lessed to give than
to receive; that love is the great revealer of the mysteries of life;
that we have here no continuing city, and must therefore set our
affections and lay up our treasures in heaven; that the things that are
seen are temporal, and the things that are not seen are eternal. This is
the Christian religion. It is a form of idealism; and idealism means a
belief in absolute or spiritual values.

When applied to human life, it introduces, as it were, a new currency,
which demonetises the old; or gives us a new scale of prices, in which
the cheapest things are the dearest, and the dearest the cheapest. The
world's standards are quantitative; those of Christianity are
qualitative. And being qualitative, spiritual goods are unlimited in
amount; they are increased by being shared; and we rob nobody by taking
them.

Secularists ask impatiently what Christianity has done or proposes to do
to make mankind happier, by which they mean more comfortable. The answer
is (to put it in a form intelligible to the questioner) that
Christianity increases the wealth of the world by creating new values.
Wealth depends on human valuation. For example, if women were
sufficiently well educated not to care about diamonds, the Kimberley
mines would pay no dividends, and the rents in Park Lane would go down.
The prices of paintings by old masters would decline if millionaires
preferred to collect another kind of scalps to decorate their wigwams.
Bookmakers and company-promoters live on the widespread passion for
acquiring money without working for it. It is hardly possible to
estimate the increase of real wealth, and the stoppage of waste, which
would result from the adoption of a rational, still more of a Christian,
valuation of the good things of life. I have dealt with this subject in
the essay on _The Indictment against Christianity_, and have emphasised
the importance of taking into consideration, in all economic questions,
the _human costs_ of production, the factors which make work pleasant or
irksome, and especially the moral condition of the worker. Good-will
diminishes the toll which labour takes of the labourer; envy and hatred
vastly increase it while they diminish its product. It is, of course,
impossible that the worker should not resent having to devote his life
to making what is useless or mischievous, and to ministering to the
irrational wastefulness of luxury. Christianity, in condemning the
selfish and irresponsi