- 
 Platonism, with its idea of God as the Absolute Reality and Will, 
 of which every form of actual being was the partial expression, as 
 regards its normal nature and functions, but on different levels of 
 reality or ideal worth; on the other, his own vivid experience of 
 conversion, from sinful sensuousness to what he felt to be super- 
 natural moral freedom. Of these the former influence made for 
 a greater unity of relations between the higher and lower orders 
 of human society, the Church and society at large, as both depen- 
 dent for their being on God: the latter, for a yet sharper moral 
 or volitional contrast, between the two spheres—human and Divine, 
 of nature and of grace—as revealed in his own individual experience. 
 The former rested on a monism, of a different intellectual species 
 from the Stoic, but agreeing in effect with its theory of the Law of 
 Nature, viewed ideally (apart from sin) as the normal standard ; 
 the latter implied a practical dualism, rooted in Original Sin. 
 The result was a social philosophy of many-sided insight (though 
 its Predestinarianism and traditional Ecclesiasticism were never 
 harmonised), but one which lent itself to various interpretations— 
 a fact of momentous significance for the social and political theories 
 
 of the Middle Ages. 
 
 This positive view of the sanctity of the social 
 order, as by its very constitution standing for 
 Justice (as St. Paul taught), appears also in many 
 Christian thinkers, especially in the West, from 
 Clement of Rome to Ambrose of Milan, who saw 
 in the law of Nature the will of God—however 
 obscured and perverted by human sin. Into this 
 tradition Augustine enters, but so as to modify it. 
 
 (ce) The emergence of a new Christian theory of 
 Society, particularly in Augustine. 
 
 We saw above, in speaking of the new element 
 which entered the stream of Christian thought 
 with the Apologists, that the Stoic philosophy 
 of society made it the normal expression of the 
 order of Reason, and of Justice between men, 
 
 64 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 as part of the law of Nature, behind all variable 
 and imperfect attempts to embody this in actual 
 laws and institutions. The true end of human 
 society, worthy the name, was to Cicero, as to 
 Aristotle long before, the common well-being of 
 its members as rational and bound to each other by 
 justice. Justice, then, to the best Greek and Roman 
 thinkers was of the essence of society, which accord- 
 ingly was in idea sacred, by the law of Nature as 
 Reason. 
 
 Augustine’s view of society, particularly in his 
 great work On the City of God, takes the form of 
 a contrast between the two social orders (civitates), 
 the earthly (terrena) or mundane, and the heavenly 
 celestis) or spiritual. ‘These two orders of society 
 were not in their proper nature visible, but were 
 partially represented by State and Church (militant 
 or im via) as corporate societies, each of which 
 actually contained both ‘elect’ and ‘reprobate’ 
 individuals. Of these mystic ‘ cities,’ above time 
 and space, Rome, on the one hand, and the New 
 Jerusalem of the Apocalypse on the other, are the 
 types. “ The two, separate in idea, origin, purpose 
 and practice, are yet dependent the one on the 
 other, giving and taking influence. The civitas Dei 
 needs the practical support of the civitas terrena 
 in order to be a visible ” body politic,! an institution 
 with material possessions and social organisation, 
 amid human society at large. ‘‘ The civitas terrena 
 —which actually (7. e. as warped by sin) rests on 
 lust of ‘dominion’ or ‘the will to power ’—needs 
 
 1 This and some of what follows comes from The Cambridge 
 
 Medieval History, Vol. I, 588. 
 F 65 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 the moral support (or inspiration) of the c1vitas 
 Dei in order to be a real State,” an ‘ harmonious 
 society of men’; for such a state “ only exists on a 
 basis of justice and love, and by participation in the 
 sole source of existence, which is God.” And this 
 participation in the Divine life, and so in true 
 spiritual values, is normally mediated to the lower 
 and earthly form of society through the higher and 
 diviner, that is, to the State through the Church 
 (the two not being as yet really coextensive). 
 
 The ethical and social bearing of all this can best 
 be seen by transposing it from the apologetic to the 
 positive key, somewhat as follows : r 
 
 (1) First and foremost, man is social by nature, 
 made for life in a harmonious society of men. 
 
 (2) ‘ Earthly Society,’ which aims at earthly peace 
 and prosperity (pax), is “a natural and therefore 
 a Divine necessity ” for attaining that limited good ; 
 and the State is its organised form. 
 
 (3) The benefits of peaceful civilisation, and 
 justice needful thereto, are genuine goods. 
 
 But God’s proper society, especially in its 
 organised form, the Church, as possessing the higher 
 values of human life in society (that is, in fellowshit 
 and unity), alone makes possible the true being of 
 the lower as society even on its own earthly level. 
 “ For the earthly civztas has no resources of its own 
 commensurate with its purpose. It can use worldly 
 wisdom and worldly power, but it has no commanc 
 over the moral life”? 2—no true moral, becaus« 
 no religious freedom of the will. 
 
 1 See J. N. Figgis, The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s ‘ City 
 
 of God,’ chs. iii, iv. 2 A. Robertson, Regnum Dei (p. 210 ff.). — 
 66 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 (4) The two societies cannot really exist apart, but 
 are complementary, though not on equal terms. 
 As possessing in itself and immediately from God 
 the vital social graces of justice (in Lactantius’ large 
 and deep sense) and love, “ the city of God is the 
 only real civitas,” in the full Divine sense of ‘society ;’ 
 yet it borrows the authority and power of the other, 
 in order to carry out in its institutional aspect ! 
 *‘ the Divine purpose.” 
 
 (5) Thus the two interpenetrate each other 
 functionally ; but the higher is destined to take up 
 into itself all the positive or real values of the lower, 
 1.é. its civic and legal order in things material. Inthe 
 end the civitas Det must absorb the civitas terrena.” 
 
 Such principles seem to rob the common order of 
 society of its moral authority. But this result is 
 largely averted for Augustine by his theory of the 
 civil ruler, which meant the Emperor,? as holding 
 
 1 Thus the civil authority alone can confer property rights, 
 jure regum possidentur possessiones ; there are no absolute property 
 rights by the law of Nature, the fundamental law of God. Such 
 is the regular Patristic view. Private property is relative and con- 
 tingent on the common good of the earthly society, within which, 
 as to temporal things, the Church exists; while in higher or more 
 ‘eal aspects the relation is reversed, and the Empire is ‘in the 
 Church.’ 
 
 2 The opposite view of this relation, viz. that the civil society 
 might so absorb the invisible or real life of the ecclesiastical society, 
 18 institution, that the human life of the whole social community 
 thould itself become the primary sphere of ‘ the Kingdom of God’ 
 ‘as, é. g., Rothe held), Augustine could not even contemplate as 
 sossible, owing to his idea of Original Sin as inherent in the civil 
 order since the Fall. 
 
 3 Not that he prefers an Empire on principle to a society of 
 mall States, like a city composed of many families, a sort of League 
 6 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 his office drectly as ‘the Vicar of God’ (a phrase 
 
 of Ambrosiaster’s in the previous generation). That 
 is, the theocratic conception of the civil magistrate 
 (King or Emperor), inherited alike from the Old 
 Testament and from the pagan Empire, served as 
 link between the ‘secular’ order of the State and 
 the sacred order of grace embodied in the Church. 
 So viewed, the Emperor stood outside the law 
 of Nature, in a quasi-sacred position as the Lord’s 
 ‘anointed’ representative in the mundane sphere, 
 acting ‘by Divine right’? of his authority over 
 the material and temporal interests of men, both 
 in State and Church (so too Pope Gelasius I, rather 
 later). ‘Thus the Christian character of the State 
 really consists in the jurisdiction within it given 
 by the Emperor to the Church, which then of itself 
 works its Christianising by change of sentiment. 
 And the State becomes true to its idea only so far 
 as it becomes Christian. : 
 
 Christian Emperors, then, while ‘fathers of 
 human kind’ as in pagan times, are, so far as true 
 to their idea as God’s agents for justice, the sons 
 and servants of the Church, and bound to serve 
 its diviner ends.2. “ We have here the germ of the 
 
 a 
 
 of Nations. ‘The latter, in fact, is his ideal ; imperialism, as the 
 worldly principle of domination in excelsis, he abhors (iii, 10, iv. 3,15). 
 
 1 Here Augustine, or even Gregory the Great (who is most 
 explicit on the duty of obedience to an evil monarch), probably 
 has not in view at all what we should call ‘ unconstitutional ” acts] 
 since monarchy was then absolute in idea as in practice (see Carlyle, 
 as above, pp. 81, 87 f.). 
 
 2 The basis of the doctrine of ‘ the secular arm,’ with the coercive 
 < sword? to be wielded at the Church’s bidding, ¢. g. by coercing 
 heretics and schismatics, on the warrant of the words Coge tntrare. 
 
 68 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 medizval theory of the Church! as the Kingdom 
 of God on earth; but it must be noted that Augus- 
 tine does not use Church and Kingdom of God as 
 interchangeable terms, despite the assertion ecclesia 
 jam nunc est regnum’’—made in setting aside the 
 Millenarian view that the Kingdom was wholly 
 future. 
 
 (f) General conclusion—On the whole, then, 
 Augustine, like the fourth-century Fathers before 
 him, accepts the order of human society as grounded 
 in the law of Nature, and so far expressive of God’s 
 wise Will. But he greatly reduces its positive or 
 optimistic significance by making it so radically 
 corrupted by the Fall that the law of Nature ceases 
 to be really valid for the actual social order save 
 relatively, 7. ¢. in forms relative to sin as inherent 
 even in the laws and institutions of the State. 
 These as a class, and not only slavery (as with the 
 Fathers generally), are so incurably tainted by 
 sinful lack of justice as to remain partly of the 
 nature of penal discipline for sinful men. Hence 
 no more than a minimum of justice can be expected 
 from such an order of society. 
 
 Thus the ‘ Augustinian ’ theory of human life could 
 
 1 The Visible Church, the home of sacraments, the recognisable 
 family of God, in spite of its not being coextensive with the elect— 
 the civittas Dei or Kingdom of God—bulks largely in Augustine’s 
 thought and language. “By the mere use of the terms civitas 
 and regnum in a work of such momentous influence, Augustine 
 prepared the way for the later development of the doctrine that 
 the Church is a soctetas perfecta, and must have the powers necessary 
 for any self-sufficing community. ‘The conception of the Church 
 as a social entity wielding governing powers owes much to 
 St. Augustine. He did much to strengthen the Church as an 
 imperial force ” (Figgis, 71 f.). : 
 
 9 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 not but check the Christian impulse to attempt 
 to the utmost the Christianisation of the social 
 order, and must therefore be esteemed a main 
 cause of the Church’s influence having been, 
 especially at certain periods, less helpful to social 
 progress than Christ’s teaching in the New Testa- 
 ment would lead one to expect. It is true that 
 prior to Augustine we have traces of another and 
 more optimistic attitude to the civil order. Such 
 an attitude seems implied in the famous prayer in 
 the Gelasian Sacramentary, that, in and through 
 His Church, God would, “ by the quiet operation 
 of Thy perpetual providence, carry out the work 
 of man’s salvation; and let the whole world experi- 
 ence and see that things which were cast down are 
 being raised up, that those things which had grown 
 old are being made new, and that all things are 
 returning to original wholeness (in integrum) through 
 Him from whom they took their origin.” A like 
 attitude appears too in Ambrose’s famous assertion 
 of justice and humanity against the great Theodosius’ 
 
 : 
 : 
 
 passionate action as a ruler asserting the Imperial 
 authority—a notable landmark in the history of 
 
 the Church’s witness to right in society; and also 
 in his constant assumption that an Emperor will 
 normally be true to his office as God’s Vicar in civic 
 justice—on pain of forfeiting his title to such 
 authority. And it reappears in certain later Latin 
 fathers,! notably Isidore of Seville, and passes on 
 into medieval Canon law. 
 
 Further there was in the West the effect of the 
 deepening doctrine of Original Sin, as arresting 
 
 1 See Carlyle, as above, pp. 93 f. 
 7O 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 the reforming action on society of the ideals implicit 
 in the Gospel. Not only did it lower the degree 
 to which social righteousness might be looked for 
 in human society; it seemed also, in Augustine’s 
 doctrine of ‘ Concupiscence,’ to cast a slur on 
 marriage as tainting, even in the case of Christians. 
 This must have fostered the already strong bias 
 towards celibacy, and so have lessened Christianity’s 
 social effect at the very point where it had all along 
 had most scope to contribute to social reconstruction, 
 viz. the family, and all it means as a basis for wider 
 brotherhood among men. 
 
 And so we find already fixed in Augustine, alike 
 in his view of the czvitas terrena as radically con- 
 ditioned, even as a social order, by original sin, and 
 in his doctrine of the typically ‘ religious’ life, the 
 limits within which the social function of Christi- 
 anity was to be discharged throughout its next 
 great period. 
 
 To sum up, then. The later Fathers are clear 
 on the duty of Christians to apply their distinctive 
 principles to social relations up to a certain point. 
 Yet there was a strong, perhaps a growing tendency, 
 to make the State itself responsible for the degree 
 to which social justice did or did not mould laws 
 and customs, and not to press for progressive 
 approximation to Christ’s full principles in that 
 sphere. 
 
 1 The following, based on Troeltsch, may help to bring out 
 further some features of Patristic thought and connect them with 
 later developments. 
 
 As regards the Christian theory of Natural Law (as modified by 
 
 the Fall) and of Theocracy—an idea first developed in the Church 
 itself—the twofold nature of the latter gives Augustine’s whole 
 
 71 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 theory of society a certain ambiguity, with momentous issues of 
 like kind for the future. Theocracy and Natural Law both in 
 common consecrate the State: what the one could not do, the 
 other could; and the Emperor in any case is primarily determined 
 by ‘Grace of God’ and his theocratic dependence. The State 
 itself, however, remains the essence of the world. But this issued 
 in leaving the social order much as it was. Another outcome was, 
 that there was also assigned to the law of Nature the Theocracy © 
 in the Churchly form of society, set over even the temporal power 
 or Imperial office. On the other hand, social and political elements 
 ' became incorporated and assimilated into the Church through the 
 Christian theory of Natural law. But in ‘natural law’ there 
 remains at bottom the Stoic rationalism, with its conception of 
 Nature as kernel of the conception of God and the natural ‘ equality ” 
 of all reasoning beings. From this foundation principle rationalist 
 reactions will arise, till in the seventeenth century they dissolve 
 the Churchly civilisation. This, as unity-civilisation (such as 
 marks the Middle Ages), was possible only through ‘ theocracy’ 
 and Christian ‘natural law’—sin being neutralised by super- 
 natural Christian grace. 
 
 In this later light we see the earlier issues made clear. The 
 sociological force of Christianity is confined to the Church; the 
 social and political life is accepted in a Churchly sense. Thereby 
 the old ideal of the Gospel—the ‘ anarchy ’ of ‘ faith,’ responsible 
 to and serving God alone, the boundless worth of the free soul, 
 and the outflow of the Divine love in brotherly love—seems 
 certainly to have disappeared or been impaired; but it survives 
 in ideas and institutions, yet under a greatly changed form. 
 
 It survives in— 
 
 (i) The Church itself. 
 
 (ii) The idea of the original state of man by crestion, and 
 the absolute law of Nature, “‘ in which ever anew the 
 ideal of Freedom, Oneness with God, Equality, and 
 Love towards God and in God, are made imaginable.” 
 
 (iii) Monasticism. “ This is in origin a very complex pheno- 
 menon . . . but in its working nothing else than the 
 asylum into which the old Christian ideal has fled, 
 from the mixed ecclesiastical sphere of semi-worldly 
 and semi-ascetic ethics.” 
 
 72 
 
THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE ANCIENT PERIOD 
 
 The Soctal Results of Early Christianity, C. Schmidt (Pitman and 
 Sons, Eng. Tr., 1907, 480 pp.). 
 
 Christian Life in the Primitive Church, E. von Dobschiitz (Williams 
 and Norgate, Eng. Tr.). 
 
 Expansion of Christiantty in the First Three Centuries, A. Harnack 
 (Williams and Norgate, Eng. Tr., 1904, 2 vols.) . 
 
 History of European Morals from Augustine to Charlemagne, W. E. 
 H. Lecky (Longmans, 2 vols.). 
 
 History of Civilization in the Fifth Century, A, F. Osanam 
 (London, 1887). 
 
 Also chapters or sections in the books cited for the whole Survey, 
 
 on p. 5. 
 
 73 
 
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Ii] 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 

 
Il]. THE MIDDLE AGES? 
 
 
 
 
 “As the teaching of the Fathers contributed 
 one element to the intellectual background of the 
 medizval Church, it had an importance extending 
 beyond the centuries in which it was formulated 
 and the particular conditions to which it primarily 
 referred. What effect, if any, such conceptions had 
 upon practical conduct, either when they were first 
 developed or in later periods of history; how far, 
 if at all, the Christian tradition influenced political 
 and economic conduct and modified social relation- 
 ships in what are called the Middle Ages, are ques- 
 tions to which very different answers are given by 
 different authorities. The medieval Church did 
 not speak with one voice, and it is easy, by selecting 
 witnesses, to present a picture which is consistent 
 with itself, but untrue to the facts.” 2 
 
 The Middle Ages may be divided into two 
 distinct periods, sharply divided by the work of 
 Hildebrand. In the first the unity of the Church 
 is an ideal; in the second (in Western Europe) a 
 reality. 
 
