The Christian Socialist Movement of the Middle of the Century

WHAT was first called “Christian Socialism” in England, — a very different thing, I need hardly say, from that which now calls itself so in Germany or Austria, — although the name was not adopted till 1850, dates in fact, as a self-conscious effort, from what Mr. Maurice once called “ that awful year 1848,” which he said he should “ always look upon as one of the great epochs in history.” ² Socialism — we should always take care not to narrow that word to the creed of this or that group of the day, which may arrogate to itself a special right to it — then burst out of obscurity as a power capable of upsetting thronesThe idea of working together instead of working against one another, of possessing together instead of possessing exclusively for one’s self, had taken hold of the workers themselves more or less in all the capitals and great towns of Europe, but more especially in that capital which then, much more than now, led the popular thought of the Continent, — Paris. Be it observed that the Socialism of those days was not the atheistic Socialism of the later German schools. All the Socialist leaders of the Continent were French, and, however far they might be from Christianity, not one of them professed or inculcated atheism. The earliest among them, a child of the first French revolution, Fourier, inveighed against atheism and materialism ; and if, with the strangest irreverence, he ranked God as one of three first principles with Nature and Mathematics, he recognized Him as Creator, as the source of unity and distributive justice, as the universal Providence, and held that our social evils acted as a limit on his justice and goodness. St. Simon s last work was entitled A .Treatise on the New Christianity, and professed to show the means of carrying out the law of God. Proudhon began his eccentric career by a prize essay on the Celebration of Sunday. Cabet, a pure Communist, of very inferior intellectual calibre to the men I have mentioned, called the work in which he set forth his social views True Christianity. Louis Blanc urged men to have “ a brave enough trust in God’s justice to struggle against the permanence of evil and its lying immortality. In one of his most remarkable works, that on Christianity and its Democratic Origin, Pierre Leroux wrote that “ if Christianity be wholly a gross error of the human mind, the best thing to do is to doubt everything, and declare forever the human spirit incapable of establishing any moral truth on a solid basis. The most practical of all the Freach Socialist leaders, Buchez, was at once an ardent democrat and a convinced Roman Catholic. Even in England, if Robert Owen, in his celebrated address at the London Tavern, August 21, 1817, declared that “ in all the religions which have been hitherto forced on the minds of men, deep, dangerous, and lamentable principles of disunion, division, and separation ” had been “ fast entwined with all their fundamental dogmas,” yet so far was he from opposing Christianity as such that a few minutes before he had declared that “ individualized man ³ and all that is truly valuable in Christianity are so separated as to be utterly incapable of union through all eternity. Let those, he said, “ who are interested for the universal adoption of Christianity endeavor to understand this.” Working altogether in the shade, the mystic Greaves, the “ Sacred Socialist,” taught that “ all human laws not in accordance with divine laws are founded on error.”

When I put all these utterances of mid-century Socialism together, I feel, far more deeply even than I did in 1848 that, with whatever false and even immoral teaching they were mixed, they represented a passionate cry for a uniting Christ. To that cry the churches, without one single exception, were deaf. Instead of seeking to understand the movement, to distinguish in it between what was genuine, living, hopeful, and what was false, excessive, dangerous, they looked on bewildered, or joined with its opponents to hoot and crush the whole thing down. Only here and there a minister of religion heard that cry. On the Continent, I can really recall but one name at the time I speak of, that of Philippe Boucher, a minister of the French Calvinist Church, but he had no helpers.⁴ The first clergyman to hear the cry in England was Frederick Denison Maurice, then professor of English literature and modern history and of theology at King’s College, and chaplain of Lincoln s Inn. One of the most valuable amongst his published volumes, that on The Lord’s Prayer, contained sermons preached between February 13 and April 9. 1848, and consequently covers the outbreak of the French revolution of February in that year. In the sermon of March 5, on the words “ Thy will be done, as in heaven so in earth,” the following passages may be noted : “ How can one ever make it a charge against any people that they hope for a brotherhood upon earth ? . . . Every hope points upwards : if it cannot find an object, it is in search of one ; you cannot crush it without robbing your fellowcreature of a witness for God and an instrument of purification. . . . Christianity as a mere system of doctrines or practices will never make men brothers. By Christianity we must understand the reconciliation of mankind to God in Christ, we must understand the power and privilege of saying ‘Our Father — Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’ . . . This prayer . . . does not treat the projects of men for universal societies, unbounded pantisocraeies, as too large. It overreaches them all with these words, ‘as in heaven.”The whole spirit of Christian Socialism is in such passages, though the term was not used, as I have said, till two years later.

