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drags the coach in which the rich folk ride. Now, again, the position of Jesus in regard to wealth puts him here uncompro- misingly upon the side of the man who has not shared justly in the distribution of the products of labor and capital. But to urge the poor man to struggle after wealth might be to spur him to selfishness as deep as that of the rich man against whom he struggles. It might be necessary to subdue nature, to make natural forces the servants of production, but wealth and sensuousness and selfishness, Jesus saw, go hand in hand. 1 Mere bigness is not goodness, and enthusiasm over bank accounts is not the spirit of the Master. The kingdom did not come with observation. 2 Life was more than food and fraternity more than wealth. 3 Social agitators, John the Baptists of eco- nomics are needed ; we may yet count Karl Marx and Lassalle among the prophets, but what sort of kingdom would a Christ have established whose evangel was a political economy and whose new age was set forth in a programme ?
2. Nor does Jesus appeal to the aesthetic side of men's nature. It is no sign of disloyalty to beauty and the educational function of art. to say that the world yet waits the advent of an aesthetic philosophy whose guarantee of constant progress can be accepted. As in the case of the demand for economic justice, so in the case of an exclusive appeal to the love of beauty, selfishness crouches at the door. To say nothing of the fact that com- paratively few men are susceptible to any persistent moral impulse from the aesthetic side of their natures, the call to be beautiful and to love that which is beautiful is not made of the stuff that makes heroes and martyrs. It is indispensable as a subsidiary motive, and as such at least Jesus seems to have rec- ognized it, 4 but from the days of beauty-mad Greece, an aesthetic culture has failed to develop a long lived, virile, generous civ- ilization. The apostle of culture finds his case weak, in fact hopeless, if mingled with the aesthetic conception of the Greek- there be not the stern Hebrew sense of right and God.
1 Luke 8: 14. 3 Luke 12:23.
a Luke 17:20. < Matt. 6:28
