Christianity and the Class Struggle 

I

I think I shall be acting in accord with the wishes of you all if I immediately in this opening address conceive the task of this, our first Congress, as modestly as possible. Not for a moment should the idea take hold, either within or outside this gathering, that we intend to give in our own way an imitation of one of those impressive assemblies where specialists from every land of Europe gather to display the treasures of their knowledge or show off the glitter of their talent. It is an unfortunate result of state monopoly, which in our universities in this country continues to increase, that we as yet have not even produced specialists; none of us at this congress stands out as an expert in economics. And if my interpretation is correct, then you have girded yourselves not to cross swords here with the opposition in a public tourney, but rather to speak among ourselves as brothers united in the name of Jesus, and to discuss seriously this question: what we as confessors of the Christ should do about the social needs of our time.

Those in other lands who profess Jesus have also increasingly realized the necessity for such action. Recall the appearance of the Christian Workers Party in the circle around Count von Waldersee in Berlin; the Christian Socialists, who, inspired by Maurice and Kingsley, have united in one group under Rev. Headlam in London; the Christian Society for Social Economy of Switzerland, organized two years ago at Geneva. And, speaking now of Christianity in the broadest sense, recall what has been done towards a solution of the social question on the Catholic side by such able thinkers as Le Play and Von Ketteler, by a whole series of significant congresses in Germany, France and Belgium; and recently by Leo XIII in his encyclical. So our own debut does not come too early, but too late, and we lag behind others when we could have preceded them. Is it not true that, even before a single voice had been heard among Christians outside the Netherlands, Bilderdijk, Da Costa and Groen van Prinsterer had already called our attention to the social need? Bilderdijk as early as 1825 addressed the lower classes:

You sigh and languish in poverty and decay While luxury defiantly feasts on the fruit of your own hands

And in the face of this need, he pokes fun of the false theory of charity, when he introduces the traditional Liberalism as saying:

Yes, the land collapses from the poor Why not deport them? Then we would be relieved of them It is a bunch of rascals that we pity Who does not find even honest poverty already too expensive They hunger, it's true, they find no work But how can they be of any use, when there is no work for them?

By contrast Bilderdijk, laying his finger on the sore spot, calls Christians to penitence in the cutting beginning of his caustic Muckrakings:

Whenever a people is destined to perish in sin It's in the church that the soul-leprosy begins

Fifteen years later Da Costa, in his Song of 1840, lashed out just as relentlessly at the Plutocracy, the "rule of money" as he called it, and pictured for us the social need which was then approaching and now is here, in this contrast:

Here luxury, grown beyond itself, externally healthy And glittering with youth, but inwardly scorched And sap-destroying like a cancer, and, as it were, Destroying the balance between the classes... There Muttering at the work that gives no bread: yokes Thrown on the neck of the free, where the walls Burn with heat day and night, and an eternal smoke Blackens the cities, and the fumes suffocate the soul.

So prophesied Da Costa, not parroting Socialism, but calling his Internationale at London in 1864 a quarter of a century before Karl Marx. And it was within half of the intervening time, in 1853, that Groen van Prinsterer frightened the dignified officials in the Binnenhof with his brusque declaration: "With reference to the socialist ideas, one should take note of the really pitiful position of the lower classes; and especially of the harm which the higher classes, through their moral corruption and false science, have brought about among the people." He declared that in socialism, "there is a measure of truth mingled with error, which gives it its power"; he recognized that "one should also attempt improvement of material conditions, the unjustness of which redoubles the power of the socialist error"; and he called upon his fellow Christians to extinguish the fire when he wrote, "socialism finds its source in the French Revolution," and hence, even as the Revolution itself, "is conquerable only by Christianity."

We have thus been placed in the rear guard. And that not only through the leaders given us by God, but as strongly by the Socialists themselves, who constantly appeal to Christ in support of their Utopias; who continually hold before us serious mottoes from the Holy Word; indeed, they have so strongly felt the bond between the Socialist need and the Christian religion that they have not hesitated to present Christ Himself as the great prophet of Socialism, and to cry out: "there can be no talk of a failure of the Christian liberation; there lies only two milleniums between the beginning and the conclusion of the work undertaken by Christ."

A liberal of the old school, Adolphe Naquet, is consequently uneasy lest it be precisely Socialism which prepares new triumphs for Christianity, and reproaches the Socialist exactly for furthering the cause of religion, despite his hatred for it. "You do the work of religion," he exclaims, "when you put in the foreground exactly those problems in whose solution Christianity is so closely involved." This is an unintentional but nevertheless meaningful tribute to the influence which Christianity can exercise on the solution of the social problem. It is an influence which comes out more beautifully in these rich words of Fichte: "Christianity conceals in its womb a much greater treasure of rejuvenation than you surmise. Until now it has exerted its power only on the individual and only indirectly on the state. But anyone who, as believer or as unbeliever, has been able to spy out its secret dynamic, must grant that Christianity can exert a wonderful organizing power on society also; and not till this power breaks through will the religion of the cross shine before the whole world in all the depths of its conception and in all the wealth of the blessings which it brings."

Enough, and more than enough, has already been cited, my friends, to arouse within you the conviction that the direct relation between the social question and the Christian religion is simply undeniable. One even feels some shame that the voice of conscience has not thus far spoken more loudly within us, or at least that it did not stir us to earlier action. It becomes a matter of guilt and moves us to humiliation that when so crying a need became apparent, we did not long since act in the name of Jesus. And it is in this spirit of self-criticism, and not at all in a tone of haughtiness that I understand your probable reproachful question whether such an obvious truth needs demonstration in a gathering such as this, and whether standing before the awful need of these times, a need which at every point is related to the very essence of error and sin, our eye should be allowed, or should be able, to turn away from the Christus Consolator, who assuredly also addresses to our violently disturbed century the persistent call of His divine compassion: Come to me, richest century that ever was, which is so deathly weary and heavy laden, and I shall give you rest.

