Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/791

Rh tions of wealth to order or church and of life to the sanctifying processes of want. Through the centuries in which the leaven of Jesus has been working in society, wealth has enormously increased, but the processes of distribution have not developed so rapidly as those of production. The poor have been always present, and the Christian church has always endeavored, with more or less wisdom, to do them good. They are God's poor. But too seldom has such benefaction perfectly understood Jesus, and too often has it hindered the realization of his more fundamental principles. While Jesus sought not the amelioration but the regeneration of individual and society, charity has for centuries been too often the palliative of sin and the deadener of conscience. If patriotism has been once the last refuge of a scoundrel, charity has been a thousand times the hypocrite's price of heaven.

Even when men have not thought there was any special merit to be acquired by the giving away of money, they have frequently believed that in some way Jesus discountenanced the search for wealth. A conviction in the absolute authority of each unrelated word of Scripture has of necessity plunged many earnest souls into profound difficulties. Tolstoi, finding in the words, "Resist not evil," the key to Christianity, ceased to be judge and soldier. Few men have been equally honest in following that which they have professed to believe the only rule of life. The words of Jesus concerning wealth have been regarded as those of a visionary, and, instead of searching for their real significance, men have been too frequently ready to class them with sayings which deal with conditions that are so far from those of the world in which we live as to belong rather to a Utopia, a land of nowhere.

III.

We should expect so sane a thinker as Jesus to say something more. Can he mean to teach that the new brotherliness is to be asceticism ? Are members of the new social order to live as