 1 For Bibliographical Notes for this period see p. 95. 
 2 Archbishops Report, p. 32. 
 77 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (A) Berore HrtpeBranp 
 
 In the first period the ecclesiastical bodies assist 
 in building up the various secular states which 
 emerged from the ruins of the Roman Empire (z. g. 
 the work of Theodore of Tarsus in England); the 
 Church works hand in hand with the secular power ; 
 its position is somewhat that of a tutor to a young 
 squire. In this formative and educative stage the 
 Church imposes some restraint on anarchy by pro- 
 claiming under religious sanction the Truce of 
 God on certain days of the week, and by organising 
 local public opinion to enforce it. Christian 
 principles are infused into the traditional * barbarian ’ 
 laws. ‘Thus Charlemagne forbids the blood-feud. 
 ** How can anyone hope to be pleasing to God who 
 has slain His son? How can anyone believe that 
 Christ will be gracious to him who has slain His 
 brother? 1 The laws of Ethelred II ordain 
 “that Christian men and uncondemned be not sold 
 out of the country, and especially into a heathen 
 nation, that those souls perish not which Christ 
 bought with His own life”; “that Christian men 
 be not condemned to death for all too little, and 
 in general let light punishments be decreed and let 
 not for a little God’s handiwork and His own 
 purchase which He dearly bought be destroyed.” 2 
 
 It will be noted that slavery is recognised, but 
 some attempt is made to mitigate its harshness. 
 
 1 Henderson, Select Historical Documents, p. 198. 
 2 Quoted by Cutts, Parish Priest, p. 172. 
 78 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 Freedom from work on Sundays was the right of 
 all men; but in Anglo-Saxon times masters were 
 invited for the love of God—not commanded— 
 to allow their slaves relaxation from labour on other 
 great festivals of the Church.! 
 
 The early monastic communities were in one 
 respect self-supporting agricultural and industrial 
 communities, and did something to establish the 
 dignity of labour, not only among themselves but 
 in the eyes of the world. ‘The principle that work 
 is prayer—laborare est orare—was applicable to a 
 wider field. ‘The old story of the honest labourer 
 casting out devils who had defied the professional 
 saint came originally from the hermits of the African 
 desert, but it remained a popular tale to enforce 
 a moral throughout the Middle Ages; and it was 
 from a sermon ascribed to a sixth-century monk 
 that a Franciscan of the fourteenth century adapted 
 his praise of labour: “‘ Work is the life of man and 
 the guardian of health ; work drives away all occasion 
 of sin and makes a man sleep well at night; work 
 is the relief of weariness, the strength of sickness, 
 the salvation of men—quickener of the senses, foe 
 of sloth, nurse of happiness—a duty in the young, 
 a merit in the old.” 2 
 
 In this period arose the close relation, often 
 amounting to identity, between the areas of secular 
 and ecclesiastical administration. In England the 
 shire bishop sat side by side with the ealdorman in 
 the shire moot; the parish generally coincided 
 
 _1 This privilege, partly owing to the disappearance of pure 
 slavery, was later extended to all classes, free and serf alike. 
 2 Little, Studies in English Franciscan History, p. 156. 
 
 79 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 with the township or groups of townships which 
 formed the administrative and economic unit, and 
 the parish priest might head ‘the four good men’ 
 who attended the ‘ hundred’ court and who are the 
 basis of the representative system, or even lead his 
 parishioners in defensive war. A proportion—a 
 third or a fourth—of the goods of the Church was 
 assigned in each parish to the maintenance of the 
 poor—a practice which died out in the later Middle 
 Ages, to be revived in another form at the end of the 
 sixteenth century. The strands of religious social, 
 economic, political life were so intertwined that it 
 is impossible to separate them. On national festivals 
 plays and fairs and merrymakings were held in the 
 churchyard, and continued to be held in spite of 
 later episcopal prohibitions. Religious life per- 
 meated the world: the world permeated religious 
 
 life. 
 
 (B) HitpEBRAND AND AFTER 
 
 The secularisation of the Church, or rather of the 
 local churches, the employment of bishops and 
 abbots as officials of the secular power, led to 
 Hildebrand’s assertion of the unity of the universal 
 Church under one head and one law, its indepen- 
 dence of and ultimate supremacy over the State. 
 It was even asserted that the secular power, founded 
 on violence, only acquired legitimate authority 
 when it acted as the handmaid of the Church. 
 The conflict which ensued dominated the rest of the 
 Middle Ages, but the Middle Ages failed to find a 
 
 satisfactory solution. The medieval Church was 
 80 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 also a universal state; and spiritual and secular 
 powers too often claimed exclusive and mutually 
 destructive allegiance in the same sphere. 
 
 (a) The Church and Soctety—The Church 
 remained ideally a purely spiritual body—the union 
 of all the faithful, past, present and to come: but 
 this was an ideal unrealisable in time and space, 
 and General Councils were a sorry image of it. In 
 its conflict with the secular power, the Church was 
 the whole body of ecclesiastics, who claimed and 
 maintained immunity from secular jurisdiction, and 
 claimed, but on the whole failed to maintain, 
 immunity from secular taxation. ‘The assertion 
 of both these privileges was a source of constant 
 disputes. ‘The statement that “the privileges of 
 the Church were the liberties of the people” is 
 true of certain periods, when the Church on the 
 ground of its privileges led a general resistance 
 to irresponsible tyranny. But such periods were 
 exceptional. The privileges of the clergy by pro- 
 moting a dualism within the law of the Christian 
 Respublica—as between clergy and laity—in the 
 long run promoted injustice, ill-will, dissension. 
 The English Parliament in 1513 passed an Act which 
 deprived clerks in minor orders who were guilty 
 of murdering, robbing churches and housebreaking, 
 of their clerical privileges (Parliament did not yet 
 venture to touch criminals who were in holy orders). 
 The Act was denounced as contrary to the law of 
 God and the liberties of the Church. A Franciscan 
 defended the Act, arguing that “it was not against 
 the liberty of the Church, because it was for the weal 
 
 of the whole realm.”’ He was called before Con- 
 G SI 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 vocation, as “‘ it was thought that he had fallen under 
 suspiciomof heresy.” } 
 
 But there was no clear-cut division between the 
 two spheres—secular and spiritual. If ‘he that 
 is spiritual ’ (2. ¢. the ecclesiastical person) ‘ is judged 
 by no man,’ yet he ‘ judgeth all things.’ Ecclesiastical 
 Courts touched every individual. Ecclesiastical and 
 civil areas of administration (as already pointed out) 
 generally coincided. Royal officials were usually 
 ecclesiastics: the surest way to promotion in the 
 Church lay through the service of the State. Becket 
 as Chancellor did much to build up the royal power 
 which as Archbishop he resisted. 
 
 Then, too, the Church was indissolubly bound up 
 in the framework of society. Most local ecclesi- 
 astical bodies were to a greater or less extent land- 
 lords, and were bound to maintain the rights of 
 property which belonged to God and His saints. 
 “The ecclesiastical landowner, like the lay land- 
 owner, bought and sold serfs when he bought and 
 sold land : ” # he was generally under less temptation 
 than his lay neighbour to sell such rights and 
 property for an immediate profit, and was in duty 
 bound as trustee for a higher power to give nothing 
 away: if he emancipated serfs he would be giving 
 away the property of God. ‘The early Cistercians — 
 made a protest against serfdom: they refused to 
 hold serfs and tried to substitute cultivation by lay 
 brothers—men who voluntarily (but irrevocably) 
 adopted a life of celibacy and labour; but the 
 system was a failure; and even before it failed the 
 
 1 Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, WU, Nos. 1313, 1314. 
 2 Cf. Archbishops’ Report, p. 33. 
 82 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 Cistercians were accepting grants of manors and 
 serfs without hesitation. Bishops and monasteries 
 were the strongest opponents of the communal 
 movement which turned serfs into free citizens. 
 
 The medizval Church’s view of society, as of 
 religion, was static. The possibility of extensive 
 social changes was hardly conceived, and those who 
 thought of State and Church as progressive com- 
 munities tended to become more or less definitely 
 heretical or, at least, anti-clerical.t It was rarely 
 recognised that Christianity introduced new social 
 relations except in the directly moral and personal 
 sphere. St. Thomas Aquinas, who occasionally 
 seemed to approach the idea of progress, declared 
 definitely: ‘‘ The new law should add nothing to 
 the old with regard to external obligations.” 
 
 (b) Lhe Church and economic life-—The Church 
 generally accepted the current ideals as to the status 
 of classes, their relations and their duties to one 
 another, and it strove for the realisation of those 
 ideals in practice—on all sides and in all departments 
 of life. The Church instructed its ministers to see 
 that each class carried out its duties to those above 
 or below it. In the confessional the priest was to 
 ask barons, knights, mayors and judges, whether they 
 had made any ordinances contrary to the liberties 
 of the Church, whether they had always done 
 justice, whether they had oppressed their subjects 
 by imposing undue taxes or exacting undue services. 
 Merchants and shopkeepers were to be questioned 
 
 1 Cf. Archbishops’ Report, p. 33. 
 2 « Tex nova super veterem addere non debuit circa exteriora.” 
 Summa, 1a, 2@, qu. 108, art. 2. 
 
 83 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS > 
 
 about usury (open or concealed), fraudulent sales, 
 false weights and measures; farmers and labourers 
 about theft, withholding payments due to their 
 masters, and encroaching on their neighbours’ 
 lands. The priests shall interrogate every penitent 
 according to his rank or occupation ; and on Sundays 
 and festivals, priests should preach against the sins 
 specially prevalent among the people committed 
 to their charge.1 These instructions are taken from 
 synodal statutes adopted in several provinces in the 
 south of France towards the end of the thirteenth 
 century. It is impossible to test how far they were 
 carried out in the confessional. The sermons of 
 Berthold of Ratisbon and Bernardino of Siena 
 (which enjoyed a wide popularity among preachers) 
 show that the spirit of the instructions was acted 
 on in Germany and Italy in the thirteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries. And in the fourteenth century 
 the teaching of Chaucer’s parson is typical of the 
 thought of medieval churchmen upon rural relation- 
 ships. ‘‘ Of covetousness come these hard lordships, 
 through which men be destroyed by tallages, 
 customs and carriages, more than their duty or 
 reason is. And eke they take of their bondmen 
 amercements, which might more reasonably be 
 cleped extortions than amercements. . . . Certes 
 these lordships do wrong, that bereave their bond- 
 folk things they never gave them... . Lords 
 
 should not glorify themselves in their lordships, 
 
 since by natural condition they be not lords of 
 thralls, for that thralldom cometh first by the desert 
 of sin. ... These that thou clepest thy thralls 
 1 Printed by Marténe, Thes. Nov. Anecd., iv, 696-7, 768. 
 84 
 
 | 
 
 ae 
 
 as ee 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 be God’s people, for humble folk be Christ’s friends. 
 ... Lhink eke that of such seed as churls spring, 
 spring lords. As well may the churl be saved as 
 his lord. The same death that taketh the churl, 
 such death taketh the lord. Therefore, I rede, do 
 right so with the churl as thou wouldest that thy 
 lord did with thee, if thou wert in his plight. Every 
 sinful man is a churl of sin. . . . I wot well there is 
 degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that 
 men do their devoir, thereas it is due. But certes, 
 extortions and despite of your underlings is 
 damnable.” 
 
 The question of the ‘just price’ is not specially 
 mentioned in the instructions to confessors cited 
 above, and it must often have been difficult to settle 
 even in the simple conditions of medizval industry 
 and trade. It is, however, one of the ‘ exteriora’ 
 discussed and decided by St. Thomas Aquinas on 
 the distinctly Christian principle, ‘Do unto others 
 as you would they should do unto you.’? It cannot 
 be said that his discussion gives much light on the 
 practical application of this principle: the price 
 should be such as to yield equal advantage to buyer 
 and seller. In discussing the lawfulness of trade 
 Aquinas is more illuminating : * trade for mere gain 
 is base ; trade undertaken with the object of supply- 
 ing the neeus of the community is not only lawful 
 but highly honourable—the merchant looking 
 upon the gain not as the end but as the reward 
 of his labour. ‘Thus economic conduct is one 
 branch of moral conduct : economic activities are 
 
 1 Chaucer, The Persones Tale, §§ 64-66. 
 
 2 Summa, 2a,2@,qu.77, att.1. % Summa, 2a, 2@, qu. 99, art. 4. 
 
 85 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 judged rather according to motives than by 
 results. 
 
 The condemnation of usury by the Church — 
 that is, the taking of any interest for a loan of money 
 (or of anything whose price may by measured in 
 money)—was based partly on the Bible, partly on 
 Aristotle, partly on practical experience of the 
 effects of moneylending in a community composed 
 predominantly of peasants, and partly on natural 
 law. ‘To wish, like the usurer, to live without 
 labour is contrary to nature.” But when from the 
 twelfth century onwards Europe began to live less 
 from hand to mouth, to trade in far countries, to 
 construct great buildings, loans became essential ; 
 and it was equally ‘ contrary to nature’ to expect 
 a particular kind of service to be given without 
 reward. The Church, after perhaps some hesitation,? 
 refused to recast its teaching in the light of altered 
 circumstances, but admitted a good many modifi- 
 cations. ‘Thus, though a loan must be gratuitous 
 to start with, the lender could claim compensation 
 for any loss which he sustained from a delay in 
 repayment. Similarly, a man who invested money 
 in an enterprise was entitled to a share in the profits, 
 provided that he also shared in the risk; he was not 
 entitled to a fixed rate of interest, whatever the 
 result of the venture—that would be usury. So 
 usury was defined by the mayor and aldermen of 
 London in 1390 as “lending to any person gold 
 or silver to receive gain thereby for certain, without 
 
 1 The Civil Law, of course, admitted the legality of interest. 
 2 Cf. Coulton’s article, ‘ An Episode in Canon Law,’ in History, 
 vi., 67-76. 
 86 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 risk.” + ‘This brought usury within narrow bounds, 
 and opened the door for most business transactions. 
 Whether the principle covered Government loans 
 bearing regular interest—such as the Italian cities 
 habitually raised—was a question fiercely debated 
 in the fifteenth century and answered in different 
 ways. The Canonist doctrine had not arrived at 
 a clear-cut principle distinguishing between the 
 legitimate and illegitimate use of money-power. 
 Many secular powers in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries issued licences to moneylenders, who were 
 allowed to charge interest. Ecclesiastical courts 
 dealt with cases of usury only when clerks were 
 concerned. Preachers such as Bernardino of Siena 
 continued to attack the whole system root and 
 branch. But it is evident from the denunciation 
 of strict moralists that absolution for the sin of 
 usury could be obtained on easy terms. It was, 
 however, admitted on all sides that business relations 
 were subject to the moral law; and the sharp 
 dualism between personal conduct—the sphere of 
 morality—and economic transactions—the sphere 
 of objective laws—which is so marked a feature of 
 later thought, either was unintelligible to medieval 
 writers or was denounced by them. “Limited by 
 various qualifications as to different kinds of con- 
 tracts, the general denunciation of usury was 
 directed against almost any inequitable bargain, 
 not only between borrower and lender, but between 
 buyer and seller, landlord and tenant. It was the 
 classical example of ‘unreasonable covetousness,’ a 
 general heading to which all minor Economic 
 1 Ashley, Economic History, I, pt. ii, 425. 
 87 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 offences were referred. Nor were these conceptions 
 mere theuries. Municipal records show that they 
 were the assumptions of plain men who sat on 
 juries and made good ordinances for the govern- 
 ment of boroughs. They had practical foundations 
 in the economic circumstances of village and town. 
 What the Church did was to work them into a 
 system, by relating even the details of economic 
 life to the universal principles of the Christian 
 Faith. .. . That is not to say, of course, that 
 these principles were not often abandoned in 
 practice. But in abandoning them men knew they 
 were acting wrongly and were known to be so 
 acting by their neighbours.” 1 
 
 (c) The Church and political life—The Empire 
 and the Church were the two chief institutions 
 which kept alive the idea of the unity of Western 
 Christendom. The fall of the Empire, and the 
 failure of all attempts to revive it either as a fact 
 (2. g. by Frederick II) or as an ideal (¢. g. by Dante), 
 left the Church as the only embodiment of that 
 unity. 
 
 The Pope as head of the Church occupied a unique 
 international position. He continually acted as 
 peacemaker and arbitrator in international and 
 domestic conflicts—intervening by his legates, now 
 on his own initiative, now at the request of one or 
 more of the parties concerned. We find the Pope — 
 taking measures to avert war, negotiating truce, 
 commanding the cessation of hostilities under threat 
 of excommunication and interdict, arranging diplo- 
 matic marriages, settling boundary disputes and 
 
 1 The Archbishops’ Report, pp. 37-8. 
 88 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 succession questions, creating a pacific public opinion 
 by means of sermons and prayers. 
 
 One of the best-known episodes in the political 
 history of the Papacy is the arbitration of Boniface 
 VIII between Edward I of England and Philip IV 
 of France in 1298. ‘Though Boniface in his award 
 speaks as Pope, the rival kings consented to his 
 intervention only as a private person. This illus- 
 trates one of the weaknesses of the Pope as arbitrator 
 —the tendency to encroach on the rights of secular 
 States, to claim sovereignty or suzerainty over 
 them, and to treat the rulers as his vassals. It was 
 the inevitable result of the Church being also a 
 State. 
 
 The Pope further, besides being Vicar of Christ 
 and head of the Church, was a territorial ruler; 
 and where his temporal interests were concerned 
 he could not be regarded as an impartial judge, and 
 was, in fact, frequently a fomenter of war and 
 rebellion (e. g. in the struggle against the Hohen- 
 stauffen). On the other hand, without political 
 independence he might easily become a tool in the 
 hands of one power or faction. Subservience to 
 France in the fourteenth century, and absorption 
 in Italian politics in the fifteenth, were alike fatal 
 to the Papacy as an international arbitrator. 
 
 The great aim of the foreign policy of the Papacy 
 was to unite Christendom in Crusades against 
 Mohammedanism. And the Crusades gave the 
 Church the opportunity (of which it fully availed 
 itself) of enlisting the spirit of adventure in the 
 service of religion (cf. Boy Scout movement) : 
 knighthood became a semi-religious institution and 
 
 89 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 gradually assimilated or produced the various ideals 
 which are summed up in the word chivalry. 
 Dynastic and personal rivalries and growing national 
 differences were difficult, perhaps insuperable, 
 obstacles to the success of the Crusades; but the 
 divisions of Christendom into the Eastern and 
 Western Churches made union and even co-operation 
 impossible. A Church which claimed universality 
 could not recognise a similar institution, whether 
 as a legitimate rival or a colleague, without stultifying 
 its claims. ‘The principle enunciated by Boniface 
 VIII, “that it is altogether necessary for every 
 human creature to be subject to the Roman 
 Pontiff,” 1 admitted of no geographical limitation. 
 