It would be affectation for me to seek to conceal the share which I may have had in leading Mr. Maurice to the expression of such views. Seven years later, in dedicating to me his volume on Learning and Working, he spoke of a letter which he had received from me early in the year 1848, when I had seen Paris immediately after the expulsion of the Orleans family, as having “ had a very powerful effect “ upon his thoughts at the time, and having “ given a direction to them ever since.” I had dear ones in Paris when the revolution took place ; I had reached the city by the first train that entered it on the railway that I had chosen ; I had spent much of my stay in the streets, which offered the most marvelous spectacle I have ever witnessed. The gagging of public opinion by the Louis - Philippist régime having suddenly ceased, the whole city seemed bubbling out into speech. A man brought a stool or a chair, got up on it, and began to speak on any conceivable subject. If two men spoke a little loudly together in the street, a group formed round them in two minutes. Well-nigh all Paris was from morning till night one Athenian agora ; or, say, what the northeast corner of Hyde Park is to-day in London of a Sunday afternoon, except that what is now the routine of open-air speaking was then an eagerly sought novelty. And the keynote of all was that this was not a political but a social revolution, and the largest groups always indicated a speaker on some social subject. There was no hostility to religion and none to its outward manifestations, as there had been at the revolution of 1830, when I had been living in Paris : priests, instead of putting on civil dresses, passed in their clerical costumes unmolested through the streets; Sisters of Charity met with nothing but affectionate sympathy. I never saw a priest or a minister of any denomination address the crowd.⁵ The conviction was forced upon me that Socialism must be Christianized, but that only a truly social Christianity could do the work. Such was the purport of the letter in question.

The state of things in England was different. The popular movement here was still mainly political, not social. Chartism was the chief disturbing force. And although there had latterly been a disposition among the Chartists to take up social questions, it must never be forgotten that the “ six points ” of the “People’s Charter”—universal suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot, equal electoral districts, payment of members, and no property qualification — dealt with no single subject which would now be called a social one. Still, the abortive Chartist meeting of the 10th April, 1848, was unquestionably the direct result of the French social revolution of February.

I have told elsewhere (Economic Review for October, 1893) — and the story is also told more or less in the Life of Maurice and that of Kingsley (not quite correctly in the latter) —how the accident of my not having cared to claim a special constable’s truncheon brought me into contact and friendship with Charles Kingsley ; how a placard by the latter addressed to the “ Workmen of England ” was posted all over London ; how the issue was decided on of a weekly periodical, Politics for the People, of which Mr. Maurice and I were joint editors. Properly speaking, that journal represents the beginning of the Christian Socialist movement in its application to political subjects ; but we took the word “ politics ” in its broadest sense, since we claimed that not only "the rights of a man in the eyes of the law, and his functions, if any, in the business of government,” but "the rate of his wages, and the interest he gets for his money, and the state of his dwelling, and the cut of his coat, and the print he stops to look at, and the tune he hums, and the books he reads, and the talk he has with his neighbors, and the love he bears to his wife and children and friends, and the blessing he asks of his God, — ay, and still more, the love which he does not bear to others, and the blessing he does not ask of his God. — are all political matters.” The paper lasted three months only. But its results were not unimportant. Round a nucleus, at the centre of which was Mr. Maurice, consisting at first of Kingsley, his friend Charles Mansfield, and myself, itbrought a band of young or middle-aged men from the educated classes, anxious to help their fellows, who began soon to meet one evening a week at Mr. Maurice’s house. The extinction of Politics for the People only led to another kind of work, the setting-lip of a free evening school. — at first only for men. but into which boys, too, soon forced their way, — in a yard off Great Ormond Street (nearly opposite what is now the Working Men’s College), with a very rough population, which (in conjunction with a girls’ school under a mistress paid by us) it ended by civilizing. A few months later, a series of weekly meetings commenced for reading the Bible under Mr. Maurice’s guidance, a deeply interesting account of which, by one of the most valuable members of our little group, Charles Mansfield, will be found in Mr. Maurice’s Life. These were continued for several years, and I shall always say were the very heart of the movement while they lasted. Many of us, I may observe, were in the habit of attending the Sunday afternoon services at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, when the chaplain preached.