On the existence of this relation I shall therefore waste no more words. Rather, recognition of this is indeed the presupposition of this congress. But what you do expect of me, and what I, depending on your charitable judgment, will at least try to furnish, is a laying bare of the fibres by which these two life-phenomena, the Christian religion and the social question, are intertwined. The conviction that such a relation exists is not enough. It must also take on form and shape for us. Only so can it speak to our consciousness.

To that end I select as point of departure an antithesis which is plain to all of us. I mean the antithesis between nature as it exists independent of our will, and our human art which acts on this nature. For the whole social question is born of the relation between our human life and the material world which surrounds us. But now in that human life as well as in this material world, there is on the one hand a power which lies beyond our reach and which we commonly call nature, and on the other hand a power derived from a man's will which may be summarily designated as art. We with our own human nature are placed in a nature around us, not to leave that nature as it is, but with an urge and calling within us to work on nature through human art, to ennoble and perfect it. An example is the breeding of horses for the improvement of the strain; and so, too, the competent florist does not gather a bouquet of wild flowers, but he rather increases and refines the varieties through the mingling of seeds; so steam comes from water; and out of the dull stone the polished diamond; and so men lead the wild stream that breaks through the mountains into safer channels, to make its water serve for shipping and for irrigating their fields. Briefly, then, human art acts on every area of nature; not to destroy the life of nature, much less, mechanically to juxtapose another structure, but rather to unlock the power which lies concealed in nature; or, again, to regulate the wild power which springs from it. God so wills it. While yet in paradise man received the order "to preserve and cultivate" the material world. It was created — forgive me here the indispensable Germanism — to be "completely-perfected." Every creature, says our confession so beautifully, must serve man, so that man may serve his God. But from this it follows that this rule applies as inexorably to your own human life, both in its personal and its social aspects. It is renouncing your duty when you let your inner nature run its course unrestrained, and do not try to help ennoble it through the holy art of "watching, praying and struggling." It is shameful for fathers and mothers to let their children grow up naturally and not to improve on nature through the art of education. And so too, it is naught but primitive barbarism whenever human society, without higher control, is left to the course of nature. And so political art, here taken in the higher sense, intervenes, so that out of this society a community may develop, and so that, further, this both in itself and in its relation to the material world, may be ennobled.

If in this process no mistake were made, if men did not fall into error, and egoism and crime did not meanwhile interfere, then this development of human society could always follow its course in peace, and uninterruptedly move forward to a progressively happier condition. But unfortunately the situation was not so simple. True, a certain instinct in almost every people has led to the recognition of a few indispensable bases for all human society, and in this area geniuses and heroic figures have from ancient times had many a happy intuition, but as soon as it came to more developed regulation for this so complex phenomenon which we call human society, action after action was misdirected, as much by those who in social life patterned usage and custom as by those who acted with magistral power; and in both instances the series of misdirected actions had a two-fold unchanging cause, error and sin. Error insofar as there was ignorance as to the essence of man and his social attributes, and ignorance equally as to the laws which govern on the one hand human association and on the other, the production, distribution and use of material goods; sin, insofar as greed and ambition disturbed or opposed the sound growth of human society, whether through force or through vicious custom and unjust law, and sometimes for centuries abetted a very cancerous development. And in time both this error and this sin joined forces to enthrone untruthful principles, which did violence to our human nature; and out of these false principles to build systems which licensed injustice and theoretically stamped as normal that which was actually opposed to the demands of life.

This reckless play with human society was carried on in all times and among all peoples; carried on by intellectuals and by the wealthy in private life; and soon, under their inspiration, carried on by the government in no less irresponsible fashion. For while it is perfectly true that the social question in the narrower sense comes up for debate only at scattered intervals, and that in consequence many are under the delusion that the intervention of the government in the social question is a novelty of our times, yet actually there has never been a government in any land of the world which did not in various ways dominate both the course of social life and its relations with material wealth. It did this through the various enactment of civil laws; through trade laws; and indirectly through its criminal law and penal code; and as far as concerns the relation to material wealth, more particularly through inheritance laws, through the system of taxation, through regulation of exports and imports, codes for purchase and rent, agrarian regulations, colonial rule, control of coinage, and much more. It has never been possible to speak of a wholly free and instinctive growth of society in any country with a high degree of national development. Human art has in many directions exploited the development of natural powers and relations. But although it must be gratefully admitted that this intervention of human direction has brought us, generally speaking, out of the condition of barbarism into a condition of orderly association; indeed, although it may and must be conceded that such a continuous development of society strengthens belief in a higher Providential rule, yet it cannot for a moment be doubted that this intervention, in many ways proceeding from untrue principles, has through all ages made unsound a state of affairs which could have been sound; has in many senses poisoned our mutual relationships; and has brought about nameless misery, whereas the goal of all statesmanship should be the happiness and honor of a nation.

The ineradicable inequality between men gave the stronger an advantage over the weaker, and as though an animal rather than a human society were involved, produced a world in which the fixed rule prevails that the stronger devours the weaker; and the stronger, almost without exception, have always known how to bend every usage and magistral ordinance so that the profit was theirs and the loss was for the weaker. Men did not literally eat each other like the cannibals, but the more powerful exploited the weaker by means of a weapon against which there was no defense. And whenever the magistrate did come forward as a servant of God to protect the weaker, the more powerful class of society soon knew how to exercise such an overpowering influence on the government that the governmental power which should have protected the weaker became an instrument against them. And this was not because the stronger class was more evil at heart than the weaker; for no sooner did a man from the lower class rise to the top than he in his turn took part just as harshly, and indeed more harshly, in the irreligious oppression of those who were members of his own former class. No, the cause lay in this, that men regarded humanity apart from its eternal destiny, did not honor it as created in the image of God, and did not reckon with the majesty of the Lord, who alone is able to hold in check, through His grace, a race sunk in sin. This unjust situation was already born in ancient times of which the Preacher so movingly complains (Eccl. 4:1): "So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of the oppressors there was power, but they had no comforter." It is a situation like that when Naboth was murdered so that Jezebel might add his acre to the royal park of Ahab; or, if you will, a state of affairs once and for all typified by our Lord in the parable of the rich man and the poor Lazarus; and against which James hurls his apostolic ban when he writes: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."

