nt prophets and the most spiritual teaching of the Hebrew
people, which condemned injustice and extortionate money-making even more
energetically than did Jesus. Medieval Christianity sincerely assented to
the principle that private property is a danger to the soul and a
neutralizer of love. Every monastic community tried to cut under sex
dangers by celibacy, and property dangers by communism. This was an
enormous misinterpretation of Christianity, but it shows that men took the
teachings on the dangers of private property seriously. The modern
Christian world does not. It has quietly set aside the ideas of Jesus on
this subject, lives its life without much influence from them, and
contents itself with emphasizing other aspects.

Has the teaching of Jesus on private property been superseded by a better
understanding of the social value of property? Or has his teaching been
suppressed and swamped by the universal covetousness of modern life? "Our
moral pace-setters strike at bad personal habits, but act as if there was
something sacred about money-getting; and, _seeing that the master
iniquities of our time are connected with money-making_, they do not get
into the fight at all. The child-drivers, monopoly-builders, and crooked
financiers have no fear of men whose thought is run in the moulds of their
grandfathers. Go to the tainted-money colleges, and you will learn that
Drink, not Graft, is the nation's bane" (Edward A. Ross, "Sin and Society,
an Analysis of Latter-day Iniquity," p. 97--the italics are his).

II

The machinery for making money which Jesus knew, was simple, crude, and
puny compared with the complicated and pervasive system which the magnates
of modern industry have built up. There was probably not a millionaire in
all Palestine. What would he have said to our great cities?

We need a Christian ethics of property, more perhaps than anything else.
The wrongs connected with wealth are the most vulnerable point of our
civilization. Unless we can make that crooked place straight, all our
charities and religion are involved in hypocrisy.

We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and
that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand
property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher
individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a
corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of
nature and in bondag