mæus. The advice to the twelve and the seventy was evidently due to some special cause, for afterwards, when giving them direction for their entire course of life after his death, he revoked it, advising a more normal manner of life.[1] Throughout the gospels Jesus never appears in the garb of an ascetic, for the reason that he was able to maintain the balance and perspective of his life. Indeed his life expresses even more distinctly than his words the coordination of his teachings. Wealth he showed to be a good, but a good only when it is a social good and when its pursuit does not weaken those impulses within a man that go out towards his fellows and God, and so render him unfit for the kingdom of heaven.
V.
All this it must be admitted brings Jesus close to the general position of socialism. If wealth is not for purely individual enjoyment but is to be used for the good of society, and if the ideal society is a brotherhood, it is not a long step to the belief that any form of private property is anti-fraternal and that society itself can best administer economic matters for the good of its members. Something like corroboration is given such an interpretation of Jesus' position by the fact that the company of his followers had a common purse,[2] and that the members of the primitive Jerusalem church "had all things in common."[3]
It is therefore by no means strange that there have always been those who have maintained that in some form of socialism
- ↑ Luke 22:35, 36.
- ↑ John 12:19; 13:6. These texts are so used by Todt, Der radikale deutsche Socialismus.
- ↑ Acts 2: 44, 45; 4:32, 36, 37. It is just here that unrhetorical description seems almost beyond hope. For instance, Leslie Stephen (Social Rights and Duties, I, 21, 22): "The early christians were the socialists of their age, and took a view of Dives and Lazarus which would commend itself to the Nihilists of today . . . . but if the man who best represents the ideas of early Christians were to enter a respectable society of today, would it not be likely to send for the police?" A master of clever English like Leslie Stephen has small need of such astonishing nonsense as this to get himself a hearing. Laveleye (Primitive Property, Intro, xxxi) though writing in a different spirit makes an equally indefensible statement: "If Christianity were taught and understood conformably to the spirit of its Founder, the existing social organism could not last a day."