II

Is it then conceivable that the Christian religion, when it went out into the world, should take no stand against a state of affairs so wrong? For everyone knows how social conditions, similar to and even worse than those which keep contemporary Europe and America in a state of tension, at that time prophesied the approaching fall of the Roman Empire; and how a genuinely Asiatic despotism was responsible for a system of extortion in almost every province against which oratorical heroes like Cicero frequently protested in vain. Then too the balance between the classes was lost: there was defiant luxury next to crying need; immense accumulations of capital and beggarly poverty concealed in the slums of Rome; and, necessarily following, there was corruption in government; sensuality rather than morality setting the tone of public opinion; and the masses, carried away by need and passion, ready at any time for rebellion, murder and plunder.

Dour pagan Rome, then, even as laughing Greece, sank away into the morass of human misery: but before it sank, there had been a light in Bethlehem, there had been heard a dying cry from Golgotha, through which a new hope was awakened for all peoples. A new hope, not in the sense in which men today wish to degrade the Christ of God to a social reformer; Savior of the World was his higher and much richer title. But nevertheless the "blessedness" which He brought to humanity had a promise "not alone for the future but also for the present life" (I Tim. 4:8); though always so that man's eternal welfare remained primary, so that soul and body might not be corrupted in hell. The worm that never dies, the wailing and gnashing of teeth in a fire that would never be extinguished—these were the nightmares which Jesus saw when He looked at poor humanity, and which gave Him no rest. The joy to which he called had to be the eternal joy of His Kingdom. There never was found in our Savior the cruelty of the Socialist who, for a bettering of the lot in this short span of time of our temporal existence, wildly and recklessly would cut off every prospect of a glory that shall be eternal. Nor was revolution ever preached by Jesus or His apostles. We are to be subject to every power which is set over us, and the poor Lazarus shall have his revenge, not while he is living from the crumbs which fall from the rich man's table, but when the rich man suffers in eternal pain and the poor Lazarus is comforted.

And if you ask then what Jesus did to bring rescue in the social need of those days, here is the answer. Since he knew that such defiant abuses arose from the evil roots of error and sin, he placed the truth over against this error, and He broke the power of sin by shedding His blood for this sin and pouring out His Holy Spirit unto His own. Since both rich and poor had fallen apart because they had lost their point of union in God, He called both together back to their Father Who is in Heaven. Since He saw how the idolizing of money had killed the nobility in the human heart, He held up the Service of Mammon to His followers as an object for their deep contempt. Since He understood the curse that lies in money, also for the man of great possessions, He adjured him to cease his accumulating of capital, and to gather not treasure on earth, where the moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal, while He rejected the rich young man since he could not resolve to sell all his goods and give to the poor. In Jesus' heart there dwelt no hatred against the rich, but rather a deep sympathy for their pitiable state; for the service of Mammon is exceedingly difficult, and indeed sooner would a camel go through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter the kingdom of Heaven. Only when possession of money leads to usury and harshness is Jesus angry, and in a moving parable the man who would not release his debtor is delivered to the torturers and branded as a wicked servant who knows no pity.

And yet Jesus works not only through moral motivation. He preaches through His personal life. When rich and poor stand opposed to each other, He never takes His place with the wealthier, but always stands with the poorer. He is born in a stable; and while foxes have holes and birds have nests, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. His apostles are to give no consideration to the accumulation of money. They are to go out without purse and without food. And while there is one among them who carried the purse, that one is Judas, the terrible man, who, led astray precisely by avariciousness, sold his soul to the devil. Powerful is the trait of pity, which is imprinted on every page of the Gospel where Jesus comes in contact with the suffering and oppressed. He does not thrust aside the unlearned masses, but draws them to Him. He would extinguish no wick that even barely smoulders. Whatever is sick is cured by Him. He does not hold back His hand from the touch of leprous flesh. When the multitude hunger, even though as yet they do not hunger for the bread of life, He breaks the loaf into many pieces and gives them an abundance of precious fish. Thus in Jesus a living life practice joins itself to theory.

His theory is set forth along the lines of the prayer of the writer of Proverbs (30:8): "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient to me." From this prayer the apostle deduces this practical lesson for the avaricious man (I Tim. 6:10): "Nothing hast thou brought into the world and so at your dying thou canst also carry nothing away. If then thou but hast food and raiment thou shouldst therewith be content. But if thou wilt be rich, thou wilt fall into temptation and the snare and into many foolish and hurtful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition; for the love of money is a root of all evil; thou, oh man of God, flee these things." But His is a theory from which there follows, by contrast, for the poor man, that he should not grumble, nor let himself be led to bitterness, and not say in his anxiety, "what shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithall shall we be clothed? For all these things the Gentiles seek." And then follows what is so flatly turned about when our Socialists preach it: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you." A theory, then, which simultaneously for both sides, rich and poor, cuts the root of sin in our human heart.

But He also follows up the theory with the heart-winning practice of devotedness, self-denial, even more of a divine pity which first drops every balsam on which it can lay hands into the wounds of suffering mankind, and then goes on to a voluntary slaughter for the need and the death of all, whether rich or poor, like the Lamb that is dumb before the shearer.

Such a presence, such a preaching, such a death, would already have exercised an influence for good in social relations. The overthrow of the idol of Mammon and the transplanting of the purpose of existence from earth to heaven must even by itself bring about a complete revolution in the self-consciousness of the peoples. But Jesus did not stop with this. Jesus also organized. Did He not cause His church to go out among the nations; a church which was destined to triply influence the life of society? First, through the ministry of the Word, insofar as the Word constantly fought against greed for money, comforted the poor and oppressed, and in exchange for the suffering of the present time pointed to an endless glory. Then, second, through an organized ministry of charity, which in the name of the Lord, as being the single owner of all goods, demanded community of goods to this extent, that in the circle of believers no man or woman was to be permitted to suffer want or to be without the necessary apparel. And, third, by instituting the equality of brotherhood over against difference in rank and station, through abolishing all artificial demarcations between men, and by joining rich and poor in one holy food at the Lord's Supper, in symbol of the unity which bound them together not only as "children of men," but, more importantly, as those who have collapsed under the same guilt and have been saved by the same sacrifice in Christ.

