may in the future be divided
among the mass of their less able brethren.

Thus the crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish
is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals.
But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious
quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this
change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing
to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a
conversion _de luxe_ which is to be the privilege of the few only,
while the many are not only debarred, from the very nature of the case,
from practising the renunciation in which the few are to find eternal
life, but are actually urged to cherish their existing economic
concupiscence, and raise it to a pitch of intensity which it never has
reached before. The competent, to whose energies the riches of the world
are due, are to put these riches away from them as though they were food
offered by the devil. The incompetent, with thankless but perpetually
open mouths, are to swallow this same food as though it were the bread
from heaven. In other words, according to our Christian socialist, the
sin against the Holy Ghost, which is involved in the enjoyment of
riches, is not the enjoyment of material superfluities itself, but only
the enjoyment of them by men who have been at the trouble of producing
them.

That this is what the message of Christian socialism comes to, little as
those who deliver it realise the fact themselves, is shown by an
illustration obtruded on us by the author of "The Gospel for To-day."
The evils of the existing situation, and its remoteness from the Kingdom
of Christ, are, he says, exemplified in a very special way by the
present position of the clergy. "If we churchmen," he says, "want money
for our own purposes, we have to go to the trust magnates and kneel. We
have to kneel to 'the steel kings and the oil kings,' merely because
they are rich men." Now, how would Christian socialism alter a state of
things like this? Let us consider precisely what it is that our
Christian socialist complains about. He obviously does not mean that he
and his brother clergymen have to approach the trust magnates on their
knees. The utmost he can mean is that, if they want these men to give
them money, they have to ask for it as a gift, and presumably make, when
it is given, some acknowledgment to the donors. This it is which
evidentl