Moreover, in the very month of July, 1848, which was the last of Politics for the People’s brief life, there had appealed in Fraser’s Magazine the first part of Yeast; and though the ill health of its author brought the work to an untimely conclusion in December of that year, it had given unmistakable proof that we had in our little band a novelist of real genius, one who looked straight at the evils of the day and could speak plainly upon them. And we had another amongst us who, although none of us guessed it, was destined before many years were over to write a work of widespreading influence, under the guise of a mere novel for boys, the future author of Tom Brown’s School-Days, who had joined us just when we were planning our free school in Little Ormond Yard. For a time, and indeed for years afterwards, we knew in “ Tom Hughes ” —— as his honor Judge Hughes, Q. C., is still for all his old friends — only the most active of fellow-workers, the most genial of companions.

But we were still only feeling our way. To say nothing of our clerical fellowworkers, two or three of us laymen had taken part in parochial work, and had come into contact with working men. But not a single one of us knew any working man to whom he could go as a friend. Yet meanwhile, unconsciously to ourselves, we had opened up a way to what was needed. Politics for the People had had a few — a very few — working men readers, and two or three working men correspondents. They were attracted by the tone of the paper, and yet distrusted it. When it failed, they recognized that it had been a genuine attempt to reach their class. One of these men was a tailor in Fetter Lane, a Scotchman, brought up in the narrowest Calvinism, but from whom all faith had dropped away, and who had become a lecturer upon Strauss, then the leading infidel teacher. A dear friend of mine, a Scripture reader with whom I had become connected in parochial work, directed my attention to this man, and, he having prepared the way, I called upon him. It was Walter Cooper, who for some years did excellent work with us, but, alas, eventually went to the bad altogether. Whilst perfectly courteous, he was very outspoken. Yet he admitted himself to have been struck by a new tone in Politics for the People, and was anxious to know more about the men connected with it. I persuaded him to go to hear Mr. Maurice. He went, and was at first perfectly bewildered, but went again and again, till he understood, and then became a regular attendant. I introduced him to Mr. Maurice, and to several other of our friends. He brought one or two of his own to Lincoln’s Inn Chapel. He suggested that Mr. Maurice should meet the working men. This led to a series of conferences beginning in April, 1849, which brought Mr. Maurice and his friends into direct contact with all that was most thought ful and most earnest in the London working class, together with a good deal that was merely frothy and unreal. It was clear after a few months that the questions which lay nearest to the hearts of these London working men were no longer political, but social ones. And a powerful stimulus in this direction was being afforded by the publication in the Morning Chronicle ⁶ of three series of letters on Labor and the Poor, by its own commissioners, which commenced while the conferences were going on, and were soon found to contain the most awful revelations as to the condition of the working class, both in London and in the provinces.