And indeed it is a fact that, as a direct consequence of the appearance of the Christ and of the extension of His church among the nations, society becomes markedly different from what it was in the pagan dispensation. The Roman society of that time was strikingly like what Jesus once called a "whited sepulchre which on the outside is beautiful, but inside full of dead bones," and that whited sepulchre crashed into ruins. And without wishing to say that the new social order which arose as though spontaneously from these ruins corresponded in any sense at all to the ideal cherished by Jesus, we may nevertheless gratefully acknowledge that more tolerable social conditions were born. Earthly welfare no longer weighed heaviest in public estimation; eternal well-being also had weight. Slavery was broken at its root, and underwent a moral criticism which demolished it as an institution. Men began to be concerned about the care of the poor and of orphans. The accumulation of too much capital was checked by the opposition to usury. Higher and lower classes approached each other on a footing of freer association. And while the contrast of surplus and scarcity was not erased, the antithesis between overweening luxury and pinching poverty was not so sharp. Man had not yet arrived at an ideal state, but at least he was started on a better path; and had not the Church gone astray from her simplicity and her heavenly ideal, the influence of the Christian religion on the state and on social relationships soon would have become dominant.

But, first of all, the Christianization of Europe went too quickly, and the folk-groups which had to be assimilated were altogether too massive. And the conversion of Constantine was for the Church the signal to wed itself with the power of the world, thereby cutting the nerve of her strength, and from then on there was in consequence an infiltration again of the world into the church. Instead of disciples who went out without purse or food, richly endowed princes of the church, housed in magnificent palaces; and as the heirs of the Galilean fisherman at the head of the Church, a series of popes displayed a royal pomp, and in a Julius II or a Leo X seemed more bent on paganizing Christianity than on Christianizing the life of the world. So the salt lost its savour; and social corruption regained its ancient strength; a corruption which was checked, but not conquered, in the lands of the Reformation; and in that portion of Europe remaining Catholic, speedily spread in such fashion that finally royal absolutism and aristocratic pride evoked the unbearable social tension which issued in the French Revolution, revolution, therefore, which broke out on Catholic territory.

III

This revolution, against which every one who professes Christ and thinks things through consistently must turn himself, produced its evil not so much in this, that it threw the Bourbons from the throne, nor in this, that it made the middle class superior in power to both the nobility and the churchmen, but rather through the complete change it produced on the sense and the philosophy of life of the nations. In the Christian religion lay the principle that the subjection of all to God creates the tie which joins authority and freedom — the French Revolution casts out the majesty of the Lord and tries to build up an artificial authority based on the free will of the individual; a thing much like a scaffold nailed together from loose planks and beams, which cracks and then falls at the first gale. The Christian religion taught us to understand life on earth as a subordinate part of an eternal existence — the French Revolution denied and opposed everything which fell outside the horizon of this earthly life. The Christian religion spoke of a lost paradise, a state of purity from which we fell, and for that reason called us to humility and conversion — the French Revolution saw in the state of nature the criterion of the normally human, incited us to pride, and put, in place of conversion, liberalization of man's spirit. Moreover, the Christian religion has, as fruit of divine pity, brought into the world the pity of a love springing from God — the French Revolution placed over against that the egoism of the passionate struggle for possession. And, to touch on the basic point, which lies at the heart of the social question, the Christian religion sought personal human dignity in the social relations of an organically associated society — the French Revolution destroyed that organic tissue, broke these social bonds, and finally, in its work of atomistic trifling, had nothing left but the monotonous self-seeking individual, asserting his own self-sufficiency.

Here, then, the die was cast. It could not happen otherwise than that out of this wrenching loose of everything that held our human life together in human dignity, there must of iron necessity be born first a deep-seated social need, then a widespread Social-Democratic movement, and finally for every people and nation a nettling social problem. I do not deny that the application of steam to machinery, the more rapid transportation between countries and the rapid increase in population contributed to the worsening of social relations; but what I firmly hold to is this, that neither the social question which now holds two continents in feverish tension, nor the Social Democracy which now threatens the public order in Europe and America, would ever have assumed even distantly such ominous dimensions if the French Revolution had not brought about such a complete change in the consciousness of the nations, the classes, and the individual.

In the first place, then, the French Revolution could not but become the cause of a deep-seated social need. This followed from the double and intrinsic characteristic; first, to represent possession of money as the highest good, and second, in the struggle for money, to set every man against every other. It was not as if the hunt for money had an official place in its program, nor that its more inspired interpreters did not coax more noble tones from their harps, but the theory, the system, had to come to fruition in a kneeling before Mammon, simply because it cut off the horizon of an eternal life, impelled men to seek happiness on earth, and thus in earthly things, and thus created a sphere of lower drives, in which money was the standard of value, and everything was sacrificed for money. Now add the loosening of all social organization, followed by the proclamation of the mercantile gospel of "laissez faire," and you understand how the struggle for life was announced by the struggle for money, so that the law of the animal world, dog eat dog, became the basic law for every social relationship. The thirst and the chase for money, the holy apostle taught us, is the root of all evil; and as soon as this angry demon was unchained, at the turn of the century, no deliberation was sharp enough, no cunning sly enough, no deceit shameful enough in order, through superiority in knowledge, position, and basic capital, to acquire money and ever more money at the expense of the socially weaker.

