to the purposes of trade and industry."[1] The alternative title of this publication was A Journal of Association, and this indeed was the more appropriate designation. To this movement is due most of the many successful cooperative experiments in England. The movement took its rise during the Chartist agitation, when indications seemed to foreshadow a revolution such as France had experienced. When this danger was happily averted the Christian socialists experienced a revulsion of feeling which accounts for the mild form of their social doctrines. In earlier stages they were certainly much more radical. This is clearly shown in the prefaces added and in the alterations made in Kingsley's Alton Locke. Their principle was not carried to a logical conclusion, for their conception as far as definitely advocated did not eliminate the competition between groups,—little less destructive than that between individuals.
More precise perceptions at this point have urged the present movement to a more advanced position. The movement is described to be in contradistinction on the one hand with the unsocial Christian—"the good and pious man who is keen eyed to the claims of faith on his own private life and that of other individuals, but is blind to its claims on the life of the community," and on the other hand with the unchristian socialist—"professed teacher or disciple of the secular socialist creeds, who unhappily fails to recognize the paramount authority of the Lord and King of all Christians."[2] Again its main object is said to be "to establish the kinship between the genius of Christianity and that 'passionate faith in the illimitable possibilities of human progress' which has been variously expressed in schemes put forward at different times by those social idealists who now go under the general name socialists."[3] This seems to possess the characteristic vagueness, but the writer continues and points out that Christian socialism aims to bring about a reconciliation of social classes and by the application of Christian ethics to reach ultimately a status of social peace.