 There were not wanting Churchmen who pro- 
 tested not against the Crusades but against the 
 substitution of force for missionary effort. ‘Their 
 warnings were justified. The Crusades against 
 Mohammedans familiarised public opinion of the 
 later Middle Ages with the idea of using force against 
 other forms of belief when argument failed. The 
 Albigensian Crusade was the first example of this 
 new development and led directly to the establish- 
 ment of the Papal Inquisition. 
 
 The attempt to control not the actions but the 
 secret thoughts and beliefs of men led to the develop- 
 ment of a procedure which has justly called forth 
 the execration of mankind. The difficulty of 
 securing proof was met by the systematic use of 
 torture both of prisoners and witnesses, and the 
 
 1 In the Bull, Unam Sanctam, a.d. 1302. 
 2 See e.g. Adae de Marisco Epistole (Monumenta Franciscana, 
 I, pp- 416, 434-6. 
 go 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 theory of ‘ suspicion of heresy ’ was invented, so that 
 the accused who could not be convicted of the 
 crime laid to his charge might be punished for being 
 suspected of it. In those countries where the 
 Inquisition was established the secular power, save 
 for some brief protests and revolts, acted as the 
 humble servants of the Church in carrying out the 
 sentences of the Holy Office, and incorporated the 
 methods sanctioned by the Church in the ordinary 
 criminal jurisprudence.! It is significant that, when 
 for afew months the Papal Inquisition functioned 
 in England to secure the condemnation of the 
 Templars, the inquisitors were compelled to get a 
 special permission from the king to use torture, 
 as it was contrary to the laws of England. 
 
 (d) Lhe Church and education.2—The destruction 
 of the old civilisation threw on the Church, as in 
 some sort the heir of that civilisation, the duty of 
 providing education. In the earlier periods of the 
 Middle Ages the duty was (with some exceptions) 
 rather imposed on the ecclesiastical organisation by 
 enlightened secular rulers (e. g. Charles the Great) 
 than voluntarily chosen by it, but later the Church 
 fully accepted the responsibility, and was the chief 
 —in Western Europe almost the only—instrument 
 for the preservation, diffusion and advancement of 
 knowledge. 
 
 Pictorial representations in churches gave some 
 instruction on religious and secular matters to the 
 unlearned, and stimulated the imagination and 
 
 1 Lea, History of the Inquisition, i, 559. 
 2 Cf. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages ; 
 Leach, Schools of Medieval England. 
 
 gI 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 zesthetic sense in a way not provided in the schools. 
 The birth} death, resurrection of our Lord, the lives 
 of the Virgin and the Saints, the Last Judgment 
 are favourite subjects. It is remarkable that the 
 ministry and teaching of Christ are rarely depicted 
 between the sixth and the sixteenth centuries; 
 and the few parables which occasionally appear in 
 stained-glass windows are generally allegorised.* 
 Among secular subjects, shown especially in sculp- 
 tured medallions, may be mentioned illustrations 
 of natural history and the geography of the world. 
 At certain periods and in certain places monastic 
 schools exercised a deep and wide influence; * and 
 it would be difficult to over-estimate the debt which 
 we owe to monastic libraries in general. The stricter 
 and more professional monks, however, such as the 
 Cistercians, discouraged educational activities as 
 inconsistent with their higher calling, and Cistercian 
 ideals reacted on other monastic orders. Some of the 
 older Benedictine monasteries continued to support 
 grammar schools, but these were outside the 
 monastic precincts, and were generally taught by 
 seculars. From the twelfth century onwards educa- 
 tional activities emanated from other sources. 
 General Councils decreed that every Cathedral 
 and every other great church should maintain 
 a school where poor clerks should receive a free 
 education. Complaints that these decrees were not | 
 carried out are frequent and general. Especially 
 
 1 On this subject see E. Male, Religious Art in France of the 
 Thirteenth Century, pp. 176-201. 
 
 2 Cf. Miss R. Graham’s Intellectual Influence of English 
 Monasticism. ‘Trans. R. Hist. Soc., New Ser. XVII, 1904. 
 
 92 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 the failure to provide theological instruction 
 is insisted on: chapters rarely set aside any 
 endowment for the maintenance .of a theological 
 lecturer. The want was partly supplied by the 
 remarkable system of graded schools established by 
 the friars; but owing to the antagonism between 
 the friars and the secular clergy, it seems that the 
 latter made little use of these schools after the 
 thirteenth century. The standard of learning among 
 the parish priests was very low. When, however, 
 at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the 
 rediscovery of the philosophical works of Aristotle 
 opened out new lines of thought, the Church was 
 able to retain the intellectual leadership through the 
 instrumentality of the mendicant orders of friars, 
 who assimilated the new learning and harmonised 
 it with Christian doctrine. St. Thomas Aquinas 
 was regarded in his own day by friend and foe alike 
 as an ‘innovator.’ It was a fact fruitful in results 
 that the same communities which produced the 
 foremost thinkers also produced the most popular 
 preachers and teachers. 
 
 In each Cathedral church the chancellor (or 
 secretary of the chapter) was usually master of the 
 school, but he generally delegated his teaching work 
 and granted to others licence to teach. Normally 
 the chancellor’s licence was necessary to enable 
 a man to keep a school in the diocese, and theoreti- 
 cally the licence was granted without fee to any 
 competent applicant. 
 
 In places where students congregated in large 
 numbers and there were many licensed teachers, 
 the teachers, or students, or the teachers and 
 
 93 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 students together, formed unions or universities * 
 to protect their rights. Such bodies were jealous 
 of outside ecclesiastical interference. “The Univer- 
 sity of Paris was constantly at feud with the Chan- 
 cellor of Notre Dame, to whom nominally belonged 
 the right to grant licence to teach, 7. ¢. to grant 
 degrees. Oxford and Cambridge, not being in — 
 episcopal cities, had less trouble and were able to 
 elect chancellors of their own and become self- 
 governing. ‘The Universities were able to maintain 
 a very wide freedom of thought and discussion. 
 Some theorists even claimed for the Universities 
 an independent position, as the organ of learning and 
 truth, side by side with the Church and the State, 
 and saw in the sacerdotium, the regnum and the 
 studium the three governing principles of the world. 
 But the Universities were from time to time subject 
 to the intervention of the Church authorities, and 
 the Papacy made short work of the claim of the 
 University of Paris to be the interpreter of Papal 
 decrees. 
 
 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries education 
 tended to pass out of the exclusive control of the 
 Church. The movement was not, except in rare 
 cases, due to jealousy of, or hostility to, the Church, 
 but to economic causes and to the growth of public 
 spirit among the laity. Individuals, municipalities, 
 gilds, now appear as founders and governors of 
 schools, which are independent of any ecclesiastical 
 
 1 The word ‘ universitas’ in the Middle Ages was applied to 
 any association or community, é. g. a gild, or city, as well as to an 
 association of teachers and students or a University in the modern 
 sense. 
 
 94 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 organisation and may be taught by clerks or 
 laymen. 
 
 The Church had done its work. It had success- 
 fully carried education through its pioneer stage and 
 linked it with the life of the times. 
 
 “ The medieval Church was the greatest teaching 
 body in existence: its thought wound into men’s 
 minds by a hundred channels, and its influence must 
 be judged by its indirect effect in modifying opinion, 
 rather than by its direct intervention through 
 legislation or judicial action. Medieval thought 
 would not allow that there was any department 
 of life which lay outside the scope of Christian 
 ethics, and which was to be guided by a purely 
 naturalistic morality, such as that to-day expressed 
 in the phrases ‘ the struggle for existence’ or ‘ the 
 survival of the fittest.’ ” + 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE PERIOD OF THE 
 MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, W. J. Ashley. 
 (Longmans, Part I, 227 pp., Part Il, 501 pp.) 
 
 Christianity in History, J. V. Bartlet and A. J. Carlyle. (Mac- 
 millan, 1917.) 
 
 History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, R. W. and A. J. 
 Carlyle. Vols. I-IV (to end of twelfth century). (Blackwood, 
 1903-22.) 
 
 Political Theories of the Middle Ages, O. Giercke. (Camb. Univ. 
 Press, 1900, lxxx and 197 pp.) 
 
 Die Soxiallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, E.'Troeltsch. (Tubingen, 
 
 1912, 994 pp.) 
 
 
 
 1 Archbishops’ Report, p. 36. 
 95 
 
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 A hah hee: 
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 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
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IV. THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD! 
 
 (a) Links with the Medieval Period.—The social 
 thought described in the account of the pre- 
 ceding period had drawn its substance from the 
 facts of the medizval and social organisation. Its 
 conception of society as an organism composed 
 of classes with varying rights and obligations had 
 been a softened reflection of the feudal land system. 
 Its theory of economic ethics, with its prohibition 
 of usury and insistence on reasonable prices, had 
 been designed to meet the economic problems of 
 an age in which, outside the great industrial centres 
 of Flanders and Northern Italy, the typical pro- 
 ducer was not a wage-worker, but a peasant or small 
 master whom a bad harvest or a commercial mis- 
 fortune drove to the moneylender, and in which 
 the consumer in the absence of legal protection 
 was liable to be at the mercy of a system of legal- 
 ised monopolies. Its insistence that economic in- 
 terests were, not a closed compartment with laws 
 of their own, but a subordinate fact of a larger 
 whole of which the apex was religion, had been 
 the natural corollary of the claim of the Church 
 to be the final arbiter of human affairs. All activities 
 fell within a single scheme, because all, though with 
 different degrees of immediateness, were related to 
 a single end. 
 
 1 For Bibliographical Notes for this period see p. 117. 
 99 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 These conceptions, which constitute the social 
 tradition of Christendom, as embodied in its legal 
 system and its political philosophy, were the equip- 
 ment with which the religious thought of the 
 sixteenth century faced the new economic problems 
 that crowded upon it. Men clung to them with 
 the greater devotion because they seemed the one — 
 good road in a country where all landmarks were 
 being submerged by the flood of ceaseless economic 
 change, which from this time onwards becomes one 
 of the master forces of history. In face of the long 
 rise in prices, which set in early in the century and — 
 proceeded with redoubled rapidity in the forties, 
 customary standards of payment broke down, and 
 with them the customary social relationships of 
 which they had been the economic foundation. 
 Partly because of the screw which the depreciation 
 of money turned on landlords; partly because of 
 the expansion of the textile trade; partly, perhaps, 
 because uneconomical methods of cultivation were 
 yielding diminishing returns; partly through the 
 collapse of feudalism as a system of political organ- 
 isation, the traditional structure of rural life began 
 to give way to a new commercialising of agricul- 
 ture. ‘The most conspicuous symptoms of this in 
 England were the spread of pasture farming, en- 
 closures and competitive rents and fines, and, in 
 Germany, a relentless enforcement of onerous and 
 antiquated services; and the result, in both alike, 
 was a series of peasant revolts, swelling up into a 
 social war. With the widening of the area of 
 commerce which followed the great discoveries, 
 
 international trade not only altered its course but 
 100 , 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 changed its character. The new scale on which 
 commerce was conducted gave their opportunity 
 to combines which commanded the resources to 
 handle it in bulk, and to corner the markets in 
 spices or in coffee. An international money market 
 with speculation in futures and arbitrage dealings 
 developed, and capital drawn from every corner 
 of Europe was placed by Antwerp agents of German 
 bankers at the disposal of merchants who needed 
 funds to finance the movement of exports, and of 
 Governments arming for the ceaseless wars of the 
 age. One industry after another passed into a 
 stage of semi-capitalism, in which, while the pro- 
 cesses of manufacture were performed by the work- 
 man in his own home, he depended for raw materials, 
 credit and markets, upon an entrepreneur. Finance 
 became a power to which Governments must defer ; 
 and the medieval bourgeoisie, intent on the con- 
 servation of local and corporate privileges, was 
 increasingly merged in a new plutocracy, concerned 
 to vindicate the power of the capitalist to dispense 
 with the artificial protection of gild and borough 
 and to carve his own career. 
 
 (b) Lhe Christian economics of the sixteenth 
 century.—Ihe economic revolution gave rise to 
 passionate controversy, and since social thought 
 had been cast in the mould of religion, religious 
 leaders were the protagonists init. T'o the peasant 
 farmer or small master, who was still the typical 
 workman of the age, the crucial problems continued 
 to be those which sprang from his relation to his 
 landlord or to the moneylender to whom he pledged 
 
 his crops or his wares in return for immediate 
 IoI 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 accommodation; and they were the more crucial 
 in the sixteenth century because the changes in 
 land tenure and the growing power of capital were 
 confronting him with the alien environment of an 
 increasingly commercial civilisation. Hence the 
 literature produced on the subject of usury, prices 
 and the land question, was voluminous. Luther, — 
 Melanchthon, Calvin, Bucer, Bullinger, Latimer, 
 Sandys and Jewel—to mention no others—all took 
 part in the discussion: they took part in it not 
 as social reformers, but as religious teachers. For 
 economic issues were regarded, as in the past, not 
 as the expression of impersonal forces but as matters 
 of individual conduct, involving personal responsi- 
 ' bility ; and where we see the movements of markets 
 ebbing and flowing as irresistibly as the tides, they 
 saw and lamented the failure to master economic 
 appetites. Had they grasped the fact that par- 
 ticular acts of covetousness or oppression could be 
 expressed in terms of a general law, they would no 
 more have regarded that fact as absolving the 
 individual of his moral responsibilities than the 
 modern statistician, who correlates the consumption 
 of alcohol or the illegitimate birth-rate with the 
 changes in the price of wheat, considers himself 
 precluded from condemning intemperance or sexual 
 immorality. Avarice, they would have replied, does 
 not become less reprehensible because the transac- 
 tions in which it is embodied can be expressed in a 
 series displaying certain characteristics of uniformity 
 and symmetry. ‘The individual is responsible for 
 his action, and it is the duty of the religious teacher 
 to emphasise his responsibility. 
 102 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 This assumption that religion embraced the whole 
 of life, and not merely certain departments of it, 
 was common to all schools of opinion; and if it 1s 
 true that the Reformation gave an impetus to the . 
 growth of the modern dualism between religion 
 and business, it did so without design and against 
 the intention of most of the reformers. However 
 profound the differences between Catholics and 
 Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists, on questions 
 of doctrine or Church government, Luther and 
 Calvin, Latimer and Laud, John Knox and the 
 Pilgrim Fathers agreed in holding that social. 
 morality was the province of the Church, and that 
 the Church should both teach it and, when neces- 
 sary, enforce it by suitable discipline. Nor, in the 
 second place, except for the qualifications in the 
 theory of money introduced by Calvin, was there , 
 any intention of relaxing the particular rules in 
 which the attempt to enforce good conscience in 
 bargains had found expression. Luther might de- 
 nounce the Canon law in general and protest that 
 the Bible was an all-sufficient rule of action. But 
 when he spoke on economic matters, as in his long 
 and famous sermon on usury, and his tract on 
 Trade and Usury, the doctrines to which he 
 appealed were those of the Canon law, stripped of 
 the qualifications by which later Canonists had 
 attempted to adjust it to the growing complexity © 
 of commercial enterprise, and his teaching as to 
 prices and interest is more open to the charge of , 
 impracticable conservatism than of laxity. In 
 England Latimer was the centre of a group of 
 
 reformers—known to their opponents by the ironical 
 103 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 name of the “Commonwealth men”—who de- 
 nounced the commercialising of agrarian relation- 
 ships as an outrage on the corporate solidarity of a 
 Christian society ; helped to secure the appointment 
 of the Commission of 1540 on Depopulation; and 
 stood behind Somerset in his ill-fated attempt to 
 undo the social changes of the last half-century by 
 throwing down the gentry’s enclosures. The men | 
 who enriched themselves by means of the great 
 pillage, and who had built up large estates by 
 plundering the Church, were not eager for the 
 enforcement of any high standards of social morality 
 in the name of reform. 
 
 Speaking generally, insistence that the property 
 owner is a trustee whose rights are at once con- 
 ditional on the function which he performs and 
 limited by the rule of charitable dealing towards 
 those dependent on him, was characteristic of the | 
 attitude towards the Land questions assumed by 
 religious teachers from the Reformation to the 
 Civil War; and Laud, who, as Clarendon said, 
 “did a little too much countenance the Com- 
 mission on Depopulation,” was the last great 
 example of it. It was a result of the same social 
 conservatism that the leaders of the English Church 
 accepted without question the traditional doctrine 
 as to usury. In the extensive literature on the 
 subject medizval schoolmen, Councils and Papal | 
 decretals, were quoted freely as evidence that usury 
 was against the law of the Church. To the critic 
 who objected that the moral discipline of the 
 Church had been abrogated by the new religious 
 
 dispensation, Dr. Wilson, a Master of the Court of 
 104 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 Requests and for a short time Secretary of State, 
 could reply that “the dissenting gospeller,’’? who 
 “‘for private gain undoeth the welfare of man,’ 
 is as reprehensible as “the wilful and obdurate 
 Papist,” that men ought not “altogether to be 
 enemies of the Canon laws . . . because the Pope 
 was author of them,” and that ‘‘ there be some such 
 laws made by the Pope as be right godly.” 
 
