arises as a secret of the
heart, a dream of the injured feeling, long before it shapes itself
as a definite propaganda at all. The intellectual philosophies ally
themselves with success and preach competition, but the human heart
allies itself with misfortune and suggests communism.

(2) Both trace the evil state of society to "covetousness," the
competitive desire to accumulate riches. Thus, both in one case and
the other, the mere possession of wealth is in itself an offence
against moral order, the absence of it in itself a recommendation and
training for the higher life.

(3) Both propose to remedy the evil of competition by a system of
"bearing each other's burdens" in the literal sense, that is to say,
of levelling, silencing and reducing one's own chances, for the
chance of your weaker brethren. The desirability, they say, of a
great or clever man acquiring fame is small compared with the
desirability of a weak and broken man acquiring bread. The strong man
is a man, and should modify or adapt himself to the hopes of his
mates. He that would be first among you, let him be the servant of
all.

These are the three fountains of collectivist passion. I have not
considered it necessary to enter into elaborate proof of the presence
of these three in the Gospels. That the main trend of Jesus'
character was compassion for human ills, that he denounced not merely
covetousness but riches again and again, and with an almost impatient
emphasis, and that he insisted on his followers throwing up personal
aims and sharing funds and fortune entirely, these are plain matters
of evidence presented again and again, and, in fact, of common
admission.

Yet that uncanny thing in Gilbert which always forced him to see
facts, mutinied again at this point and produced another fragment in
which he has moved closer to Christianity and thereby further away
from modern Socialism. The world he lived in contained a certain
number of Christians who were, he found, highly doubtful about the
Christian impulse of Socialism. And most of his Socialist friends had
about them a tone of bitterness and an atmosphere of hopelessness
utterly unlike the tone and the atmosphere of Christianity. Just as
atheists were the first people to turn Gilbert from Atheism towards
dogmatic Christianity, so the Socialists were now turning him from
Socialism.

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