Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/162

 character is inherently and eternally alien from Western civilized man, his valuations and his ideals. Some recognition of this truth is discernible in the Aryan-Christianity by which the Nazis seek to pour the substance of their barbaric faith into the emptied shell of the Christian creed.

But it is not necessary for us to go so far as the Nazis in repudiating the ethics of Christianity. All we have to do is to refuse to recognize that Christ’s ethics in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere have any application to modem social institutions. These are purely personal ethics. The Christian Churches must, therefore, keep out of politics and economics, for “The Church has its own message to deliver, a message which it cannot deliver if it mingles in political agitations.” “The plain truth is that power is always abused, and that the masses, who now have the power, and are morally neither better nor worse than the upper and middle classes whom they have supplanted, intend to pillage the minority for their own benefit.”

“There is nothing contrary to the Gospel or to Christian principles in collective experiments which do not involve confiscation.” But Dr. Inge plainly regards the “power politics” of the masses as pillage and confiscation anti-Christian practices. “The revolutionary creed flatly contradicts Christianity at every point.” The repudiation of Religion by Marx