 In spite of the increasing discredit of the ecclesi- 
 astical jurisdiction, cases of usurious contracts still 
 continued to be brought occasionally before the 
 ecclesiastical courts. Archbishop Grindal’s injunc- 
 tions to the clergy and laity of the Province of York 
 (1571) expressly emphasised the duty of ‘ presenting 
 to the ordinary’ those who lend and demand back 
 more than the principal, whatever the guise under 
 which the transaction might be concealed. Bishops’ 
 articles of visitation down to the Civil War required 
 the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, 
 together with swearers, drunkards, ribalds and 
 sorcerers. ‘The rules to be observed in excom- 
 municating the impenitent promulgated in 1585, 
 the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, 
 and the Canons of the Irish Church in 1637, all 
 included a provision that the usurer should be 
 subjected to ecclesiastical discipline. What is sig- 
 nificant is less the denunciation of the particular 
 offence than the conception of a scheme of social 
 morality based on religion which it implies. “ If 
 any man be so addicted to his private interest,”’ 
 preached Laud in 1621, “that he neglects the 
 common State, he is void of the sense of piety and 
 
 wishes peace and happiness for himself in vain. 
 105 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 For whoever he be, he must live in the body of the 
 Commonwealth and in the body of the Church.” 
 To such a temper economic was as repugnant as 
 religious individualism. The doctrine that religion 
 oversteps its province when it interferes with 
 economic affairs would have been as unintelligible 
 to most sixteenth-century Churchmen as to their — 
 medizval predecessors. 
 
 Nor was it only the right wing of the reformed 
 Churches which continued the medizval tradition. 
 Calvinism, at least in the first half-century of its 
 history, stood for the subordination of economic 
 appetites to a discipline not less but more rigorous 
 than that against which it revolted. Calvin, it is 
 true, accepted as the starting-point of his social 
 theory the realities of a commercial civilisation— 
 capitalist commerce, banking and investments— 
 which Luther, with his simpler scheme of patri- 
 archal ethics, had denounced as belonging to the 
 very essence of the kingdom of darkness, which the 
 Churchman must shun. In the qualified sanction 
 which he gave to interest, involving, as it did, 
 a distinction between interest and usury, Calvin 
 attempted to maintain the principle that the lender 
 should not wring extortionate gain from the neces- — 
 sities of the borrower; while at the same time, he 
 adapted it to the facts of a society in which the 
 borrower was not seldom a wealthy merchant, who 
 raised a loan in order to speculate on the foreign” 
 exchange and to make a profitable coup by dealing 
 in wool or wheat. His innovation was of consider- 
 able speculative interest and of some practical” 
 
 importance. It founded a doctrine which, while 
 106 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 hotly disputed, was taught henceforward by a 
 school of divines of increasing influence, such as 
 Bullinger in the sixteenth century and Ames in the 
 seventeenth, thus introducing a division into the 
 moralists’ camp. In England in particular (where, 
 after a short interval of five years from 1545 to 
 1551, during which interest not exceeding 12 per 
 cent. had been legalised, all interest had again been 
 prohibited by the Act of Edward VI) it supplied 
 wavering legislation with an excuse for saying that 
 ecclesiastics did not know their own minds. But 
 to read Calvin’s remarks as implying a general 
 indifference to matters of economic morality is 
 completely to misinterpret the spirit of Calvinism. 
 His famous or notorious ‘indulgence’ was after all 
 merely one specimen of a long series of interpre- 
 tations by which theologians had attempted ever 
 since the thirteenth century to bridge the gulf 
 between religious theory and commercial practice ; 
 and the conditions by which it was accompanied— 
 that interest should never be demanded from the 
 poor, that, when demanded, it should never exceed 
 a rate fixed by public authority, that the borrowers 
 should benefit as much as or more than the lender 
 —were of a kind to be hardly more consoling to 
 the devout moneylender than complete prohibition. 
 How far Calvinism was from intending to encourage 
 the sacrifice of moral to economic interests a glance 
 at the teaching of Calvinist divines is sufficient 
 to show. Ames in the first half of the seventeenth 
 century, and Baxter in the second, both produced 
 works of economic casuistry in which the traditional 
 
 teaching as to prices and usury appeared almost 
 107 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 unaltered, except for the concession made to moder- 
 ate interest; and the duties of lender and borrower, 
 seller and buyer, landlord and tenant, were defined 
 with the precision of a medieval summa. 
 
 (c) The passing of the Christian view—The 
 assumption, then, that the conduct of man in his 
 economic relations was to be controlled by rules 
 derived from religion and expounded by the Church, 
 had survived the shock of the Reformation. It 
 still remained the common Christian conviction 
 that transactions of business were just one depart- 
 ment of ethical conduct and to be judged, like 
 other parts of it, by ethical criteria; that whatever 
 concessions the State might see fit to make to 
 human frailty, a certain standard of economic 
 morality was involved in membership of the Christian 
 Church; and that it was the function of ecclesi- 
 astical authorities, whoever they might be, to take 
 the action needed to bring home to men their 
 social obligations. Such doctrines, far from being 
 the monopoly of any particular school of religious 
 thought, were a legacy shared by Protestants as 
 fully as by Catholics. But they were a legacy 
 which could survive as a living reality only by 
 virtue of a perpetual effort to restate its implications 
 in a form applicable to the special conditions and 
 practical problems with which each generation 
 was confronted. What meets us in the sixteenth, 
 and still more in the seventeenth century, is the © 
 decline of the whole body of ideas of which the 
 attempt to create a Christian casuistry of economic 
 conduct had been the practical expression. In- 
 creasingly disputed by practical men and gradually 
 
 108 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 discarded by religious teachers, the conception that 
 a moral rule is binding on Christians in their economic 
 transactions gives way to the temper which asserts 
 that no moral rule beyond the letter of the civil 
 law exists. By the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century the view that trade is one thing and religion 
 another, if not explicitly asserted, is tacitly accepted. 
 
 The change of thought was momentous. Could 
 any intellectual revolution be more profound than 
 one which substituted for a supernatural criterion 
 one conception or another of economic expediency ? 
 Its connection with the political struggles of the 
 age requires no emphasis. 
 
 The Civil War weakened authority, political and 
 ecclesiastical. It left England with a divided 
 Church, and from the Restoration onwards no such 
 power was entrusted to churchmen as had been 
 exercised by Laud. ‘The Star Chamber as a means 
 of enforcing social standards was not re-established, 
 and the laity saw to it that the clergy did not again 
 hold high office in the State. The power of the 
 Privy Council was no longer what it had been in 
 the days of the first Stuarts. Episcopal courts 
 confined themselves more and more to technical 
 offences against ecclesiastical discipline. 
 
 But what was not less fundamental than the 
 discrediting of ecclesiastical authority, was the 
 failure of all schools of religious opinion to work 
 out a social theory applicable to the condition of a 
 society where economic development was entering 
 on seas uncharted by the medieval moralist. Systems 
 prepare their own ruin by a preliminary process of 
 
 petrifaction; and if the continuity of religious 
 109 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 teaching from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth 
 century is impressive, it is none the less evidence 
 of the failure of thought to keep pace with 
 the changing realities of economic organisation. 
 Traditional doctrines of prices and usury had 
 endeavoured to moralise economic transactions by 
 treating them as a simple case of neighbourly or 
 unneighbourly conduct; and they were repeated 
 in a hundred pamphlets between 1600 and 1640. 
 But in the conditions produced by the growth of 
 international commerce, of capitalist industry and 
 of an elaborate financial organisation, the question 
 which remained for solution was, Who exactly is 
 the neighbour in question? ‘The teaching which 
 had as its target the uncharitable covetousness of 
 the village pawnbroker neither made nor could it 
 be expected to make any impression on the clothier, 
 the East India merchant or the goldsmith banker. 
 To be influential it should have been recreated : 
 in actual fact it was merely restated. Its ineffective- 
 ness in practice prepared the way for its total 
 abandonment as a theory. The social philosophy 
 of the Church had ceased, in short, to be creative 
 and had become traditional. As it became merely 
 traditional it drifted further and further away from 
 the realities of the business world. And as it lost 
 touch with reality, it lost its hold first upon the 
 conscience of practical men and then upon the 
 clergy themselves. What after the Restoration 
 took its place among the educated classes was the 
 new science of Political Arithmetic, which treated 
 economic phenomena, not as a casuist concerned 
 
 to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist 
 IIo 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 interested in the objective analysis of non-moral 
 forces. 
 
 (d) The naturalistic social philosophy of the 
 new pertod.—tntellectually the way was pre- 
 pared for this morally detached attitude of mind 
 by the revival or reinterpretation of the old Stoic 
 concept of Natural Law, which began with the 
 Renaissance and culminated in the eighteenth 
 century. In the work of Hugo Grotius, this idea 
 of natural law is dissociated from the idea of God. 
 In the ancient Church there had arisen a modified 
 theory of the Stoic idea of natural law. It was 
 an order imposed or sanctioned by God as a remedy 
 for the consequences of the Fall. But in Grotius, 
 natural law is self-subsisting, self-explanatory. ‘‘’ The 
 purpose of the natural order is not the honour of 
 God, but the welfare of man.” From this starting- 
 point Grotius developed a theory of a social con- 
 tract In a conservative sense. Many different 
 theories could be and were constructed on this 
 basis, but the basis itself involves the belief in a 
 natural law, a social order, which would be valid 
 whether or no it were supported by religious faith. 
 ‘The Puritans developed their sociological ideas 
 directly out of their religion; they determined 
 their attitude towards society and industry in the 
 name of God: Grotius led the way to a complete 
 severance of the two realms. Religion stands by 
 itself, it has nothing to do with natural law; and 
 natural law stands by itself, it has nothing to do 
 with religion. The two realms of human life are 
 entirely neutral in relation to one another. (This 
 
 is of fundamental importance for the later attitude 
 II! 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 of the Church.) For if natural law has nothing to 
 do with religion, the Church has nothing to do 
 with the social question.” 1 As the influence of 
 this idea of natural law spread, and even before it 
 received its significant development in the classical 
 political economy, the Christian ethic tended 
 to become purely individualistic. The question 
 whether Christianity had a doctrine of society or 
 involved a social revolution was left on one side. 
 The Church had surrendered the guidance of 
 human conduct in business and politics to the 
 economist and the politician. 
 
 Closely connected with the idea of natural law 
 was the conception of International Law, especially 
 in its bearing on war, which arose out of problems 
 due to the Wars of Religion, particularly the Thirty 
 Years’ War. But here the Law of Nature and the 
 Christian revelation were treated as largely agreeing 
 with and supporting each other. 
 
 International law proper owes its origin to the Jus Gentium 
 and Fus Naturale of Rome: its inspiration is to be found in Stoic 
 philosophy rather than in Christian teaching. After the break- 
 down of the Roman system, however, it was Christian idealism 
 which took over the Stoic idea of the law of Nature, together 
 with the authority of the Church, that kept alive and revived 
 the idea of international obligation. In the eleventh century 
 the Church was partially successful in asserting the ‘ truce of 
 God.’ The Pope was often arbiter between rulers. ‘The Canonists 
 were amongst the medieval forerunners of the international 
 lawyers. ‘Thomas Aquinas himself paid some attention to inter- 
 national law. ‘The moral theologians at the end of the fifteenth 
 century—and especially the Spaniard, Franciscus a Victoria— 
 discussed international law more fully. War is justified by refer- 
 
 
 
 1 J. Meyer, Das soziale Naturrecht in der christlichen Kirche, 33f. 
 112 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 ence to the Old Testament in the works of several sixteenth- 
 century writers, including Victoria and Ayala. 
 
 The modern science of international law comes 
 to fruition in the works of Albericus Gentilis and 
 Hugo Grotius. Both were, unlike Machiavelli and 
 his non-moral politics, inspired largely by the 
 desire to bring international practice into closer 
 conformity with moral principle and to enlist 
 the sympathy of Christian people for that aim; 
 both enforced their arguments by frequent refer- 
 ence to the Bible, to the early Fathers, to St. 
 Augustine and to the Canonists. The following 
 quotations from Grotius may be regarded as fairly 
 typical. 
 
 First he gives as his reason for writing on this subject that he 
 “saw prevailing throughout the Christian world a licence in 
 making war of which even barbarous nations would have been 
 ashamed.” ‘The books written by men inspired by God, or 
 approved by them, I often use as authority, with a distinction 
 between the Old and the New Law.” “I use the New Testa- 
 ment for this purpose, that I may show, what cannot be shown 
 in any other way, what is lawful for Christians.””? He concludes 
 his Introduction with the words: ‘‘ And now, if I have said 
 anything which is at variance with sound piety, with good morals, 
 with Holy Scripture, with the unity of the Christian Church, 
 with truth in any form—let that be as unsaid.” “If, therefore, 
 a peace sufficiently safe can be had, it is not ill secured by the 
 condonation of offences, and damages, and expenses; especially 
 among Christians, to whom the Lord has given His peace as His 
 
 
 
 1 Grotius quotes the Old Testament 51 times; the New 64 
 times; the Fathers and other theologians 23 times; these three 
 together forming about half his references to classic authorities. 
 The first four of the quotations given above are from the Intro- 
 duction to his De jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), and the last two from 
 the closing pages. 
 
 I 
 
 113 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 legacy.” Finally, ‘“‘ May God write these lessons—He who alone 
 can—on the hearts of all those who have the affairs of Christendom 
 in their hands; and may He give to those persons a mind fitted 
 to understand and to respect Rights, divine and human; and 
 lead them to recollect always that the ministration committed 
 to them is no less than this, that they are the governors of Man, 
 a creature most dear to God! ” 
 
 (ce) The soctal influences of  Puritanism—The 
 Puritanism, too, which was the faith of large sections 
 of the bourgeoiste, and which had its strongholds in 
 the commercial centres, exhibited, when its heroic 
 age was over, a temper of social indifferentism. 
 “Prudence and Piety,” wrote a Puritan divine,! 
 ‘‘were ever very good friends. You may gain 
 enough of both worlds if you would mind each in 
 its place.” The qualities which such a creed 
 emphasised were those of foresight, industry, thrift 
 and material calculation, intensity and earnestness 
 of labour. In throwing these into high relief, it 
 naturally, if not quite logically, tended to disparage 
 the moral significance of the social environment 
 for which the individual, as an individual, is not 
 directly responsible. A zealous discharge of private 
 duties was at once, it was suggested, the high-road 
 to business success and the loftiest form of moral 
 virtue. Of the collectivist and individualist ele- 
 ments which lay side by side in the teaching of — 
 Calvin and his sixteenth-century popularisers, it © 
 was the individualist element which survived. 
 
 This tendency to individualism survived in ~ 
 part because the Puritans, as Nonconformists, 
 were, in the eighteenth century, shut out from the 
 
 1 Steele, The Religious Tradesman. 
 114 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 Universities and to a large extent excluded from 
 political influence. They were also merged in sects 
 which had indeed in the seventeenth century been 
 socially more revolutionary than the Calvinists, 
 but which had had to moderate their enthusiasms, 
 partly in the sheer struggle to survive at all in the 
 face of persecution, and partly in the effort to 
 become respectable. For it must be remembered 
 that the seventeenth-century sects had two char- 
 acteristics in common. ‘They were intensely demo- 
 cratic in spirit and they stood for some kind of 
 social revolution. ‘This last point is true not only 
 of the most extravagant sects—like the Levellers, 
 the Diggers and the Fifth Monarchy men—which 
 were suppressed, but also of the Quakers, the 
 Baptists and Independents, which survived. George 
 Fox, ¢. g., saw in vision fair a time when we should 
 have a Christian world without lawyers, without 
 soldiers, without doctors and without clergy. ‘This 
 vision is certainly revolutionary. But after the 
 Restoration the energies of Quakerism were largely 
 taken up with the urgent task of self-preservation, 
 and with paying the purchase-price of toleration. 
 The situation of other Dissenters was not dis- 
 similar. In the eighteenth century the whole 
 force of the Puritan and allied traditions seems to 
 be devoted to the maintenance of certain standards 
 of individual conduct and the preservation of certain 
 religious groups and communities. The sense of 
 wider Christian responsibilities was largely lost, 
 until John Woolman initiated the anti-slavery 
 movement by his loyalty to conscience, and until 
 William Carey, stirred by the new Evangelical 
 115 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 movement, burst the bonds of the old Calvinist 
 orthodoxy and started the modern missionary 
 movement. 
 
 Politically Puritanism and the influence of the 
 sects! developed democracy. In the seventeenth 
 century the Puritans at least ensured the consti- 
 tutional character of our monarchy. In the eigh- 
 teenth century the little independent churches 
 proved themselves to be the training-ground of 
 modern democracy. But just as they had to 
 struggle for individual liberty in religion and in 
 politics, so they came to distrust all State inter- 
 ference, all social control in industry, and tended 
 to make the individual a law unto himself in his 
 business dealings. ‘The result was that when the 
 sweeping movement of economic reconstruction, to 
 which convention assigns the not very felicitous 
 name of the Industrial Revolution, took place in 
 the eighteenth century, the consciences of the 
 mass of middle-class men were often already dis- 
 armed by the very nature of the religion which 
 they professed. 
 
 1 See E. Borgeaud, The Rise of Democracy. 
 
 116 
 
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 
 
 Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, Ernst 'Troeltsch. 
 (Tiibingen, 1912, 994 pp.) 
 
 Protestantism and Progress, Ernst Troeltsch. (Williams and Nor- 
 gate, 1912, 210 pp.) 
 
 Political Thought from Bacon to Halifax, G. P. Gooch. Esp. 
 chs. v—vii. (Williams and Norgate, 1914, 256 pp.) 
 
 Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, G. P. Gooch. 
 
 Property : its Duties and Rights. (Macmillan.) 
 
 Economic Liberalism, Levy. (Macmillan and Co., 1913, 724 pp.) 
 
 Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, W. J. Ashley. 
 (Longmans. Two Parts: 227 pp. and 501 pp.) 
 
 117 
 

 
V 
 THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES 
 

 
V. THE. NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH 
 CENTURIES ! 
 
 Tis period may conveniently be taken to cover 
 a century and a half, and may be divided, despite 
 inevitable overlappings, into three sections of half 
 a century each. The first will cover the years from 
 1770 to 1820; the second, the years from 1820 to 
 1870; the third, the years from 1870 to 1920. 
 During the first will be seen the rise of a new 
 social order, during the second the reign of Indi- 
 vidualism, and during the third the reaction from 
 Individualism. 
 
