lay the true programme of Christianity. It has repeatedly happened that a revival of faith and zeal has been accompanied by some doctrine as to community of goods. "If there were no sin, all temporal goods would be held in common" has been the cry of more than one Raymund Lull. The Waldenses were not singular in going "about barefoot, two by two, in woolen garments, possessing nothing, like the apostles."[1] To a considerable degree this is seen beneath the policy of the great mediæval monastic orders and of ultra-reformers like some of the Anabaptists. But in most of these cases their limited communism has been accompanied by more or less asceticism, to which the spirit of modern socialism is radically opposed. No man can bring any such charge against the Christian socialist of England, Germany, or America. The great inducement to combine Christianity and socialism lies along the very different line of their professed search for greater happiness and completeness in life, and it cannot be denied that the combination has great attractions. Indeed, if socialism be only what Maurice[2] declared it to be, "the acknowledgment of brotherhood and fellowship in work," it is but a phase of Christianity.
To think of Jesus as a gentle idealist who preached a communism which was neither coarse nor practicable; to see in the Jerusalem church a group of kindred idealists attempting to practice the same unworldly economy; to see only sophistry in the word of any man who ventures to think that the early church fathers did not regard riches as the fruit of usurpation; all this is captivating, but it will hardly bear severer scrutiny than the less euphemistic "Le bon sansculotte," of Camille Desmoulins.[3]
- ↑ Quoted by Neander, History of the Christum Religion and Church, IV, 608, from the statement of an eyewitness, the English Franciscan Walter Mapes.
- ↑ Life II. 128.
- ↑ So Nitti, Le Socialisme Catholique, especially Chaps. II, III. Less learned but equally extreme views are constantly to be met. For instance, R. Hebee Newton, Social Studies, 332 sq. It is gratifying to find an opposite view presented in so important a work as Nathusius, Die Mitarbeit der Kirche an der Lösung der Socialen Frage, II, 274 sq. As one would expect, thorough historians reject the idea of there having been communism in the Jerusalem church. For instance, Weizsäcker, History of the Apostolic Age (Eng. ed.), I. 56. See also Keim, Jesus of Nazara, III, 345-347.
