Woman One Vote, and universal suffrage and equal incomes and all sorts
of modern political measures. Even in Syria in the time of Jesus
his teachings could not possibly have been realized by a series of
independent explosions of personal righteousness on the part of the
separate units of the population. Jerusalem could not have done what
even a village community cannot do, and what Robinson Crusoe himself
could not have done if his conscience, and the stern compulsion of
Nature, had not imposed a common rule on the half dozen Robinson Crusoes
who struggled within him for not wholly compatible satisfactions. And
what cannot be done in Jerusalem or Juan Fernandez cannot be done in
London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. In short, Christianity, good or
bad, right or wrong, must perforce be left out of the question in human
affairs until it is made practically applicable to them by complicated
political devices; and to pretend that a field preacher under the
governorship of Pontius Pilate, or even Pontius Pilate himself in
council with all the wisdom of Rome, could have worked out applications
of Christianity or any other system of morals for the twentieth century,
is to shelve the subject much more effectually than Nero and all its
other persecutors ever succeeded in doing. Personal righteousness, and
the view that you cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament, is, in
fact, the favorite defensive resort of the people who, consciously or
subconsciously, are quite determined not to have their property meddled
with by Jesus or any other reformer.

MODERN COMMUNISM.

Now let us see what modern experience and modern sociology has to say
to the teaching of Jesus as summarized here. First, get rid of your
property by throwing it into the common stock. One can hear the
Pharisees of Jerusalem and Chorazin and Bethsaida saying, "My good
fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of Judea equally today,
before the end of the year you would have rich and poor, poverty and
affluence, just as you have today; for there will always be the idle
and the industrious, the thrifty and the wasteful, the drunken and the
sober; and, as you yourself have very justly observed, the poor we shall
have always with us." And we can hear the reply, "Woe unto you, liars
and hypocrites; for ye have this very day divided up the wealth of
the country yourselves, as must be done every day (for man liveth not
otherwise than from hand to mouth, nor c