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ese fundamental questions more sternly in sight. I Plainly Jesus felt that the acquisitive instinct, like the sex instinct, easily breaks bounds and becomes ravenous; there is even less natural limit to it. It absorbs the energies of intellect and will. As with the rich fool, the horizon of life is filled with chances to make the pile grow bigger. Life seems to consist of money, and the problems of money. People are valued according to that standard. Marriages are arranged for it. Politics is run for it. Wars are begun for it. Creative artistic and intellectual impulses are shouldered aside, fall asleep, or die of inanition. Property is intended to secure freedom of action and self-development; in fact, it often chains men and clips their wings. This is what Jesus calls "the deceitfulness of riches" and "the darkening of the inner eye."(2) In addition to the blight of character, wealth exerts a desocializing and divisive influence. It wedges apart groups that belong together. Dives and Lazarus may live in the front and rear of the same block, but with no sense of solidarity. Dives would have been deeply moved, perhaps, if one of his own class had punctured a tire in the Philistian desert and gone for two days without any food except crumbs. The separation of humanity into classes on the lines of wealth is so universal and so orthodox that few of us ever realize that it flouts all the principles of Christianity and humanity. In the case of the young ruler Jesus encountered the fact that wealth bars men out of the world of their ideals. The question was not whether the young man could get to heaven, but whether he could have a share in the real life, in the kingdom of right relations. It is hard to acquire great wealth without doing injustice to others; it is hard to possess it and yet deal with others on the basis of equal humanity; it is hard to give it away even without doing mischief. We have seen that Jesus believed profoundly in the value and dignity of human life; that he sought to create solidarity; that he was chiefly concerned for the saving of the lowly; and that he demanded an heroic life in the service of the Kingdom of God. But wealth, as he saw it, flouted the value of life, dissolved the spiritual solidarity of whole classes, and kept the lowly low; the wealthy had lost the capacity for an heroic life. This is radical teaching. What shall we say to it? Jesus is backed by the Old Testame
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