so whole-heartedly give himself to this great work of social
reconstruction. To believe in a real and personal Heaven is surely not
to deny earth with its tragedy, its sorrows, its splendid
possibilities. It is simply to believe a little more concretely than I
do, that is all. To assert the brotherhood of man under God seems to
me to lead logically to a repudiation of the severities of Private
Ownership--that is to Socialism. When the rich young man was told to
give up his property to follow Christ, when the disciples were told to
leave father and mother, it seems to me ridiculous to present
Christianity as opposed to the self-abnegation of the two main
generalizations of Socialism--that relating to property in things, and
that relating to property in persons. It is true that the Church of
Rome has taken the deplorable step of forbidding Socialism (or at
least _Socialismus_) to its adherents; but there is no need for
Socialists to commit a reciprocal stupidity. Let us Socialists at any
rate keep our intellectual partitions up. The Church that now quarrels
with Socialism once quarrelled with astronomy and geology, and
astronomers and geologists went on with their own business. Both
religion and astronomy are still alive and in the same world together.
And the Vatican observatory, by the bye, is honourably distinguished
for its excellent stellar photographs. Perhaps, after all, the Church
does not mean by _Socialismus_ Socialism as it is understood in
English; perhaps it simply means the dogmatically anti-Christian
Socialism of the Continental type.

I am not advocating indifference to any interest I have here set aside
as irrelevant to Socialism. Men have discussed and will, I hope,
continue to discuss such questions as I have instanced with passionate
zeal; but Socialism need not be entangled by their decisions. We can
go on our road to Socialism, we can get to Socialism, to the Civilized
State, whichever answer is given to any of these questions, great or
small.

CHAPTER VII

WOULD MODERN SOCIALISM ABOLISH ALL PROPERTY?

Sec. 1.

Having in the previous chapter cleared up a considerable mass of
misconception and possibility of misrepresentation about the attitude
of Socialism to the home, let us now devote a little more attention to
the current theory of property and say just exactly where Modern
Socialism stands in that matter.

The plain fact of the case is that the Socialist, whether he wanted to
or