That autumn I went over to Paris. It was the golden time of the associations ouvrières, — societies for productive coöperation. I say “ golden time ” in a moral sense, for if they were no longer persecuted by the government, as they had been after the insurrection of June, 1848 (although I was assured that, with scarcely any exceptions,⁷ the men of not One of the associations had descended into the streets), still they were viewed with disfavor by the ruling bourgeoisie. But never before or since have I seen anything to equal the zeal, the self-devotion, the truly brotherly spirit which pervaded these coöperative workshops. It seemed to me that they offered the best material solution for the immediate difficulties of the labor question in England as well as in France. I told what I had seen to my friends, and they were all of opinion that funds should, if possible, be raised for setting up an association of workingmen in London on a basis similar to that adopted in Paris. The tailoring trade, Walter Cooper assured us, was ripe for the experiment. It was agreed to begin with this, he to be manager of the association. At the same time, Mr. Maurice took up again an idea which he had already entertained when Politics for the People was started, that of a series of tracts, which came out as Tracts on Christian Socialism. And if Little Ormond Yard school had given us T. Hughes for a fellow-worker, the setting up of a coöperative association brought its in time another most valuable recruit, Edward Vansittart Neale.

I have dwelt on these early days of the movement in order, if possible, to bring out its spirit. One often hears it said that the old Christian Socialism aimed only at setting up little associations of working men who should carry on trade on their own account and share the profits. Nothing of the kind. From its earliest years the movement was political ; it was educational; it was religious; I might add, it was sanitarian, for (not to speak of some excellent sanitary articles in Politics for the People, — for example, on the baking trade, by Dr. Guy, who, however, did not follow us later on) in the autumn of 1849 we carried on a little sanitarian crusade against a particular plague spot in Bermondsey, and projected a Health League with shilling subscriptions, but of this plan Mr. Maurice would not hear. At the very time when we were setting up our first little association, the volume of Fraser’s Magazine for 1850 opened with an article (by myself) based upon the Morning Chronicle letters on Labor and the Poor, and under that title (reprinted in 1852 in a series of Tracts by Christian Socialists). In this will be found a good deal that many people think to be novelties of the present day. I have heard the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes speak at a meeting in the Jerusalem Chamber of the demand for a “ living wage ” as a new thing. I can only say that it was the claim of the working class before 1850, and that the article in question put forth the demand —granted within the last few years to a certain extent — that government contracts should be given only to “ some fair-dealing man who shall pay his work people living wages ” (the singular “ wage ” was not then an accepted term). If the article recommended (though in other language) coöperation both in production and in consumption, it warned its readers against putting their trust in any single panacea; recommended within certain limits emigration, the revision of the customs tariff, the finding of new employments for women, reforms in the prison and workhouse systems ; suggested (what has since been carried out) government clothing workshops ; above all, urged the Church to “ put forth all her strength to grapple with the hundred-headed evil; ” declared that “ the care of the sick, the reformation of the prisoner, the government of the adult pauper, the training of the pauper child. . . . required both a special and religious vocation in the individual, and the support and comfort of an organized fellowship,” so that “ we must have orders of nurses, orders of prison attendants, orders of workhouse masters, workhouse matrons, workhouse teachers, perhaps parish surgeons.” But the article also proclaimed that the remedy for social evils lay, not “ in any system or theory, not in any party cry or economical machinery, but in a thorough change of spirit. ‘ Make me a clean heart. O God, and renew a right spirit within me,’ must he the cry of this whole nation. We must feel that we are members of one society, having common profit and common loss ; members of one church, many members under one Head ; members, to use that most wonderful saying of the Apostle, members one of another.” I do not mean to say that all the views thus expressed were shared by all my fellow-workers ; some of them I may hold now only in a modified form. But they fairly show what subjects were being discussed amongst us, and prove, I think, that we were not mere men of a hobby, and had not any the slightest notion that coöperative productive associations were to be a cure for all social evils. But we did think them, and I do think them now, the best remedy — however difficult of application — an yet devised against the evils of the competitive system in trade, the anti-Christian system of “ every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost.”