This condition would have existed even if the opportunities at the beginning of this struggle had been equal for both parties; it became so in much worse degree now that the opportunities were so manifestly unequal. On the side of the bourgeosie, there was experience and insight, ability and association, available money and available influence. On the other side was the rural population and the working class, bereft of all means of help, and forced to accept any condition, no matter how unjust, through the constant necessity for food. Even without prophetic gifts, the result of this struggle could readily be foreseen. It could not end otherwise than in the absorption of all calculable value by the larger and smaller capitalists, leaving for the lower strata of society only as much as appeared strictly necessary to maintain these instruments for nourishing capital — for in this system, that is all the workers are held to be. And so a social condition found previously only among the Jews — "at the one end of the social scale, millionaires; at the other, ant-poor drudges"— has gradually come to be that of all Europe, and that now without the palliatives of family ties and pity for the poverty-stricken fellow-believer which had a mollifying effect among our Jewish fellow-citizens. And so in all of Europe a well-to-do bourgeoisie rules over an impoverished working class, which must steadily increase the wealth of the ruling class, and which is doomed, when it can be of no more use, to sink into the morass of the proletariat.

The social need is also worsened by the fact that the luxurious bourgeoisie makes a display of its luxury which creates a false want in the poorer classes, and through the undermining of that contentment which can be happy even with little, insofar as there was less for the poor man to enjoy, fanned into flames his feverish seeking after pleasure.

With equally strict necessity, that same system gave birth, in the second place, to Social Democracy, with its open proclamation of a coming revolution. The French Revolution had written on its blood-red banner not only "freedom" but also "equality and fraternity," and it was certainly not least the French farmers and the French workers who in the wars of the French Republic rushed to the battlefields, singing the Marseillaise, for the achievement of these precious ideals. But, alas, the "equality" of which men had dreamed turned out to be an even more shocking inequality; and instead of the promised "fraternity," they received a revised version of the fable of the wolf and the lamb. Would there not necessarily arise in the suffering class of society this very natural question: "With what right do men force on us this desperate poverty? We were taught that we were as good as anyone else; and also that the numerical minority must subject itself to the majority. Well, are we not the majority; the great majority; the overwhelming masses? And it is then not a violation of the principles of the French Revolution, and a scoffing at the holy slogan for which so much costly blood flowed at Paris, that a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of much lower calibre, an aristocracy of money, sets itself up, to lay down the law to us, to put its foot on our neck, and thus again to restore that same evil that was once overthrown by the almost unbelievable exertions of the Voltaires and Rousseaus and the heroes of the Bastille? Because of the very theory of the French Revolution, give us, us too, the voice in affairs which we have coming to us; then we will out-vote you, and supply a wholly new social order, which will give the death blow to privilege forever, and then finally, finally, have for ourselves what your beautiful theory promised us but which you never granted us."

Seriously, I cannot see that a person who is not an opponent but a supporter of the theory of the French Revolution can bring anything to bear on logically good grounds against this demand of Social Democracy. From that standpoint, I at least must agree with the Social Democrat. Once the false theory is granted, Social Democracy and it alone is consistent. Nor do I see how Social Democracy can be condemned in the name of the French Revolution, as men try and do, by saying that herein at least it is in error, in that it openly preaches revolution and explains that, if necessary, it would not hold back from violence. Did the dignified gentlemen of the Girondins preach no violence? Did men treat Louis XVI as they did because of a principle that the social order might not be broken? Did the spiritual forefathers of our Liberals and Conservatives shrink from violence in the September murders? But the raising of these questions is lost in absurdity when the dull chant of the guillotine still awakens tragically disturbing echoes in our ears, and when we note how the recent centennial of the storming of the Bastille was celebrated by all of Liberal Europe as a most laudable and heroic feat. How can those who have themselves not hesitated to wade through streams of blood to reach their goal turn others over to the contempt of human feeling because they too, in a tight corner, would again erect the guillotine?

Naturally I myself shudder as I utter these words, and everything that the Christian religion teaches us is in horrified opposition to such words; but, comparing the Social Democrat to the Liberal, I neither can nor may say that he is in the wrong. It is using a double standard, it is hypocrisy and self-deception, for those who themselves were born of the Revolution, yes, from regicide, to count it mortal sin in their own spiritual children when they too dare speak of "forceful means."

Next I come to a more attractive subject; for out of the results of the French Revolution there was also born a third thing, this time by reaction; I do not now mean the social need nor Social Democracy, but the social question. Not as if the social question now presents itself for the first time. Rather, it was the order of the day in ancient history, as much on the Euphrates as on the Tiber, as much in Sparta as in Athens; it rose again when the feudal system found acceptance, and after some centuries passed away; and, to give an example from our own Dutch history, it appeared twice in Java, when the Culture-System was introduced and then given up. Obviously whenever one uses the term social question one means thereby, in the most general sense, that serious doubt has arisen about the soundness of the social structure in which we live, that in consequence public opinion is divided as to the type of foundation on which a more appropriate and more liveable social order may be built. In itself, therefore, the mere positing of the question in no way implies that it must be solved in the socialistic sense. The solution at which one arrives can also be a totally different one. Only this one thing is necessary if a social question is to exist for you: that you realize the untenability of the present situation, and that you realize this untenability to be one not of incidental causes, but one involving the very basis of our social association. For one who does not acknowledge this and who thinks that the evil can be exorcised through an increase in piety, through friendlier treatment or kindlier charity, there exists possibly a religious question and possibly a philanthropic question, but not a social question. This does not exist for you until you exercise an architectural critique of human society itself and hence desire and think possible a different arrangement of the social structure.

As far as concerns this untenability of the social situation, born as this was of the individualism of the French Revolution, I think there can be little difference of opinion among Christians. As long as you still feel a human heart beat in you and the ideal of our holy Gospel inspire you, every better aspiration in you must execrate the actual state of affairs. Obviously, if there is no change, it will become increasingly less a heaven and increasingly more a hell on earth. Our society is losing touch with Christ; it lies bowed down in the dust before Mammon, and from the relentless goad of the most brutal egoism the very foundations of the earth stagger, as the Psalmist would complain (Ps. 82:5, 11:3). Every tie-beam and anchor of the social structure is disturbed; disorganization brings demoralization; and in the increasing wantonness of some contrasted with the steadily growing want of others, one detects something of the decomposition of a corpse rather than of the fresh bloom and muscular strength of sound health.

