The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard
in Utopia.

Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have
had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides?
Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed
clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul?
As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer
is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational
objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained
from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment,
but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a
dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the
commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has
been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle.
I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious
to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel
to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest--if,
in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least
that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this--
that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy.
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern
society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly
ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely
based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is
tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian)
is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions
about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics,
this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is,
of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already.
That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that
a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man,
spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt.
There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints
have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply
that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.
It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators
of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown
the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly
un-Christian to rebel again