 (A) Tue Rist or THE New Socrat OrpeER (177 
 TO 1820 A.D.) : 
 
 1. Historica Survey.—The eighteenth century 
 saw the landed aristocracy in almost complete pos- 
 session of power, as the result of the part it played 
 in the constitutional revolution of 1688. It domin- 
 ated both the State and the Established Church, and 
 sternly disciplined Nonconformity. Parliament be- 
 came entirely controlled by the landed interest. 
 But in the last quarter of that century a new force 
 rapidly rose to power with it—that of the capitalist 
 manufacturers. ‘These two interests in uneasy 
 
 1 For Bibliographical Notes on this period see p. 158. 
 121 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 partnership entirely ruled the country for a long 
 half-century. Together they revolutionised the 
 whole order of English society, and that with a 
 suddenness which was startling. ‘The process may 
 be seen in the operation of three chief causes, in 
 three contemporary events which acted and inter- 
 acted—the French wars, the Agrarian Revolution 
 and the Industrial Revolution. 
 
 (a) The French wars: social effects—The French 
 wars extended from 1793 to 1815. Victory in these 
 gave command of the seas, supremacy in commerce, 
 and the beginnings of Empire in the East. They 
 enriched landowners and farmers, merchants and 
 manufacturers, but exhausted the State and crushed 
 the main body of the English people. ‘The National 
 Debt, which stood at (2472 millions in 1790, rose 
 by 1815 to £861 millions. ‘Taxes were placed upon 
 every necessary and convenience of daily life. To 
 add to the misery, prices rose, wages fell. But 
 profits soared and rent-rolls increased. By 1815 
 both raw cotton imports and all exports had doubled. 
 Never before had wealth accumulated in the hands 
 of the few at such a rate. 
 
 (b) Lhe Agrarian Revolution: its effects and 
 reactions.—Simultaneously with the French wars a 
 great agrarian revolution had been in, process, which 
 was another chief cause of the new wealth and new 
 poverty. In 1760 the soil was farmed in common 
 in more than half the parishes of England by village 
 communities. The system was economically waste- 
 ful, and unable to provide for a population growing 
 rapidly and threatened in its food supplies by the 
 
 French blockade. Legislative steps were taken to 
 122 . 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 enclose the common fields, and commons and wastes. 
 Enterprising landowners, adopting agricultural re- 
 forms, brought in the ‘ New Agriculture.’ Stock, 
 cultivation of the soil, and production of food were 
 vastly improved. But it meant also large additions 
 to private property in land. From 1760 to 1844 
 nearly 4000 Enclosure Acts were passed, covering 
 about one-third of the cultivable area of England. 
 All experts agree that these agricultural reforms and 
 enclosures were carried out to the detriment of the 
 labouring population. Arthur Young, the chief 
 agent in stimulating them, declared that “ the poor 
 were injured by nineteen out of twenty Enclosure 
 Acts.” By these changes labourers were all reduced 
 to entire dependence on money-wages. In the 
 Agrarian Revolution (as real though not as political 
 a revolution as the French) the English agricultur- 
 alist lost what the French peasant never did—his 
 status—his right in the soil. 
 
 In 1688 three-fifths of the agricultural population held rights 
 in land, and one-fifth were yeomen farmers. Yet up to a generation 
 ago one-third of the entire area of England and Wales was in the 
 hands of the landed aristocracy, a congestion in a few hands which 
 had not happened since the Middle Ages, when the Church held 
 one-third of the cultivable area. Barely one in a hundred and 
 seventy came to own more than an acre of English ground +— 
 a fact pregnant with important economic and social consequences. 
 
 The result of these agrarian ‘ reforms’ was that 
 during the first quarter of the nineteenth century 
 agricultural labour pined and perished from reduced 
 status, low wages and crushing taxation. In the 
 words of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, “ no class in the 
 
 1 See Evolution of Industry, D. H. Macgregor, p. 155. 
 123 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ‘world has so beaten and crouching a history.” 
 Pauperism increased with appalling rapidity and so 
 did poor-rates. Population too increased with such 
 rapidity that Thorold Rogers affirms that nothing — 
 like such increase had been known in England for — 
 the five hundred years from 1300 to 1800. The 
 decision of the Berkshire magistrates at Speenham- 
 land near Newbury in 1795, to supplement farmers’ 
 wages from the poor-rates, to bring them up to 
 subsistence level, with grants to new-born children, 
 is generally regarded in this relation as having disas- 
 trous consequences upon the despairing labourers’ 
 morale. 
 
 The phenomenal rise in the poor-rates led to the 
 enactment of the New Poor Law of 1834, which 
 abolished outdoor relief and substituted the work- 
 house test. Hateful as this law was to the people, 
 it brought down the poor-rates, yet it did not abate 
 the misery. ‘That misery led to grave discontent, 
 to the emigration of the better types of labourers, 
 and to much migration to the towns despite the Acts 
 of Settlement. The drift to the towns led to a 
 rapid redistribution of the population and changed 
 the face of England. 
 
 (c) The Industrial Revolution.—Side by side with 
 the French wars and the Agrarian Revolution went 
 on another revolution—the industrial, that made 
 by the new machine-industry. The invention of 
 spinning and weaving machinery by Arkwright, 
 Crompton, Hargreaves, Cartwright and _ others 
 destroyed domestic industry. The new machines, 
 driven first by water and then later, through James 
 Watt’s invention, by steam, displaced hand-loom 
 
 124 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 machinery. They inaugurated the Factory System 
 and capitalistic manufacture. Hitherto the crafts- 
 man had dwelt in his own cottage, with its garden, 
 near the fields. He had worked his own machines, 
 often owned his own tools, and marketed his own 
 product. He lived in frugal comfort and independ- 
 ence. Now all became changed. He was driven 
 into the factory towns for a living, with nothing but 
 his labour for hire, and that in a market cheapened by 
 the influx of the destitute agricultural labourers, and 
 by the labour of women and children. 
 
 The new machinery multiplied the powers of 
 production a hundredfold. It was expensive and 
 ran in large factories owned by capitalists. These 
 ‘cotton lords’ grew enormously wealthy, for trade 
 increased by leaps and bounds. ‘Thorold Rogers 
 declares that “‘ never in English history was wealth 
 more rapidly accumulated by manufacturers and 
 landlords than in the forty years between 1782 and 
 1821.” 1 Wage-earners, however, gained no share 
 init. The condition of factory labour soon became 
 a crying scandal. Mills ran day and night, served 
 mainly by relays of women and little children, the 
 latter working for fourteen, sixteen and more hours 
 per day. Pauper children were exported by the 
 ‘ Guardians ’ of the poor from the south to the north 
 of England, and were treated in the mills with 
 incredible cruelty. Sanitary conditions were appal- 
 ling; the death-rate terrible. Feeble efforts were 
 made to diminish some of the evils of the system, 
 but it remained unchecked till 1830. The result of 
 this traffic in flesh and blood for gain could be seen 
 
 1 Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 220. 
 125 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 for a generation or two afterwards in the deterio- 
 rated physique of the populations of Lancashire and 
 Yorkshire. Amongst the displaced handicraftsmen 
 unemployment and low wages led to grave discon- 
 tent. Sedition, Conspiracy, and Anti-Combination 
 Laws to prevent the workers uniting to better their 
 condition were severely put into operation, and 
 transportations and executions were frequent. It 
 was not until the Repeal of the Anti-Combination 
 Laws in 1824, through the skilful labours of Francis 
 Place and Joseph Hume, that violence ceased. 
 Even then the class-administration of the Conspiracy 
 and other Acts made workmen’s combinations difh- 
 cult and even dangerous.” Mr. Sidney Webb states 
 that the first twenty years of the nineteenth century 
 witnessed a legal persecution of trade-unionists as 
 rebels and revolutionaries.® 
 
 A marked feature of the Industrial Revolution was 
 the growth of cities, towns and urban districts, espe- 
 cially in the north. These increased as if by magic, 
 formless, haphazard, hideous, insanitary. Over- 
 crowding, slums, disease, immorality, drunkenness 
 and brutality inevitably ensued. Factory chimneys 
 in hundreds spread a perpetual canopy of smoke. 
 The skies were obscured, sunshine enfeebled, the 
 atmosphere vitiated. Vegetation withered, rivers 
 were poisoned, beauty vanished. ‘The minds of men 
 became materialised as their work became mechanised 
 and their environment defiled. Workers lost their 
 
 1 Between 1811 and 1816 Luddite and other riots occurred, in 
 which new machinery was destroyed and life lost. 
 2 The fate of the “‘ ’Tolpuddle martyrs” is a case in point. 
 3 History of Trade Unionism, p. 63. 
 126 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 interest in production both from the monotony of 
 the subdivision of labour, with the long hours, and 
 from their lack of any other share in it than a low 
 wage. Class antagonism deepened as the only 
 relation between master and man became that of a 
 cash-nexus and men were regarded as mere ‘ hands.’ 
 
 The new machine-industry won undeniable 
 victories in the field of production, in the provision 
 of employment for multitudes, and in the creation 
 of wealth for the comparatively few. It evoked great 
 inventions and fine qualities of organisation and 
 business management. It wrought also better than 
 it knew or intended, in disciplining men in multi- 
 tudes to regular and peaceful combined action. 
 Upon the material plane a wonderful, complex 
 civilisation arose, with an ever-increasing standard of 
 comfort and luxury. New arts developed, applied 
 science began its majestic career, and the ends of the 
 earth were drawn together. Nevertheless material 
 developments wholly outdistanced moral. The new 
 system failed to secure justice to the economically 
 weak—the worst indictment which can be brought 
 against a professedly Christian civilisation. It began 
 its career with grave injustices, injustices which for 
 fifty years it barely made an effort to undo. Perhaps 
 responsible business men’s eyes were too intently 
 fixed upon the dazzling economic transformations 
 which were in process, for them to cast a glance at 
 the conditions and treatment of the indispensable 
 workers. 
 
 2. Tue Cuurcy 1n ReLaTIon To THE RisE OF THE 
 New Sociat Orpver.—The Christian Church itself, 
 
 generally speaking, seemed unable to realise the grave 
 127 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 moral and spiritual issues at stake and unaware of the 
 inhumanity of the new economic developments. 
 It is strange that it should have been so blind to the 
 steady subordination of men to machinery, and the 
 subordination of things spiritual and esthetic as well 
 as ethical to the cause of material gain. So general 
 was its blindness that even the exceptions to this 
 are frequently forgotten or ignored. It may be 
 useful to indicate some of them. 
 
 (a) The French wars had their Christian opponents 
 as well as their Christian supporters. 
 
 Dr. Richard Price, of the Old Jewry Meeting House, the Revs. 
 Winterbotham and Mark Wilks, Baptists, and, at first, the famous 
 Dissenting orator, Robert Hall, opposed them. Dr. Price evoked 
 Burke’s famous Reflections and his rash statement that “ the 
 Dissenters were disaffected citizens.” ‘This, however, covered 
 many Churchmen, who also sympathised with the aims of the 
 French Revolution. Opposition to the wars was not wholly left 
 to William Cobbett, Tom Paine, William Godwin and Thos. 
 Hardy—products of Dissent as the three latter were. 
 
 (b) As to the Agrarian Revolution, it is a melancholy 
 fact that the Church in agricultural districts was too 
 much controlled by landowners and farmers, or too 
 much in sympathy with them, to give effective 
 assistance to the oppressed and impoverished popula- 
 tion save by charity and exhortation. Yet many 
 notable things were done by individual Christian 
 men and women to check or counteract the evils of 
 the time. 
 
 Such men as Homer, rector of Birdingbury in 1790, and Demain- 
 bray, rector of Broad Somerford in 1806, tried to humanise or 
 make less unjust the enclosures in their parishes. Dr. Davies, 
 rector of Barkham, an earnest social reformer, advocated in 1795 
 
 128 . 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 work for the unemployed, unemployment insurance, rate-allow- 
 ances for children, and some land for every cottager. Howlett, 
 vicar of Dunmow, in 1795 publicly opposed Pitt’s ruinous policy 
 of lavish outdoor relief and supported Samuel Whitbread’s Bill for 
 the enactment of a minimum living wage. George Crabbe the 
 poet, another clergyman, described between 1783 and 1812 with 
 stern fidelity the wretched condition of the rural poor. Sidney 
 Smith spoke out also in the early century. Shute Barrington, 
 Bishop of Durham, more practically opened in Mongewell in 1794. 
 the first Co-operative Distributive Society to serve three parishes 
 in Oxon. The Rev. J. Smith founded the first Savings Bank at 
 Wendover, and Priscilla Wakefield, cousin of Elizabeth Fry, opened 
 in 1798 a ‘ Frugality Bank,’ whilst the Rev. Henry Duncan estab- 
 lished the first self-sustaining People’s Bank in 1810 at Rothwell, 
 a model which eventually led to the establishment of the Post 
 Office Savings Bank. In 1773 the Rev. James Cowe, vicar of Sun- 
 bury, formed the first philanthropic Friendly Society. The 
 Friendly Society movement received from the first great assistance 
 from Churchmen and Dissenters. ‘The Becher Society of Stew- 
 poney still preserves the name of Prebendary Becher of Southwell. 
 When Friendly Societies began to develop into ‘ Orders ’—like 
 the Oddfellows—they were at first suppressed under the Sedition 
 Act which forbade any meeting of working men of more than 
 fifty in number. 
 
 These philanthropic movements were mainly 
 ameliorative. They did not touch the main 
 economic situation, nor were they numerous or 
 widespread enough greatly to affect the distress. 
 But they saved individuals and did a little also to 
 save the Christian name. 
 
 The Evangelical Revival under the Wesleys and 
 Whitefield began in a period of economic prosperity 
 for the labouring people. Thorold Rogers holds 
 that it could only have begun in such a period. It 
 is generally agreed that its spiritual influence sus- 
 tained masses of the English people during the 
 subsequent distress, and furthermore exerted a moral 
 
 K 129 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 influence which saved English society from the 
 revoluticnary spirit which wrought such havoc in 
 contemporary France. John Wesley himself had 
 been a social reformer in his prison work, in his 
 employment schemes for the out-of-work, his loan 
 society, his ‘stranger’s friend’ society, his orphan 
 house, his school at Kingswood, and his provision 
 and circulation of cheap and good literature. 
 
 The Evangelical movement certainly quickened 
 compassion and gave rise to important philanthropic 
 and educational movements. It led to the abolition 
 of the slave trade in 1807 under Granville Sharp, 
 Clarkson and Wilberforce. Foreign Missionary 
 Societies, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the 
 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge— 
 all were formed just before or after the year 1800. 
 Sunday schools arose through Hannah Ball of High 
 Wycombe and Robert Raikes of Gloucester. By 
 1801 there were 1500 such schools in which 156,500 
 children were taught. Ragged schools were started 
 by John Pound of Portsmouth. Joseph Lancaster 
 and Dr. Bell, the one a Quaker and the other a 
 Churchman, became the famous pioneers of elemen- 
 tary education. Silas Told, John Howard and 
 Elizabeth Fry, by 1815, through their devoted labour 
 secured humaner methods and improved food and 
 hygiene in the prisons—a not unimportant matter 
 in years when dread of ‘ liberty’ or fear of licence 
 made imprisonment frequent for honest men and 
 good citizens. 
 
 (c) The Industrial Revolution at its rise seems to 
 have overwhelmed the forces of the Christian 
 Church. Little was done officially to stem the tide of 
 
 130 
 s 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 evil or even to protest against it. Economic and 
 business matters were regarded as beyond its range. 
 The Bible too was taken as inculcating resignation in 
 this world, with the expectation of justice and recom- , 
 pense in the world to come, and Christianity taken 
 not as a standard by which to judge institutions, but _ 
 
 as a Divine warrant for submissiontothem. Wilber- _ 
 
 force, in his Practical View, told the lower orders 
 “that their more lowly path had been allotted to 
 them by the hand of God,” that it was their part 
 “faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly 
 to bear its inconveniences.” Wilberforce had more 
 compassion for negroes than for his fellow-country- , 
 men in their worse than slavery. He would do 
 nothing to secure them either justice or freedom. 
 Workers were a social necessity. Authority must be - 
 maintained. It is true that he helped the Spital-‘ 
 fields weavers to a Minimum Wage Act. But it was 
 at the request of the employers, in order to save their 
 industry from extinction. Paley actually argued 
 that the poor were better off than the rich—“ frugal- 
 ity is itself a pleasure”! It has been truly observed 
 that “On the fifty years that laid the foundations 
 of modern England, the influence of the Church as a 
 witness to social righteousness was, it is hardly an 
 exaggeration to say, almost negligible.” 1 
 
 Yet the spirit of Christianity was at work. It 
 was at work in the great Welshman, Robert Owen, 
 however much he might disown it. He was the first 
 to realise the wickedness of the new factory system 
 in its relation to working people. At the New 
 Lanark Mills from 1800 to 1813, in association with 
 
 1 Archbishops Report, p. 47. 
 I3I 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 his partners, Jeremy Bentham the Utilitarian, and 
 William Allen the Quaker, he embarked upon his 
 epoch-making factory reforms. Improved conditions, 
 shorter hours, sanitary decency, better dwellings, 
 co-operative societies and infant schools were among 
 the reforms of this noble pioneer. He demon- 
 strated the compatibility of justice to the worker 
 with success in business, to a world unwilling to 
 learn. He made a fortune of £300,000, all of which 
 he expended, like Ruskin later, in idealistic social 
 experiments, concerning which the last word has 
 not yet been spoken. 
 