No, it need not remain so; it can become better. And improvement undoubtedly lies — I do not shrink from the word — along the socialistic path, provided only you do not mean by socialistic the program of Social Democracy; but merely express this idea, in itself so beautiful, that our national society is, as Da Costa said, "not a heap of souls on a piece of ground," but rather a God-willed community, a living, human organism. Not a mechanism put together from separate parts; not a mosaic, as Beets says, inlaid with pieces like a floor; but a body with members, subject to the law of life; that we are members of each other, and thus the eye cannot get along without the foot, nor the foot without the eye. It is this human, this scientific, this Christian truth, which by the French Revolution was most deeply misjudged, most stoutly denied, and most grievously assailed; and it is profoundly against the individualism of the French Revolution, born from this denial, that the whole movement of society in our times is turned.

So, then, you err, if you think that present day socialism has its source in the confused Utopias of fanatics, or was born in the brains of hungering hotheads. Mario, who in three thick volumes first proposed "organization of labor," was an outstandingly able professor. Rodbertus, who before Karl Marx, pleaded for the social question itself, had been Minister of the King of Prussia in 1848. Karl Marx himself, the founder of the Internationale, belonged to the highest class, and married into a ministerial family. Lasalle moved in the circles of "le haute monde." Henry George was an American of the best class. And Schaeffle, who goes so far as to make land, tools, and capital collective, was Minister of the Emperor of Austria in 1871. One could hardly restrain a Homeric laugh when one until very recently heard talk, in our own circles also, of Socialism as of something peculiar to the riff-raff. One would almost ask whether people read, whether people keep up to date. Or whether Quack spoke to the deaf when he introduced in such enthralling words the whole Socialist family to our cultured public. Indeed, whether people never even heard how already Plato, the greatest philosopher of Greece, wrote about and recommended a plan for a completely socialistic arrangement of the state. And even if such far-reaching ignorance would have been excusable twenty years ago, now, at any rate, it has certainly become obscurantistic politics. Now that the Socialist movement has already given shape to four different scientific schools; spontaneously and simultaneously in every land of Europe startled the contented bourgeosie out of their rest; finds advocates in a whole series of universities; makes the presses groan under a constant stream of studies; it has gradually acquired such depth and extension, such increased significance, that a Bismark joined the movement, a Leo XIII sent out an encyclical about it, and even the emperor of Germany began his reign with a congress in the capital of Prussia to prepare for the international solution of the social question. No, truly, ostrich-politics is of no avail here; and it does no good when men scoff at justice for all, declare Domela Nieuwenhuis socially outcast, and let the stupid crowd sing of all the "socialists in a herring barrel." Socialism is in the air. The social wind, which can at any moment change to a storm, bulges the sails of the political ship. And it may safely be said that the social question has become the question, the burning life-question, of the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the whole of this century, so prodigally rich in problems, no single problem has arisen which so deeply grips the life of the nations and agitates public opinion with such violence.

The common characteristic of all the forms and degrees in which this imposing movement expressed itself, is in the rising of the community-feeling, feeling for social justice and for the organic nature of society, against the one-sidedly developed individualistic form which the French Revolution and its corresponding economic school of laissez-faire had impressed on society. And this to such an extent that the battle over the right to private property and against capitalism is merely a consequence of this zealousness for the social principle, inasmuch as it is precisely in the absolute right of property that the individual finds his strongest bulwark; and the immeasurable fortunes which were heaped up produced, just because of this individualism, an unconquerable obstacle which hinders society from doing justice to its own sociological character.

So far, then, the socialist movement in all its variations is united. But as soon as the question is raised, what must be done away with and what must replace it, there are as many opinions as there are people. Obviously, if one does not believe in a God whose eternal ordinances must be obeyed, nor yet, in the life of the nation, holds to that historical development which never permits its intrinsic law of life to be violated with impunity; if one sees in all the structures of our present society only the product of arbitrary human will; then in consequence he considers himself justified in overthrowing everything which stands, and does not shrink from the giant's task of building anew on the vacant plot.

Of those who think along these lines, the most radical is the Nihilist, who, seeing how our human life is totally interdependent, holds no salvation possible as long as anything remains of a civilization which has died, and thus wants to begin by destroying everything, literally everything. His ideal is to go back to the time after the deluge. For him the center of gravity lies in the nothing. Already less radical is the Anarchist, who scoffs at that intellectual picture — as though the virus should cling also to houses and tools! — and looks for the poison only in the government and in every function and power which derives from the government. For him the demolition will have gone far enough if only every government is done away with. No more state; only a society. Then the golden age will come of itself. Still less radical are the Social-Democrats, who would keep both state and society, but a state which will be only an organ of society and the housekeeper of society, which ought so to arrange society that the many families will dissolve themselves into the single family of the state, and that in this single family every citizen shall share and share alike. It is true that among these men, you also find variations. Men of action with no scruples, preaching plundering and uproar, along side men like Liebknecht, who seek salvation in parliamentary triumphs. There is Schaeffle, who would collectivize land, tools, and capital, alongside the ordinary collectivist, who would have the state own only the land and the tools. But in the end all these ways amount to this: The single state swallowing up every individual and caring for every individual equally.

Appreciably different from these Social Democrats are the State Socialists, who, although they may also include variant forms, exactly reverse the above position and place the authority of the state very far above society, but then also ascribe to this authority the task of leading the movement of society in a patriarchal manner. This is a school which has found enthusiastic interpreters in Rudolph Meyer, Wagner and partly in Laveleye and many others, and has finally found its desired statesman in Bismarck. The power of the Historical school lies less in a practical program than in scientific research directed against the illusion that the present situation and the present legal relationships have an absolute character. It thus prepares public opinion for modification of the existing state of affairs and tries to search out the law for such modification. Add to this that also in the less doctrinaire of the Liberals there is more and more an apparent inclination to be on the one hand more conservative — that is, to make the concessions necessary to conserve the present situation — and on the other hand more radical, by strengthening the political influence of the lower class so as to arrive at an improvement of the lot of this class; and at the same time benefiting the propertied class by curtailing any lower class privilege which is harmful to the propertied class. And to complete this brief summary, I must finally add the cynical Pessimists, who do see that something is smouldering in the structure of modern civilization and even concede that there is fire and that unless it is checked, the flame of an all-destroying revolution will soon break out; but they contend that to extinguish it is simply impossible, and hence prophesy with stoic calm that our civilization, like the Oriental and then the Graeco-Roman civilizations, is destined to go under into Nirvana.

