o 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 against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite
certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more
morally safe th