nsidering them, we shall waste our time
unless we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume that the
man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and illusion
as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite
aware of all the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in
the first five minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a
considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers in
the first five minutes; but as the result is that the world is so badly
governed that those who know the truth can hardly bear to live in it,
an objection from an average stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima
facie case for any social reform.

THE REDUCTION TO MODERN PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY.

All the same, we must reduce the ethical counsels and proposals of Jesus
to modern practice if they are to be of any use to us. If we ask our
stockbroker to act simply as Jesus advised his disciples to act, he will
reply, very justly, "You are advising me to become a tramp." If we urge
a rich man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, he will
inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he sells his shares
and his lands, their purchaser will continue all those activities which
oppress the poor. If all the rich men take the advice simultaneously the
shares will fall to zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man sells
out and throws the money into the slums, the only result will be to add
himself and his dependents to the list of the poor, and to do no good
to the poor beyond giving a chance few of them a drunken spree. We must
therefore bear in mind that whereas, in the time of Jesus, and in the
ages which grew darker and darker after his death until the darkness,
after a brief false dawn in the Reformation and the Renascence,
culminated in the commercial night of the nineteenth century, it was
believed that you could not make men good by Act of Parliament, we now
know that you cannot make them good in any other way, and that a man who
is better than his fellows is a nuisance. The rich man must sell up not
only himself but his whole class; and that can be done only through the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. The disciple cannot have his bread without
money until there is bread for everybody without money; and that
requires an elaborate municipal organization of the food supply, rate
supported. Being members one of another means One Man One Vote, and One