 In the early struggle for Trade Unionism, before 
 and immediately after the repeal in 1824 of the Anti- 
 Combination Acts of 1795 and 1800, some Chris- 
 tian people were found friendly. ‘There were the 
 Midland Baptists: Robert Hall in 1819 formed a 
 Framework Knitters Union for three midland 
 counties, which lasted five years. Professor Granger 
 says that “the Dissenting bodies of the Midlands 
 helped to alleviate the mistakes and hardships which 
 the Industrial Revolution involved. Among Uni- 
 tarians, Priestley of Birmingham and Gilbert Wake- 
 field of Nottingham may be mentioned. It is a 
 great achievement of English Dissent that during 
 this dreadful interval it supplied the newly-rising 
 working class with spiritual strength and consola- 
 tion.” 1 The Church of England, through its clergy, 
 and the Wesleyan Methodist Church, through its 
 ministers, seem to have been hostile to early Trade 
 Unionism. But there were exceptions in both 
 Churches. Dorchester labourers were first organ- 
 
 1 Historical Sociology, p. 224. 
 132 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ised by two of the ‘ Tolpuddle martyrs,’ George 
 Loveless and his brother, who were Wesleyan local 
 preachers. Mr. Sidney Webb has given recent 
 testimony to the part played by Primitive Method- 
 ist local preachers in Christianising and civilising 
 and then leading the miners of Northumberland and 
 Durham in their new Unionism.1 
 
 (B) Tue Reren or [npivipuarism (1820-1870 A.D.) 
 
 1. THe Tueoreticat Baszs.—For the next fifty 
 years, from 1820 to 1870, Individualism reigned 
 supreme. Wonders were wrought in the produc- 
 tion of goods and of wealth. ‘The system rapidly 
 developed and consolidated. The number of self- 
 made men multiplied. So did the number of men 
 marred, and even many of the self-made were ‘ self- 
 marred ’” in all that mattered most, ‘ made’ only in 
 the money sense. Yet men must find some intellec- 
 tual justification to themselves and others for their 
 way of life. Hence the new order was not long in 
 developing educated defenders in two realms—in 
 the economic and in the biological. 
 
 (a) Economic theory.—The new political economy, 
 which expounded this system and drew out its 
 ‘laws,’ was first formulated by Adam Smith in 1776. 
 It was the culmination, in economics, of a European 
 movement for freedom in allrelations. In opposition 
 to the Mercantile System complete laissez-faire was 
 set forth as the ideal. The individual was to be 
 entirely free from restraints and restrictions at home 
 
 1 The Story of the Durham Miner, pp. 21-24. 
 133 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 and abroad. Adam Smith denounced Corn Laws 
 and other’ protective duties, Combination Laws 
 against workmen, and Settlement Acts restricting the 
 freedom of labour ; he proposed to tax ground rents, 
 declared against Trusts, and in favour of high wages. 
 But these views of his were ignored. ‘‘ The govern- 
 ing classes adopted, in short, those parts of the 
 economist’s teaching which appeared advantageous 
 to themselves and ignored the remainder.” David 
 Ricardo’s economics followed, and ‘‘ completed the 
 final stage in making social evils tolerable to the 
 consciences even of the best men,” right up to 1870.1 
 Ricardo was a financier and dealt in abstractions and 
 deductions. He formulated his law of rent, his law 
 of value and his iron law of wages. To Ricardo 
 must be added John Stuart Mill, who published his 
 Principles of Political Economy in 1848. From his 
 time orthodox political economy ruled the business. 
 world, or rather the working classes, with a rod of 
 iron. ‘The ‘laws’ of supply and demand, the wages- 
 fund, and others, were held up as having the value 
 and inevitability of the-law of gravitation. It has 
 been truly stated “‘ that the influence of this theory, 
 during the period from 1820 to 1870, was incalcu- 
 lably great in staying social progress, in lulling the 
 conscience of the educated classes, and therefore in 
 encouraging a violent class antagonism.”? For 
 instance, take the following sentence in Archbishop 
 Whateley’s Political Economy (1831): “* It is curious © 
 to observe how, through a wise and beneficent 
 arrangement of Providence, men thus do the greatest 
 1 Archbishops Report, pp. 41 and 46. 
 2 Ibid., p. 46. 
 134 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 service to the public when they are thinking of 
 nothing but their own gain.” Yet at its very initia- 
 tion this political economy was challenged both in 
 the name of humanity, by Thomas Hodgkin, and of 
 Christianity also by men like Dr. Charles Hall, 
 William Thompson and John Francis Bray. ‘These 
 names, through the glamour of Mill’s writings, were 
 unworthily forgotten. But when Marx and Lassalle 
 began to turn the Ricardian laws, especially that of 
 the labour theory of value, to the service of social- 
 istic economic theory, a general change began. John 
 Ruskin in 1861, in Unto this Last, exposed fallacies 
 in John Stuart Mills’ Political Economy, and memor- 
 ably challenged the whole ‘science.’ In 1869 Mill 
 srenounced the wages-fund theory. Certain German 
 ‘and Austrian economists+ demonstrated that the 
 ‘science’ had been based upon passing phenomena 
 in English business-life, that it was unhistorical in 
 spirit, untrue to the law of development, ignored 
 induction and the value of experiment, and, above 
 all, divorced political economy from ethics. Chris- 
 tian thinkers and others joined in denying that self- 
 interest, even ‘ enlightened self-interest,’ could be 
 the true law of economics, and held ‘ buying in the 
 cheapest market and selling in the dearest’ to be 
 wrong when practised upon the life and labour of 
 human beings. It began to be realised that the 
 utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham and John 
 Stuart Mill, which was closely connected with this 
 new economy, needed, at its very best and highest, 
 the most careful qualification and exposition, to be 
 made consistent with Christianity. The fact came 
 1 Schmoller, Roscher, Wagner, Schiffle, etc. 
 135 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 slowly to be recognised in thoughtful circles that 
 political economy is, after all, but one branch of 
 sociology, and can never be safely formulated apart 
 from ethics, and Christian ethics in particular. Yet, 
 as Mr. George Dibblee has said, “‘ the old school of 
 political economy stands unreplaced. Its original 
 language is still current, and men between forty and — 
 fifty who guide the actual life of business know no 
 other.” He surmises that “ it may still be dominant 
 as a cheap philosophy in business for another hundred 
 years, + 
 
 (b) Biological theory.—Biological theory also was 
 enlisted in intellectual justification of the reigning 
 system of industry and business. Evolution and 
 natural selection were pressed into the service of 
 Individualism and the competitive system. Herbert 
 Spencer was perhaps the first. He began writing 
 in the Nonconformist as early as 1842. From 1852 
 onwards he applied the doctrine of evolution to 
 every department of human life in a series of monu- 
 mental works. He tempered the utilitarian theory 
 with the doctrine of development. Dr. Thomas 
 Malthus’s famous book on Population (1796), which 
 maintained that social misery was due to the fact 
 that population tends to increase in greater ratio 
 than the means of subsistence, suggested to both 
 Darwin and Wallace ideas which issued in their 
 simultaneous formulation of the theory of evolution 
 by natural selection. 
 
 Darwin’s Origin of Species, based upon prolonged 
 observation and experiment, was published in 1859 
 and created a new era in science and in human 
 
 1 See The Laws of SuPpiy and Demand, p. Xi. 
 13 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 thought. Soon development by ‘the struggle for 
 existence ° and ‘ the survival of the fittest ’ filled the 
 mid-Victorian mind. Not only was this set forth as 
 the law of physical nature, but it was stoutly declared 
 to be the law of human society. The educated and 
 employing classes discovered a scientific sanction for 
 the competitive struggle in which they were ‘the 
 fittest ’tosurvive. If‘ the weakest went to the wall ’ 
 it was a natural process, pace the New Testament. 
 If many went under it was but by the operation of 
 one or other of Malthus’s ‘ natural checks.’ The 
 inhumanity of it all was hidden to them by its sup- 
 posed inevitability. Intelligent workers naturally 
 resented this and rebelled against these ideas. Pro- 
 fessor Russell Wallace from the outset refused to 
 consent, on the grounds of science, to an explana- 
 tion of the origin of human nature and of human 
 society in the terms of struggle and competition. 
 Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, also drastically 
 criticised it. ‘The Christian Church, be it said, was 
 no more hasty in applying the new doctrine of 
 evolution to economics than it was in applying it to 
 theology. Its Christian instincts revolted against 
 it, and from the first found expression in many 
 Christian pulpits and publications. 
 
 2. AMELIORATIVE INFLUENCES AND Earty CriTI- 
 cisms.—Nothing human is wholly bad. The human 
 spirit is dauntless under the worst conditions. The 
 working of the competitive system often fell into 
 good hands and was made less intolerable. ‘There 
 were model employers like John Fielden and 
 others, all through the period. Even during the 
 triumph of Individualism criticism was not lacking, 
 
 137 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 and many ameliorations took place. There was, for 
 instance—., 
 
 (a) Factory regulations and sanitary reform.—The 
 factory system continued to develop rapidly both 
 intensively and extensively. Inventions multiplied, 
 technical skill increased, organisation and production 
 improved and markets developed. At no time, how- 
 ever, from the days of Robert Owen, were its evils 
 unassailed. If the organised Church did not rise 
 against them, Christian men did in numbers. ‘The 
 Factory Agitation may be said to have been a 
 definitely Christian agitation. So early as 1802 
 Parliament was induced to pass protective legislation 
 for children. Again in 1819 a nominal twelve-hours 
 day was secured for them. In 1831 night-work in 
 the cotton trade was forbidden to young persons. 
 In 1833 a more drastic Act was passed, and then in 
 1847 the famous “ ‘Ten Hours Bill” was passed. 
 
 Individualism reigned in these years, and it 1s 
 probable that the economists and manufacturers who 
 were against such legislation, such interference with 
 the ‘ liberty ’ of labour, of contract, and the freedom 
 of commerce, would have succeeded in defeating it, 
 had not the landed interest been at the time adverse 
 to the manufacturing interest. Even men like John 
 Bright and Richard Cobden in the name of ‘ free- 
 dom ’ opposed the factory legislation. ‘The honour 
 of the Ten Hours Factory Act rests with Christian 
 men like Lord Shaftesbury, Richard Oastler, Michael 
 Sadler, John Fielden the Oldham manufacturer, and 
 the Revs. G. S. Bull and J. Rayner Stephens. Their 
 difficulties were historic. ‘The struggle was bitter 
 
 and intense. The workers were in favour, but they 
 138 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 were unenfranchised and could only demonstrate. 
 Robert Southey was frequently consulted by Shaftes- 
 bury on the steps to be taken in Parliament, on what 
 Southey called “ this most hellish of all slaveries— 
 the slave trade was mercy to it.” 4 William Words- 
 worth denounced the system in The Excursion." 
 But the organised Church held aloof. Lord Shaftes- 
 bury said that few ministers of religion stood by him, 
 ** they were cowed by the overwhelming influence 
 of the cotton lords.” Whilst this factory legislation 
 was expressly limited to women and children, it 
 could not fail to relieve the situation for adult male 
 labour, partly displaced by, and partly dependent. 
 upon the labour of women and children. ‘This was 
 but the beginning of factory reform. Perhaps the 
 most pregnant reform of all was the appointment of 
 Factory Inspectors. The first Factory Inspectors’ 
 Report appeared in 1835. 
 
 Sanitary Reform is akin to Factory Reform, 
 though wider, inasmuch as it had to deal with slum 
 evils, disease, epidemics, drainage and the general 
 health condition of the towns and the cities. It had 
 been urged in relation to factories and factory 
 dwellings in 1819 by Robert Owen. But four 
 great Christian men gave it wider range, viz. Dr. 
 Southwood Smith (1788-1861), the grandfather of 
 Octavia Hill, Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800-90), Canon 
 Girdlestone and Charles Kingsley. ‘Their labours 
 resulted in the Public Health Act of 1848, and later 
 in the Board of Health of 1854. ‘The physical well- 
 being of the people gained much from these. 
 
 1 Letters to Caroline Bowes (1822) and John May (1830). 
 2 Books VIII and IX. 
 139 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (b) Development of education and the cheaper 
 press—The movement for elementary education 
 continued. It began as a voluntary Christian move- 
 ment, induced by the felt deficiencies of Sunday 
 School efforts at education. It was maintained in 
 its two wings, Church and Dissent, by voluntary 
 Christian effort, until the country came to realise 
 their inadequacy and so sought through Lord 
 Althorp, in 1832, to support them with grants in aid 
 of buildings, and again in 1846 for general education. 
 The movement culminated in the famous Education 
 Act of 1870 under Mr. Forster, when elementary 
 education became primarily a State system. Adult 
 education received direct impetus from Mechanics’ 
 Institutes. William Lovett, the Chartist, was 
 prominent in this; also Dr. Black, Edwin Chadwick 
 and Dr. Birkbeck. The Rev. R. E. Bayley had 
 founded a People’s College at Sheffield. It served 
 as a model for F. D. Maurice’s Working Men’s Col- 
 lege in Great Ormonde Street in 1854, in which 
 Ruskin, Furnivall and Rossetti taught. ‘These were 
 also the progenitors of the Adult School Movement 
 (founded by Joseph Sturge in 1845), the Workers’ 
 Educational Association, Ruskin College, Oxford, 
 and the Central Labour College. The Press also 
 became an important element in the adult education 
 of the time. The freedom of the press had been 
 championed in the early century by Robert Hall. 
 A cheap press, 7. ¢. an unstamped press, was secured 
 finally by the labour and ability of Cobbett with his 
 Political Register, by Cleeve, Hetherington, and the 
 Rev.James Smith of the Shepherd, The Family Herald, 
 and other people’s papers. William and Mary 
 
 140 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Howitt and Charles Knight also did pioneer press 
 work. 
 
 (c) The struggle for TIrade Unionsm and the 
 franchise—The struggle for Trade Unionism was a 
 century long. From 1824 the workers breathed a 
 little more freely, but their efforts to protect their 
 modest standard of living by combination were often 
 driven underground, with the usual result of violent 
 and criminal procedure. Robert Owen’s effort to 
 create one great National Consolidated Union came 
 to grief. The constitutional and constructive efforts 
 for Trade Unionism between 1846-55 were greatly 
 assisted by the Positivists, E. 5. Beesly, Frederick 
 Harrison and Henry Crompton. Finally, after the 
 Royal Commission on the Sheffield outrages, the 
 movement gained full Parliamentary and legal recog- 
 nition, by the Acts of 1871 and 1875. It was helped 
 by Christian men like Alexander Macdonald, Henry 
 Broadhurst, Thomas Burt, Joseph Arch, and George 
 Howells from within, and from without by G. 
 and H. Lushington, Thomas Hughes and J. M. 
 Ludlow, who rendered the movement in this 
 period great Parliamentary, organising and legal 
 assistance. By the end of this period Trade 
 Unionism was successful in maintaining a decent 
 standard of life for skilled labour. The attitude 
 of the Christian Churches gradually grew more 
 cordial. 
 
 The reaction due to the French Revolution 
 blighted the work of Major Cartwright’s 1780 Com- 
 mittee for Political Reform: but the movement was 
 renewed after Waterloo with Cartwright as its 
 Nestor, and Cobbett, William Lovett, Hetherington, 
 
 41 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Hunt and Samuel Bamford as its active spirits. This 
 movement too came to grief in 1819 at Peterloo, 
 and was followed the same year by the iniquitous 
 Six Acts. Yet repression could not last, and the 
 agitation was renewed a decade later with vigour. 
 Then came the 1832 Reform Bill. But the working 
 classes were practically excluded from its benefits. 
 Disappointed at this, and incensed by the New 
 Poor Law of 1834 and the Press Regulations of 1836, 
 the workers renewed political agitation. ‘The Owen- 
 ites, who first expounded Socialism, became active 
 throughout the thirties. ‘They were at first anti- 
 Christian, until driven from this attitude largely by 
 the Rev. James (‘Shepherd’) Smith. Spencerian 
 Societies for the nationalisation of the land extended 
 into this period. But Chartism (1837-42) became 
 the dominating political movement and continued 
 the agitation for the Cartwright political reforms. 
 It had two divisions, one for recourse to physical 
 force and the other using only ‘ moral force.’ ‘The 
 latter was supported by many representative Chris- 
 tians. Joseph Sturge and Edward Miall, of the 
 Complete Suffrage Movement, conferred with them. 
 Charles Kingsley proclaimed himself a Chartist. 
 William Lovett and Thomas Cooper, two very able 
 men, Wesleyan Methodists, were chief promoters 
 of it. Carlyle was in sympathy with it, as were also 
 noble-minded men like George J. Holyoake, William 
 Wade and John Collins. ‘The movement, however, 
 memorably and suddenly collapsed in 1842; yet had 
 finally full fruition. 
 
 (d) Lhe Christian Socialists and Corn Law move- 
 ments.—The Rev. F. D. Maurice of King’s College 
 
 142 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 had already been moved by the teaching of Coleridge 
 and the writings of Carlyle in the direction of social 
 reform, when John M. Ludlow, a barrister, was 
 introduced tohim. Ludlow was expert in economics 
 and the new French socialism. He convinced 
 Maurice of the need for a Christian interpretation 
 of industrial and economic relations. ‘Together they 
 began the movement known as Christian Socialism 
 (1848-54). Joined immediately by Charles Kingsley 
 and Thomas Hughes, and later by Vansittart Neale 
 of co-operative fame, and other educated Christian 
 men, the movement did work of permanent value, 
 both critical and constructive. The latter took the 
 form of working men’s associations for co-operative 
 production and distribution. But they were in 
 advance of their time both in relation to working 
 men and in relation to the contemporary Christian 
 Church. They were misunderstood, and maligned. 
 The movement died out after 1854 and attention 
 turned to housing, sweating and sanitation. Then 
 John Ruskin became a potent Christian force for 
 social reconstruction. Nor can the name of Charles 
 Dickens be omitted. William Ewart Gladstone is 
 also important as the first of the nineteenth-century 
 politicians to relate his political ideals explicitly to 
 his Christian principles. 
 
