Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/788

772 It would indeed be strange if one who attempted to establish a regenerate social order should have overlooked those ambitions and strivings that make up so much of human life. We should expect, too, that Jesus, if for no other reason than completeness of thought, would not merely give, but, as in the case of marriage, would apply his general principles. It would be, of course, unreasonable to expect him to legislate specifically for every new combination in the kaleidoscope of economic history. An itinerant preacher in Judea could hardly be expected to know of the great trade combinations of Alexandria and Rome, to say nothing of those economic changes through which the centuries were to pass. Even supposing that he had been able to foresee thus minutely the future, had Jesus attempted after the rabbinical fashion to draw up minute rules for the conduct of the industrial life, he must needs have filled his brief career with toil that would have been as superfluous as incomplete. It is characteristic of genius to distinguish between the accident and the essential in human experience. Judged by the same standard Jesus is the consummate genius, for there is no phase of generic human life with which he has not sympathy and to which his great principle of fraternity does not reach.

Thus inevitably Jesus touched upon economics. Not, indeed, as the man who collects material and discovers its laws: far less as those who, after the fashion of the schoolman, struggle with definitions in which there is neither hope nor reality; nor yet as those prophetic hearts imagine who see in his words panaceas of their own unconscious devising; but as the economic philosopher who seeks properly to relate all economic desires and efforts to those other desires and strivings which together constitute life. On no subject does he speak oftener or with more emphasis. Indeed, in so startling a form did he sometimes throw his teachings that men instinctively have refused to carry their letter into life, and when occasionally some zealous soul has thought that duty lay in following such teaching of Jesus, the courts have entrusted him to a guardian.

For this, if for no other reason, men have slighted this phase