IV

Unless I am in error, this hasty sketch has already brought me to my objective, and has already revealed the fibres by which the Christian religion must be woven together with the social question. In the last part of my speech there remains only to take up these fibres one by one, and have you see what direction they have to give to our study and what direction to our action. However, we must first remove a possible objection which, if left standing, would probably nullify the force of my argument; namely, how I can call Social-Democracy a fruit of the French Revolution and at the same time assert that it is opposed and hostile to the principle of the French Revolution. This apparent contradiction results from the fact that the individualistic character of the French Revolution is only a derived principle. It is not the root principle, from which it borrows its dynamic. For the French Revolution, the root-principle is its God-provoking "ni Dieu, ni maitre," or, if you will, humanity emancipated from God and his established order. From this principle there develops not one line but two. First, the line along which you make up your mind to break down the established order of things, letting nothing remain but the individual with his own free will and imaginary supremacy. But alongside of this there develops also the other line, at the end of which you are tempted to push aside not only God and His order, but also now deifying yourself, to go sit on God's throne, as the prophet said, and create a new order of things out of your own brain. This last, now, is what Social Democracy does. But in doing this, it is so far from letting go of the individualistic starting point, that it rather would found the social structure it wants to erect, by way of universal suffrage, on the sovereignty of the people, and thus on the individual will.

But this is only in passing. For the question which now demands our attention is this: what attitude those who profess the Christian religion should assume towards this socialist movement.

And it is very certain that the disorganization of our social life and the resultant need must arouse also our deep pity. We may not, as the priest and the Levite, pass by the exhausted traveler who lies bleeding from his wounds, but we must, as the merciful Samaritan, be deeply moved by a holy pity. Because there exists suffering, because there exists a crying need. Not yet so much in the circles of our regular tradespeople, but undeniably in the proletariat that stands behind them; and just as much in some rural areas. Think of Friesland. And then I too say with Bilderdijk, God has not willed that one should drudge hard and yet have no bread for himself and for his family. And still less has God willed that any man with hands to work and a will to work should suffer hunger or be reduced to the beggar's staff just because there is no work. If we have "food and clothing" then it is true the holy apostle demands that we should be therewith content. But it neither can nor may ever be excused in us that, while our Father in heaven wills with divine kindness that an abundance of food comes forth from the ground, through our guilt this rich bounty should be divided so unequally that while one is surfeited with bread, another goes with empty stomach to his pallet, and sometimes must even go without a pallet. And if there are still some who, God forgive them, will defend such injustices by an appeal to the words of Jesus, "the poor you have always with you," then in respect for God's holy Word I must register my protest against such an abuse of the Scriptures; and request him who so judges to first trace through this same Bible how the condition of the poor man in Israel was almost luxurious, compared to the misery in which our proletariat lies sunk.

And if you then ask me whether still more ought to be given, I answer without hesitation, most certainly; but I hasten to add that a charity which knows how to give only money and not also itself is not yet the Christian love. Then alone will you be justified when you also offer your time, your ability and the sympathy of your inventiveness to help end such injustices for all time, and when you let nothing hidden in the treasure house of your Christian religion remain unutilized against the cancer which is destroying the dynamic of our society in such disturbing ways. For, indeed, the material need is terrifying; the oppression is great; and you do not honor God's Word if, such being the case, you ever forget how both the Christ, and also just as much His apostles after Him as the prophets before Him, invariably took sides against those who were powerful and living in luxury, and for the suffering and oppressed.

But even greater and more appalling is the spiritual need of our generation. When, in the midst of our social misery, I behold the demoralization which comes up behind this need, and hear a raucous voice which, instead of calling on the Father in heaven for salvation, curses God, mocks His Word, insults the Cross of Golgotha, tramples on whatever witness was still in the conscience, all in order, as though in frenzy, to inflame everything wild and animal which hides in the human heart; then I stand before an abyss of spiritual misery which almost arouses my human pity more than the most biting poverty.

For also out of this spiritual misery comes a cry of accusation against us as Christians. Or were not almost all of these who now so rage once baptized? And after their baptism, what have we sacrificed for these thousands so that instead of the caricature of the Christian religion against which they now utter their curse they might have some understanding, even the least, of the real love of God which is in Christ Jesus? What has been done by us, Christians in the Netherlands, while increasingly the poison of the French Revolution unnoticed ravages the veins of the social body—what have we done to stop this poisoning of the social life-blood? What have we on our side done, when the evil became evident on the outside and the social sickness took on an epidemic character, to bring medicine and balsam for its cure? Not till now are we making our first weak attempt, in a social congress, to examine the death-need of society, when our Christian thinkers should have been laboring already for twenty or thirty years with something of the earnestness and scholarly sense of a Mario or a Schaeffle to plumb the depths of this desperate situation.

There is so much damage to be made good! Simply note the problems that are of central importance.

Of primary significance is the problem of the majesty of our God, for, though we will come presently to concrete measures, we must first take up the general ideas which lend form and color to all our conception of life. We are neither plant nor animal; our rank and title is to be human; and, since we are human, we live above all as conscious beings, and our feeling of happiness or unhappiness is in consequence in many respects dominated by our representations, our general concepts. Therefore the first article of any social program which will bring salvation must remain: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." This article is today being erased. Men will no longer recognize any God in statesmanship. Not as though men did not find the poetry of religion charming: but because whoever says I believe in God thereby also acknowledges that there is an ordering of nature by God, and an ordinance of God over our conscience; a higher will, to which we as creatures have to submit ourselves. Today, everything must be a free creation of human art. The social structure must be planned only according to whim and caprice. And therefore, God must go, so that with no natural bond to restrain them, men can turn every moral ordinance into its opposite and undermine every fundamental of human association. Does there not lie here the lesson for us, that we as Christians must place, precisely in the social question, the strongest possible stress on the majesty of God's authority and the absolute claim of His ordinances, in order that, with all our condemnation of the mouldering structure in which today we live together socially, we may yet never help erect any structure but such a one as continues to rest on the foundations laid by God?