 The Repeal of the Corn Laws, in which he with 
 Bright, Cobden and Villiers were leaders, whilst 
 resisted by landowners and suspected by Chartists, 
 allayed discontent by making possible cheap food and 
 so ending ‘the hungry forties.’ Seven hundred 
 Christian ministers gathered in Manchester to further 
 that movement. Then came the Reform Bill of 
 
 143 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 1867, which at last gave the artisan the franchise 
 and began the new era. 
 
 (C) Tue Reaction From InpivipuaLism (1870- 
 1920 A.D.) 
 
 1. ’Tue Generar Reaction.—Adam Smith, 
 Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were great 
 men, and England owed much to them in the 
 matter of social progress. But the one-sided 
 development and application of their laissez-faire 
 doctrine led at last to a general reaction. Principal 
 Ernest Barker rightly says that ‘“‘the difference 
 between the generation before and the generation 
 after 1880 is profound.’ + The Statute Book reveals, 
 as Professor Dicey has shown in his Law and Public 
 Opinion in the Nineteenth Century, that legislation, 
 especially during the latter half of that century, 
 was definitely ‘ collectivist.’ The State had again 
 assumed a positive position and become much more 
 than a mere protector and a policeman. Reaction 
 against Individualism was widespread, and revealed 
 itself in many realms and forms, chiefly intellectual 
 and moral, economic and political. 
 
 (a) Theoretical—Matthew Arnold was one of the 
 earliest awakening forces in literature. Herbert 
 Spencer’s Sociology too constituted a moral indict- 
 ment of much in modern life and emphasises the 
 organic nature of society. T. H. Green’s Oxford 
 Lectures on “ The Principles of Political Obliga- 
 tion” taught that the State must facilitate the free 
 moral development of its citizens. Edward Caird 
 
 1 Political Thought from Spencer, p. 23. 
 144 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 struck the new note of collective action, quoting 
 Arnold on “ seeing life steadily and seeing it whole,” 
 in order “to raise the state of man and raise it 
 organically.” 1 Ruskin was passionately urging in 
 Fors Clavigera that the community should be organ- 
 ised on rational and Christian principles. Huxley 
 in his Evolution and Ethics declined to follow the 
 ultra-Darwinians and place man wholly within 
 physical nature. To him it presented a vast gladia- 
 torial show. ‘‘ Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, 
 but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature.” 
 Man must ‘‘ combat the cosmic process.” Patrick 
 Geddes in 1889 and Prince Kropotkin in 1902 
 declared that struggle was not the law of progress in 
 Nature herself, but rather sociality and mutual aid. 
 Similarly, J. Arthur Thomson and P. Geddes 
 stated? that ‘‘ the self-interest which utilitarian 
 economists found the all-sufficient spring of action, 
 which naturalists too long and too uncritically 
 adopted from these, turns out to be ‘ enlightened ’ 
 by family interest, species interest, however sub- 
 conscious. Survivals in nature are finally through 
 love and sacrifice, sociability and co-operation.” 
 Nature, therefore, scientists came to see, really 
 presents the spectacle of evolution not by struggle 
 alone but by sociality as well, even when man him- 
 self is not regarded as a part of Nature. 
 
 (b) Practical—Concurrently with the intellectual 
 and moral reaction of literary men, philosophical 
 thinkers and scientists, there was also a strong 
 practical revolt against Individualism upon the part 
 
 1 Address to Ethical Society, 1883. 
 2 Evolution, p. 246. 
 i #45 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 of multitudes who felt the pinch of the system in 
 their daily lives or observed its effects upon others. 
 It was mainly a reaction of moral indignation 
 against the tyranny of industry, its exploitation of 
 human beings in the interests of production and 
 profit, its lack of consideration for the physical and 
 moral well-being of the workers, their reduction to 
 so much abstract labour, ‘the cramping of their 
 lives,’ the disrespect to personality, the greyness and 
 monotony of their daily toil and the uninspiring 
 and damaging nature of their environment. A 
 thousand pamphlets and periodicals and some sections 
 of the press rang with it; and the attitude of states- 
 men and politicians began to change. ‘These ideas 
 and sentiments found at last practical expression 
 from quite opposite quarters. 
 
 (i) Lhe statistical factor —Valuable investigations 
 into social and economic facts were pursued and 
 published. These were given to the country by 
 statisticians like Giffen, Bowley and Chiozza Money, 
 and by expert social students like the Right Hon. 
 Charles Booth, B. Seebohm Rowntree and Mann. 
 They revealed startling facts, which increased the 
 reaction against Individualism. Undoubtedly wealth 
 had greatly increased under its egis. ‘The national 
 income increased all through the nineteenth century. 
 In 1867 it was the equivalent of £29 per head of the 
 cara By 1gor it had risen to £40 per head. 
 
 ut the wealth, the result of the joint efforts of 
 capital and labour, was unjustly distributed. It was 
 pointed out that one-half roughly of the national 
 income, according to the Inland Revenue Returns, 
 was in the hands of one-eighth of the population 
 
 146 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 and the other half only spread over the remaining 
 seven-eighths.1 By 1917 the Blue Books revealed 
 that one-ninth of the population owned nine- 
 tenths of the accumulated wealth of the country. 
 The Board of Trade Returns revealed that from the 
 outset of the twentieth century real wages fell, but 
 profits increased.2, In a word, all the ameliorations 
 and reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth cen- 
 turies, which were very numerous and humane, 
 seemed to avail little to secure justice to the workers, 
 against whom all the economic scales seemed to be 
 weighted. Messrs. Booth and Rowntree, by inde- 
 pendent expert investigation, showed that one- 
 third of the population lived in permanent poverty, 
 one million in receipt of Poor Relief, another million 
 in chronic want, receiving but 18s. per family per 
 week, another million more or less affected by 
 unemployment, and another million by under- 
 employment.? ‘These startling facts led to a rapid 
 crystallisation of opinion in favour of drastic changes 
 in the economic structure of society. 
 
 (ii) Lhe Socralist Movement.—Such revelations 
 were grist to the mill of an able body of revolutionary 
 and reformist Socialists. ‘The early English Social- 
 ists (Owenites) had been unheeded at home. Marx 
 and Engels carried their teachings abroad. They 
 returned restated and developed in the eighties. 
 In 1881 H. M. Hyndman and William Morris 
 
 1 See Riches and Poverty, Chiozza Money, .1908. 
 2 Prices advanced 13°7, wages 2 to 5°5, incomes 22°5 per cent. 
 See Board of ‘Trade Returns for 1913. 
 3 See the Labour Report of 1894 and the Poor Law Report of 
 1909. 
 14/ 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 founded the Social Democratic Federation, which, 
 though influential, never became very numerous. 
 In 1883 ‘Thomas Davidson’s personal influence led 
 to the formation of the New Fellowship, which 
 emphasised the moral factor in social reconstruction, 
 and of the Fabian Society, which emphasised the 
 economic and political factors, and had a longer 
 life. In 1889 appeared the Fabian Essays, con- 
 tributed by Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Graham 
 Wallas, Sidney Olivier and others, harbingers of a 
 new era of administrative Socialism, characteristically 
 English. On the working-class side appeared Keir 
 Hardie, an avowed Christian, who founded the 
 Independent Labour Party in 1893. ‘This eventually 
 led to the formation of the Labour Party by fusion 
 with political Trade Unionism. ‘The influence of 
 Henry George must not be lost sight of, for in 1879 
 he re-awakened the spirit of radical reform, which 
 had slept since 1854. 
 
 (iii) Movements toward — self-government.—lIwo 
 great self-governing movements also increased the 
 control of the people over their environment and 
 the general conditions of life. They greatly en- 
 hanced their health and comfort, and were valuable 
 to them for training in public life and in business 
 management. ‘These were Co-operation and Munt- 
 cipal or Local Self-government. 
 
 The Municipal Corporations Act was passed in 
 1835, and 150 new and growing towns finally secured 
 municipal privileges. The feature of the years 
 between 1867 and 1885 was the democratisation of 
 municipal, urban and rural districts, and parish 
 
 councils. Soon 30,000 local governing bodies were 
 148 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 in existence—all created after 1835. ‘These adminis- 
 tered at least {£400,000,000, indirectly employed 
 more than 300,000 persons, and one-half of these 
 bodies spent more money and employed more civil 
 servants than the national government itself in pre- 
 war days. Local government touched the people’s 
 lives at every point and gave them a new control 
 over their social environment. It improved the 
 health and happiness of millions. Many Christian 
 men and women, after overcoming religious scruples 
 about entering public life, performed useful service 
 on all these bodies. 
 
 The Co-operative Movement, begun by the London 
 Christian Socialists after Robert Owen, and by the 
 twenty-eight weavers in Toad Lane, Rochdale, in 
 1844, grew rapidly. It attained vast dimensions on 
 the distributive side, and later on the productive. 
 By the twentieth century it had 2 million families 
 trading with 55 millions of capital, employing 
 50,000 salaried officials. It has an annual turnover 
 of some 20 millions sterling. ‘This was a successful 
 effort by the workers to supply their own wants as 
 consumers. It was managed from the first exclu- 
 sively by working men; and it is not surprising that 
 demands rose later for a share by the workers in 
 the control of industry, by means of National 
 Industrial Councils, Whitley Councils, Public Owner- 
 ship with Joint Control, or Democratic Guild Con- 
 trol. Still later industrial discontent developed, with 
 lack of discipline, the violation of agreements, and 
 Governmental inquiries. ‘These were throes in the 
 transition from the old individualistic order of society 
 to one more adequate to the needs of personality 
 
 149 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 and to the demand for more freedom and self- 
 government. It has been said that every such 
 transition is marked by “ irreverence for laws and by 
 a reversion to natural rights.” ‘he movements at 
 the end of the period claimed a much greater recog- 
 nition of the value of the labour-factor in industry 
 and business, and a new respect for the individual. 
 These demands did not fail to win the ear of 
 twentieth-century Christians, with their new interest 
 in moral personality. 
 
 (iv) Capttalistic Collectivism and Impertalism.— 
 The earlier period exhibited the attainment of 
 economic power through individual enterprise and 
 competition: this latter, its attainment by com- 
 bination. By the eighties a new attitude began to 
 be adopted toward free competition by the business 
 world itself. ‘That which had been regarded as the 
 law of nature and the method of Providence was 
 now discovered to be wasteful, detrimental to 
 efficiency and to profit. To compete successfully, 
 especially internationally, meant, it was maintained, 
 to combine adequately. Internal individual com- 
 petition began to be eliminated, and the Joint Stock 
 Company, the Combine, the Syndicate, led gradually 
 but swiftly to a new kind of collectivism—to 
 monopoly, not by sovereign peoples, but by a few 
 mighty captains of industry and kings in finance. 
 These combinations led to havoc amongst business 
 firms outside them, and they rendered the life of the 
 employee, in many cases, especially at the outset, 
 harder, more monotonous, and more hopeless in 
 outlook. They proved as soulless and selfish as 
 
 many of the old competitive firms, with a closer and 
 150 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 more menacing grip upon the life of the people as 
 consumers. Corners in necessary articles, cartels 
 to fix prices arbitrarily, restriction of supplies, 
 extorted ransom from the long-suffering com- 
 munity. Food, fuel, housing-materials and a 
 hundred other necessary things were monopolised 
 for profit. 
 
 These associations continually grew vaster; and 
 the life of society, in production, consumption and 
 distribution, seemed at the mercy of a very small 
 number of powerful combines. ‘Those in control of 
 armaments became especially dangerous. Mighty 
 federations of industries controlling vast masses of 
 capital began to threaten the vital interests of the 
 workers, of the community itself, and of the State. A 
 form of economic collectivism—capitalistic collectiv- 
 ism, differing from socialistic collectivism in that it 
 meant control by the few for the few, and not 
 control by the many for the whole, the perils of 
 bureaucracy or oligarchy accompanying both— 
 appeared in society. Capitalistic collectivism even 
 sought to induce the State to share control with it 
 in enterprises to their mutual benefit.1. Thus the 
 wheel went full circle in the economic evolution of 
 
 1 The Report forwarded by Mr. McCurdy from a Government 
 Committee in 1920 to the President of the Board of Trade put the 
 matter succinctly: “The concentration of control over the price 
 and disposition of motor-fuel in the hands of two enormously 
 powerful capitalistic combines, practically world-wide in their 
 scope, constitute so dangerous a power, if it happens to be im- 
 properly used, that it is imperative that the Governments of the 
 world should give some attention to it. Their possession of the 
 main sources of supply practically prevents the setting up of any 
 private competition.” 
 
 151 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 industry. ‘The question arose, could a corporation 
 be given a conscience or a soul, as it could be given a 
 legal entity ? 
 
 A final phase of the reaction from Individualism 
 was that of Capitalistic Imperialism. It has been 
 said that ‘‘ Collectivism has sown the modern State, 
 but Nationalism has entered and reaped the crop.” } 
 For thirty years, from 1884 to 1913, Capitalistic 
 Imperialism grew and developed. Ever-increasing 
 hoards of capital sought for more profitable invest- 
 ment abroad than could be obtained at home. Big 
 financiers and their agents obtained ‘ concessions ’ in 
 foreign lands. Rivalries and international com- 
 plications ensued. Policies of ‘ imperial expansion,’ 
 of territorial annexation, of the exploitation of native 
 labour, were inaugurated. ‘The powers of the State 
 were used to defend the interests of ‘ big business ’ 
 
 and of great financiers. ‘The policy of non-inter- 
 
 vention in European affairs, of ‘ peace, retrenchment 
 and reform,’ began to pass in the eighties, material- 
 ism spread, megalomania seized the ruling classes. 
 The lives and happiness of the helpless many were 
 pledged or mortgaged without their knowledge or 
 consent. Greed of trade and territory, envy, sus- 
 picion, fear, led to the growth of great armaments, 
 until overweening militarism and arrogant imperial- 
 ism, in many countries, precipitated the appalling 
 catastrophe of 1914-18. The heathen maxim of 
 Vegetius, “‘ If you wish for peace, prepare for war,” 
 thus refuted itself. ‘The Peace of Versailles brought 
 a ‘peace’ very much like war. The only ray of 
 
 1 Principal Ernest Barker, Political Thought from Spencer to To- 
 
 day, p. 22. 
 152 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 hope was the Covenant attached to it which founded 
 ‘’The League of Nations,’ even if at first it was little 
 more than a League of Allies, with enemy countries— 
 great nations—excluded and America holding aloof 
 from it. This is the most hopeful movement away 
 from Nationalist Individualism or Imperialism, 
 with its recurring wars; and Great Britain from 
 the first has favoured it. 
 
 A general indication of the extent of the reaction 
 from Individualism in England was seen in the 
 conviction expressed during the early twentieth 
 century that the one ‘all-purposes’ Parliament was 
 increasingly incompetent to meet the demands of 
 modern social, industrial and commercial develop- 
 ment. Demands were voiced for constitutional 
 attention to function, or the distribution of con- 
 stitutional power to separate functions of the body 
 politic—such as political, industrial, legislative and 
 administrative—and their union in a kind of federal 
 functionalism. In another direction it was seen in 
 the call for the socialisation or control of credit, as 
 being of national and social creation. Society, which 
 creates credit, was mainly to profit by it, rather than 
 individuals or corporations to an immoderate degree. 
 This was said to be one of the financial lessons of the 
 Great War. 
 
 2. Tur SprciFiIcaALty CurisTIAN REAcTION.— 
 Christians in numbers found their place in many of 
 the protests and movements described in the fore- 
 going. Most of the protagonists in all of them would 
 probably have maintained that their outlook was 
 dictated to them by the demands of Christian 
 morality as they understood it. But the reaction 
 
 153 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 took some definitely Christian forms, and that from 
 the very beginning of the period. 
 
 In 1877, for instance, the Rev. Stewart Headlam 
 founded the Guild of St. Matthew in Bethnal Green, 
 in conjunction with Mr. F. Verinder, the Revs. W. 
 Moll, F. Shuttleworth and many other clergymen 
 and laymen. It was distinctly socialistic, and had 
 considerable influence. It was the first re-emergence 
 of organised Socialism after the decline of Owenism. 
 The Social Democratic Federation was not formed 
 till 1881. So early as 1872 Professor Seeley of Cam- 
 bridge had urged the education of the clergy in 
 political and social philosophy, as had Wordsworth in 
 1835+ and Carlyle in 1843.2, Canon Fremantle in the 
 1882 Bampton Lectures on The World as the Subject 
 of Redemption, revealed the wealth of social teaching 
 in the Scriptures and applied it to modern life. 
 
 Canon Moore Ede in the Hulsean Lectures of 1895 _ 
 
 followed him. Arnold Toynbee, disciple of Ruskin, 
 in 1883 delivered with dying breath his important 
 Lectures on the Industrial Revolution. ‘Toynbee Hall 
 rose In Whitechapel in his memory under Canon 
 Barnett, and the ‘Settlement ? Movement began. 
 The Rev. Dr. Clifford was early at work with a 
 Christian Socialist League in 1886. The Rev. H. 
 Price Hughes founded the Methodist Times, a Chris- 
 tian Socialist journal, in 1890. In 1889 the Christian 
 Social Union, founded by Dr. Gore and Canon 
 Scott Holland, went to the root of the matter, and 
 started The Economic Review for the study of duty 
 in relation to social life, and dealt with ‘‘ economic 
 . 1 See Preface to 1835 edition of Poems. 
 2 Past and Present, Book IV. ch. ii. 
 154 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 morals from the point of view of Christian teaching.” 
 
 It published two magazines, the Commonwealth and 
 Goodwill. Bishop Westcott, one of its leaders, 
 emphasised the social teaching of the Incarnation 
 and the social aspects of Christianity in important 
 volumes. As Bishop of Durham he mediated and 
 arbitrated in industrial disputes. The Church 
 Socialist League was founded in 1905. Later, other 
 Christian Churches had their Social Service Unions, 
 beginning with the Wesleyan in 1905, which pub- 
 lished in 1906 The Citizen of To-morrow and in 1909 
 The Social Teaching of the Bible. Roman Catholics, 
 Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Primitive 
 Methodists, the Friends and the Unitarians, also 
 established similar Unions. ‘These combined in 1910 
 in The Interdenominational Conference of Social 
 Service Unions, the forerunner of ‘C.O.P.E.C.,’ 
 which has since held annual Summer Schools and 
 published several volumes of Reports. 
 