Just as definitely, we must choose, in the second place, which side we as Christians will take in the controversy between State and Society. He who would, like the Social Democrats, allow the state to be absorbed by society thereby denies the implanted authority which must strive to maintain His majesty and His justice. And whoever, on the contrary, would, like the State Socialists, allow society to be absorbed in the state, bears incense for the deification of the state; the state in place of God, and the free society ordained by God now destroyed for the sake of deifying the state. Against both of these, we as Christians must hold that State and Society each has its own sphere, or, if you will, its own sovereignty; and that the social question cannot be solved rightly unless you recognize this duality, and so honor Authority as clearing the way for the free initiative of Society.

In the third place, if the question is raised whether our human society is an aggregate of individuals or an organic body, all those who are Christians must place themselves on the side of the social movement and against Liberalism, for, as you know, God's Word teaches us that we are all of one blood and all joined in a single Covenant through God. And no less because both the solidarity of our guilt and the mystery of the Atonement on Golgotha, as completely incompatible with such individualism, vie with each other pointing to the interconnected wholeness of our human society.

If then the Pantheist, and on his inspiration the Pessimist, would further tell us that the course of history, fatal and miserable though it is, cannot be broken; that an iron fate rules the course of our human life; and that we must first wade through this stream of misery in order, perhaps, if it so happens, to emerge in some later century in happier circumstances: then it is our duty that we as Christians, with God's Word in hand, oppose this false theory of destiny as much as this false system of guilty passivity; that we, through the power of our confession of God's providence, which also operates in the social sphere to separate good from evil, and further girded with the sword and with trowel in hand, simultaneously fight that which is found unbearable and build up that which is obviously good. Or if, fighting in direct opposition to this passive pessimism, the furious zealot seeks to set fire to the building and through wild revolution obtain the bare ground upon which the new structure will presently arise; then it is just as definitely our calling as Christians, with the apostolic word on our lips, to warn against all violation of authority, bravely oppose every deed of violence or lawlessness, and make resound loudly and clearly the demand that the thread of our historic growth be altered only through gradual change and in a lawful way.

If, in the fourth place, the social question raises the problem of property; and if the one contends that every concept of property is absolute, and the other proposes to turn over all individual property to collective ownership: then the man who lives by God's Word will here interpose the one true theory that God gave in His ordinances, and in His name witness that absolute property can be spoken of only by God; that all our property is only loaned; that our management is only stewardship; and thus that on the one hand only the Lord God can relieve us of the responsibility for that management, and on the other hand, that you have under God no other right of rule than in union with the organic association of mankind, and thus also with the organic association of its possessions. What the Social Democrat calls "community of goods" never existed either in Israel or in the first Christian community; rather, such an absolute community of goods is excluded everywhere in Scripture; but Scripture also excludes just as completely every illusion of a property right by which you would dispose of it absolutely, as if you were God, without reckoning with the needs of others.

If further, not only by the Collectivist but also by the advocates of nationalization of land, a separate issue has been made of the ownership of land; then it is proper that also here we as Christians should neither arrogantly ridicule such ideas nor, as though God's Word gives us no guidance here, shrug our shoulders at such a knotty problem. Such an attitude is condemned in the first place by our conscience. When we hear how, in Scotland, three-fourths of the land is in the hands of fourteen persons, and how recently one of these fourteen, who bought an area in which forty-eight families lived, simply drove off the nearly three hundred persons who lived there in order to extend his game preserve — then a voice in our innermost self says that such disposal of the land, on which bread for the hungry must be grown, is already condemned in principle, and that the identification of ownership of land with individualistic ownership must run counter to God's ordinances. In the Lord's lawgiving for Israel there will be found a whole set of special regulations for the ownership of land. The fruitful acre is given by God to all the people, so that every tribe in Israel might dwell on it and live from it; and every agrarian regulation which does not reckon with this positive ordinance ruins "land and people."

Oh, it is so profoundly untrue that God's Word lets us hear only appeals for the salvation of our souls. No, very definitely also for our national existence and for our social life together, God's Word gives us fixed ordinances; it marks out lines that are very clearly visible; and it is unfaithfulness in us Christians if we, noting this fact, impiously permit our theory and practice to be determined by ruling opinion or conventional law, consulting our own comfort.

For on almost every point in the social question, God's Word gives us the most positive direction. Think only of the family, whose immediate destruction is being advocated; of marriage, which some men would transpose into free love; of the family tie between generations, which men would dissolve by removing every right of inheritance; and not least of birth, which men would put under law and rule. For to begin with, did not Bilderdijk, still unacquainted with Malthus, denounce, on the basis of God's Word, all such agitation as "an ungodly thing, in opposition to God's positive ordinances, a murder of the unborn?" However, just for that reason we must never, as long as we value God's Word, oppose colonization. God's earth offers, if only it is cultivated, food enough for more than double the millions who now inhabit it; and what else is it than human folly to remain so piled up in a few small places on this planet that men must crawl away into cellars and slums, while at the same time there are other places a hundred times greater than our native land, waiting the plow and the sickle, or on which thousands of flocks of the most valuable cattle wander without an owner? The divine ordinance says not only "be fruitful" but also "replenish the earth," and not overcrowd the small area within your narrow boundaries. For indeed the institution of marriage, which is damaged by such cramped geography, must always be held in high honor by Christians; God punishes us with every curse of sensuality and prostitution when we oppose His regulation in this matter. And by that same Word of God, the family is pictured for us and enjoined on us as that wonderful creation through which the rich tapestry of our organic human life must spin itself out. And here also we need not hesitate. We do not have to organize society, we have only to develop the germ of organization which God Himself has created in our human nature. And therefore, away with false individualism, and an anathema on every attempt to break up the family. At least in our Dutch state, which has now for three centuries felt in flowering family life the tensile spring of its power, the loosening of this basic foundation may never, at least with our permission, be allowed.