 The Congregational Union early appointed a 
 Social Service Secretary, and the Wesleyans set up 
 a Social Welfare Department, with a Standing Com- 
 mittee on Industrial and International Relations as 
 part of the official machinery of the Church, and a 
 permanent Secretary. From the day of Cardinal 
 Manning’s intervention in the Dockers’ Strike of 
 1888, the Roman Catholic Church in England had 
 worked for social reconstruction and betterment. 
 The Catholic Truth Society has produced Professor 
 Charles L. Devas’s Political Economy, a competent 
 Christian study of the subject, and Monsignor Henry 
 Parkinson’s Primer of Social Science. 
 
 The latter part of this review indicates renewed 
 
 155 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 social activity upon the part of influential sections 
 of the Christian Church. The movements just 
 chronicled largely leavened the several official 
 governing bodies of their Churches. Slowly but 
 surely the Christian Churches began to feel concern 
 for more than the individual, to see the ethical defects _ 
 of the social and industrial system, and to care for © 
 the individual’s environment. Prejudiced at first — 
 against any deviation from the recognised ‘ spiritual 
 work’ of Christianising the individual, they came to 
 intervene in the life of society, to deal with social 
 evils. At first the evils of intemperance, impurity, 
 gambling and poisonous pleasures, engrossed them. 
 Later they began to take up cautiously the evils of 
 injustice, sweating, bad housing and similar ques- 
 tions. ‘These subjects appeared upon occasion in 
 the official agendas of the Church Assemblies. 
 Numerous resolutions began to be passed. In some 
 sections of the Christian Church a rooted objection 
 was for long maintained against intervention in 
 practical politics. ‘This was particularly the case 
 in those Churches which were the outcome of 
 the Evangelical Revival. The Church, they held, 
 must leave such matters to professional politicians 
 and publicists. Party spirit might disturb the peace 
 of the Churches. Indeed participation in politics 
 and even municipal life might destroy the spiritual 
 life of their members. But, as indicated, this 
 attitude began to pass. And so, although it had 
 far from ceased to exist in many quarters, by the 
 end of this period it had been replaced, on the whole, 
 by wider conceptions and a truer understanding of 
 
 the full meaning of Christianity. 
 156 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 Viewed in this broad historical prospective, the 
 general attitude of Christian people to social ques- 
 tions a hundred years ago, however lamentable, is 
 not wholly inexplicable, and the story of the inter- 
 vening century is one of progressive improvement. 
 Gradually throughout that period Christian prin- 
 ciples have been reasserting themselves in the 
 minds of Christians generally as applicable even in 
 social and political affairs. As one group after an- 
 other of the victims of social conditions and economic 
 laws have claimed the attention of Christian people, 
 these have refused to allow such conditions and 
 such laws any longer to operate. ‘The process of 
 recovery is by some such stages as these. First 
 of all, conscience insists upon providing all kinds 
 of ameliorative measures and utters itself in spasmodic 
 protests against social evil. Next we have more 
 positive and constructive attempts to reach a con- 
 dition of social life in which the evils will not arise. 
 Then follows, as a third period, one of more de- 
 liberate thought and educational effort to grapple 
 with the problem scientifically all along the line. In 
 this final period, religious faith and feeling are more 
 widely stirred, social evils begin to be felt as matters 
 for deep penitence and reproach, and the possibility 
 of social progress is increasingly identified with 
 positive Christian faith. That we are in the midst 
 of such a movement of thought as this we cannot 
 doubt. 
 
 The present protest of the Christian conscience 
 against a system of religious ideas which has no 
 strong constructive word to say to such social evils 
 as ours to-day is most emphatic. The Christian 
 
 157 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 mind of the present decade is becoming sure “ that 
 
 the one purpose worth striving after is the Kingdom — 
 of God, and that no region of life, least of all the © 
 
 sphere of human industry, can be excluded from His 
 sovereignty ” (Archbishops? Report, p. 48). In spite, 
 
 too, of the mental lassitude and the social and political — 
 disappointments of the last few years, we are con- 
 
 vinced that the mind in which Christian people 
 emerged from the war represents still their deepest 
 
 thought on these questions. ‘That mind is one of 
 
 deep desire and strong determination to make an 
 end of the types of social arrangement that breed 
 ill-will, unrest and strife. It is a mind of deep 
 faith that in Christianity we have possession of the 
 
 principles which can show us a better way. ‘Even | 
 
 now, it is too much to say that English Christendom 
 as a whole is prepared to work Christ’s principles out 
 to their full conclusion or to make the sacrifices 
 which they require. But there is a dawn of hope, 
 and the next generation may see a better day” 
 
 (Archbishops? Report, p. 49). 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE MODERN PERIOD 
 Secial England, H. D. Traill (Ed.)., 1896, Vol. V., chs. xix. and 
 
 xX, 
 
 4 History of British Socialism, M. Beer. (Bell. 2 vols.) 
 
 The Socialist Movement, J. Ramsay Macdonald. (Williams and 
 Norgate, I9II, 256 pp.) 
 
 The Village Labourer, 'T. L. and B. Hammond. (Longmans, 
 Green & Co., 1911, 339 pp.) 
 
 The Town Labourer, T. L. and B. Hammond. (Longmans, Green 
 & Co., 1917, 346 pp.) 
 
 158 
 
 
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 The Skilled Labourer, 'T. L. and B. Hammond. (Longmans, 
 Green & Co., 1919, 397 pp.) 
 
 The Evolution of Industry, D. H. Macgregor. (Williams and Nor- 
 gate, IQII, 254 pp.) 
 
 Political Thought from Spencer to To-day, Ernest Barker. (Williams 
 
 & Norgate, 1915, 256 pp.) 
 The History of Irade Unionism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. 
 
 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1920, 784 pp.) 
 
 | 
 

 
VI 
 RETROSPECT 
 
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VI. RETROSPECT 
 
 Looxtine back over the whole survey, we may 
 now point out one or two of its practical bearings 
 on the problems of to-day. We do not pretend that 
 history has provided us with any simple and indis- 
 putable answers to these problems, or any prescrip- 
 tions that are plain and easy to apply. Rather 
 does it accentuate our sense of the vast magnitude 
 and complexity of the attempt of the Church to 
 embody its principles in the social order of the world. 
 But that is by no means the end of the matter. 
 
 (1) In the first place, our survey makes it abun- 
 dantly clear that the Church has made this attempt, 
 and has felt it to be of fundamental importance 
 that it should do so. With greater or less persist- 
 ence and courage at different periods, the Church 
 has endeavoured to make the idea of the Kingdom 
 of God mean something real and practical in the 
 ordering of the world’s industrial and political life. 
 The greater its spiritual vitality at any time, the 
 more has this been the case: revival has always 
 led ultimately to social transformation. Thus 
 history as well as exegesis attest the point that the 
 religion of Christ must bring the whole of the 
 collective as well as of the individual life of man 
 within its sway. 
 
 163 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 At successive periods this side of the conception 
 of the Kingdom of God, as a divinely regulated 
 social order, has been differently interpreted in 
 principle and realised in practice with varying success. 
 We hope our survey has thrown light upon these 
 variations of the ideal, the extent to which they 
 influenced or failed to influence the social relations 
 of the world, and, to a certain extent, the reasons 
 for their comparative success or failure. We do 
 not pretend to have done more than open up a great 
 question, which we hope that many will pursue 
 a great deal farther and thereby learn much for 
 the present day. Particularly would we disclaim 
 the attempt to express any comparative judgment 
 on the value of the contributions made by different 
 Christian bodies. We have done no more than 
 indicate, in the Church’s record as a whole, a few 
 of the most outstanding and suggestive points. 
 
 (2) In the second place, our survey helps us to see 
 that we are just now slowly but steadily emerging 
 from a period during which the Church has been 
 comparatively ineffective, because deliberately inac- 
 tive, in the attempt to make Christian principles 
 regulative in social life. ‘This period of religious 
 indifferentism toward the social ‘and political 
 theories which have dominated the last few centuries, 
 doubtless has among its causes the defects of the 
 Church’s previous attempts to supply the world 
 with its regulative principles. We think we have 
 said enough to show that such is the case, without 
 having said enough to suggest any judgment between 
 
 the relative merits of the contribution made by this 
 164 
 
RETROSPECT 
 
 age or that. It seems to us clear, however, that the 
 very large success of the Middle Ages in bringing 
 life under the influence of expressed religious 
 principles, which yet were not fully adequate prin- 
 ciples, provoked in the end too great a reaction in 
 favour of individual freedom of conduct and against 
 ‘ecclesiastical’ influence in worldly affairs. The 
 result has been that modern life has formulated 
 its ruling social principles with far less reference to 
 Christ than did the Middle Ages; and the effect 
 on the social relations of mankind has been disastrous. 
 The over-emphasis upon ‘ individual freedom’ as a 
 sufficient solvent of social evils, had brought this 
 country to such a pass by the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century that the Christian conscience 
 was stirred to protest and interference. 
 
 The practical bearings of these facts upon our 
 thinking at the present time are fairly obvious. 
 To begin with, we have to look with strong suspicion 
 upon most principles of industrial and social theory 
 formulated in the last few centuries, and upon all 
 those practical maxims of the market-place in which 
 the most convenient of the working principles of 
 the day are crystallised. They are to be suspected, 
 because they are mostly born out of an attitude to 
 life in which Christianity had, for the time being, 
 abdicated its position of decisive influence. The 
 views about property and industry which we have 
 all imbibed are views which were formulated, it 
 must now be recognised, without due regard to 
 the main stream of Christian thinking on these 
 matters in the past, and without due loyalty to 
 
 Christian principles and sentiments. They were 
 165 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 dominated _by a pagan philosophy, which failed to 
 
 assert the supremacy of spiritual considerations 
 in all realms of life. The true views we are now 
 seeking may therefore prove very difficult to come by, 
 and may be curiously different from the common- 
 places of recent generations. At the same time, 
 the fact that Christian thought as a whole is now 
 once more recovering the great trail from which 
 in some important matters it has been wandering 
 more or less for centuries, makes the possibilities 
 of progress in the immediate future immensely 
 greater than we readily imagine. 
 
 (3) In the third place, we notice what great 
 vigilance and courage, combined with wisdom, are 
 required to discern the time when great advances 
 can be made in the social standards of an age. In 
 
 this matter it is as easy for idealism to be premature 
 
 as for pessimism to miss the chance, though the latter 
 may have been the more prevalent fault. Thus 
 it seems to us indubitable that ancient Christian 
 opinion tolerated slavery far beyond the time when 
 it was in a position to set about uprooting the evil ; 
 just as, at a later date, it took the whole system of 
 Feudalism far too completely for granted, as the 
 fixed and unalterable basis for the life of the Middle 
 Ages. We say this without disputing that there 
 may have been times when there were no immedi- 
 ately practicable alternatives to slavery and serfdom 
 respectively, and when, therefore, these imperfect 
 social institutions were rightly accepted and made 
 the best of. It is one thing, however, to bear and 
 
 mitigate an evil for a season, and quite another to 
 166 
 
RETROSPECT 
 
 accept and condone it permanently; and the ten- 
 dency has always been to believe existing institutions 
 to be more fixed and inevitable than they really 
 are, and thereby to underrate and belittle the power 
 of spiritual forces to transform them. 
 
 In all such matters it is necessary for the Church 
 to proceed always along a veritable knife-edge of 
 difficulty. On the one hand, it must not lay upon 
 men’s conscience and imagination burdens greater 
 than they can bear, by expecting them suddenly 
 to jump from the moral order to which they are 
 adjusted and attuned, to another enshrining ideals 
 which they can hardly understand—in ways which 
 they can scarcely imagine. Nor must it, on the 
 other hand, suffer men to remain disastrously 
 content with institutions which fail to embody 
 the spiritual principles of their religion. 
 
 There have been times, as we have said, when the 
 error was mainly on the side of a cowardly acceptance 
 of the status quo. But there have also been times 
 when the mistake has been to misunderstand and 
 misjudge the facts and tendencies of the social life 
 of the period, and to attempt to impose Christian 
 principles upon them in arbitrary and ill-considered 
 ways. As an instance of this we would point to 
 the attempt made by the national Churches, from 
 about the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, 
 to preserve the existing framework of society 
 against the encroachments of nationalism in the 
 sphere of politics, and commercial developments 
 in the sphere of industry. This was done on high 
 principles, but in a way which underrated the spiritual 
 
 services which trade expansion and national self- 
 167 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 expression respectively might render to the world. 
 It therefore made religion the enemy, where it 
 should have been the guardian and tutor, of the new- 
 born social forces of the modern world—with resultant 
 disaster to both the social and the religious develop- 
 ment of modern Europe. 
 
 Religion may thus go wrong in either of two ways. 
 It may, on the one hand, attribute too much weight 
 and value to the old-established customs in which 
 the morality of the age has embodied itself, and allow 
 itself to be intimidated by them; or, on the other 
 hand, it may see too little value in the newly emerg- 
 ing social developments which appear from time 
 to time, and threaten to invalidate its ancient maxims 
 and time-honoured loyalties, so causing it to iden- 
 tify its principles with particular rules of conduct 
 whose justification has largely passed away. 
 
 (4) In the fourth place, we find ourselves to-day 
 at a point in history where we have fuller knowledge 
 of both the merits and demerits of diverse great 
 attempts to constitute a rightly ordered society. 
 In particular we have knowledge of the great 
 medieval experiment in collectivist control of 
 industry, and of the great modern experiment in 
 individualist liberty in industry; and we know 
 that we want to find the way to an order of 
 society which has learned from the successes and 
 failures of both, just as in the international sphere 
 we are now in a position to see both advantage 
 and peril in the attempt to allow the nations their 
 independent sovereignty. Such breadth of know- 
 
 ledge, at the disposal of an age which has learned to. 
 
 168 
 
RETROSPECT 
 
 believe in the great possibilities of social evolution, 
 puts it in our power to look back upon the Christian 
 social theories which have influenced the past and 
 subject them to a scientific criticism out of which 
 may come the more adequate theory that we need. 
 For it seems to us indisputable that the Church’s 
 limited success—often striking failure—to inspire the 
 social life of the past has turned largely on the lack 
 of any adequately thought out theory of human 
 society in relation to the Christian idea of the King- 
 dom of God. 
 
 Certain great efforts to arrive at such a theory 
 have indeed been made by individual thinkers, 
 from the time of Augustine onwards, with abiding 
 effects upon the thought and practice of the Church 
 of later periods—some favourable and some unfavour- 
 able to an ideal social development. But they have 
 not been adequate, and that for two very obvious 
 reasons. On the one hand, they were not the out- 
 come of any really effective co-operation of the 
 Christian minds of the time; and yet, on the 
 other hand, they came to be invested with an 
 authority and practical influence to which they 
 had no secure title. They were inadequate, from 
 the first, to the facts of the case as they then stood ; 
 and they were bound to become more and more 
 inadequate as the facts themselves changed during 
 the ensuing ages. 
 
 Now this lesson is of the greatest practical moment 
 for us. For it affords not only warning as to where 
 the Church to-day may still be largely lacking, 
 but also the strongest ground for hope as to the future 
 
 possibilities of more rapid progress, and that at 
 169 
 
HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 no distant date. It is to further the realisation of 
 such a hope by utilising the possibilities of corporate 
 thinking that the Birmingham Conference has been 
 projected and prepared for. And in so far as it is 
 more fully representative and inclusive of Christian 
 experiences and thoughts than anything hitherto 
 attempted in Great Britain, it is full of promise for 
 such progress. 
 
 “Knowledge is power.” A new knowledge of 
 the past, and of what its experiments have to teach 
 the present, is within our reach to-day. Social 
 science, too, has placed at our disposal new knowledge 
 alike of the conditions and methods whereby we may 
 surely and effectively modify our present social rela- 
 tions and institutions, and of the means of implanting 
 and fostering new and more inspiring ideals of 
 fruitful co-operative fellowship. New knowledge 
 also is abroad of the need of religion—and particu- 
 larly of Christianity, as the most ethical of all 
 religions—to supply and maintain the moral enthu- 
 siasm that is required to translate true social theory 
 into living social practice. Thus, in the words 
 of a thoughtful sociologist, who has given special 
 attention to the subject from both sides: “‘ A new 
 hope has come to the world—that science (1. e. 
 social science) may unite with religion in the work 
 of redeeming mankind; that we of this generation 
 may discover a new synthesis of aspiration with 
 knowledge.” There lies in that statement a chal- 
 lenge to the Church to make knowledge, in a quite 
 new degree, the ally of personal devotion and religious 
 
 1 Dr. Charles A. Ellwood, in his Christianity and Social 
 
 Science, a Challenge to the Church (Macmillan, 1923), p. I. 
 170 
 
RETROSPECT 
 
 idealism, in the age-long task of the Christian trans- 
 formation of society. 
 
 Signed: J. Vernon Barter (Chairman.) 
 | Norman H. Baynes. 
 SAMUEL FE. KeEeEsie. 
 J. A. Licurrep. 
 Anprew G. Lirttte. 
 C. Ryper Smit. 
 R. H. Tawney. 
 H. G. Wooo. 
 
 Matcoitm Spencer (Hon. Secretary). 
 
 The members of the Commission who, having 
 co-operated in the preparation of the above Report, 
 attach their signatures, do so as individuals and in 
 no way commit the Churches or Societies of which 
 they are members. The acceptance of the Report 
 by a signatory denotes agreement with the general 
 substance of the Report, but not necessarily with 
 every detail. 
 
 171 
 
MApe& AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN. 
 Ricuaro Cray & Sons, LIMITED, 
 PRINTERS, BuNGAY, SUFFOLK. 
 
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