Against that system a ringing blow was struck by Kingsley’s Cheap Clothes and Nasty, which was founded mainly, like the article in Fraser, on the revelations of the Morning Chronicle. This came out almost simultaneously with the opening of the Working Tailors’ Association, selling largely from the first. It was not one of the actual Tracts on Christian Socialism, but was afterwards reprinted as the second of the Tracts by Christian Socialists. And already since early in 1849 (February) Kingsley had been at work on another novel, at first called The Autobiography of a Cockney Poet, but eventually published in August, 1850, as Alton Locke, and the success of which gave the publishers of Fraser’s Magazine courage, in the following year, to reissue Yeast as a volume.

To the Tracts on Christian Socialism the title was given by Mr. Maurice himself, as being, he wrote, “the only title which will define our object, and will commit us at once to the conflict we must engage in sooner or later with the un-Social Christians and the un-Christian Socialists.” The first of these Tracts, by himself, the Dialogue between Somebody (a person of respectability) and Nobody (the writer), contains that broad exposition of Socialism which can never be too often quoted against any who would force that great word into the narrow limits of their own creed or their own hate : “ The watchword of the Socialist is Cooperation ; the watchword of the antiSocialist is Competition. Any one who recognizes the principle of coöperation as a stronger and truer principle than that of competition has a right to the honor or the disgrace of being called a Socialist.” How little we thought of confining our Socialism to profit-sharing associations is shown by the fact that, out of the eight Tracts on Christian Socialism, one (the third) is entitled What Christian Socialism has to do with the Question which is now agitating the Church (referring to a late Privy Council decision on the subject of baptism) ; another is a Dialogue between A and B, two Clergymen, on the Doctrine of Circumstances as it affects Priests and People; and a third is A Clergyman’s Answer to the Question “ On what grounds can you associate with men generally ? ” whilst the subsequent series of Tracts by Christian Socialists began with one on English History (all four being by Mr. Maurice).

Early in 1850, the starting of the first association of working tailors, with funds advanced by ourselves, having brought in applications from workmen in various other trades, the Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations (a name afterwards changed, owing to legislation which I shall presently advert to, into that of Association for Promoting Industrial and Provident Societies) was established. It was divided into two branches: the Promoters, represented by a council, the second of whose functions was “ to diffuse the principles of cooperation, as the practical application of Christianity to the purposes of trade and industry ; ” and the Associates, that is the members of the associations connected with the society, represented by a Central Board. In November, 1850, the Christian Socialist, a weekly paper, was started, and carried on till the end of 1851, to be succeeded for six months by the Journal of Association.⁸

Into the story of the early associations I need not enter. They all failed. The first established one, that of the tailors, lasted longest, about nine years, and was then broken up through the dishonesty of the manager, that same Walter Cooper whom I have mentioned as our first working man ally, — a failure all the more painful as he had become somewhat prominently connected with the church, and vicar’s churchwarden of All Saints, Margaret Street. Looking back, I am not in the least surprised at such failures. We had tried (and were, I still consider, right in trying) coöperation on its more difficult side, that of production (not that coöperation in consumption and distribution was entirely neglected, for two or three coöperative stores were established, and Vansittart Neale set up a Central Agency, which lasted many years, and prefigured the splendid Coöperative "Wholesale societies of our day). We tried the experiment with men utterly new to the thing, and for the most part what the French would call the déclassés of the labor world, men of small or no resources and generally little skill. The trade-unions —themselves having no legal recognition — looked for the most part askance on coöperation. Moreover, when we started work, it was virtually impossible to obtain a legal constitution for our associations, unless under the then ruinous form of a company, and that only with unlimited liability. Hence much of our effort had to be devoted to the obtaining such a change of the law as would render coöperation legally practicable. We were able, fortunately, to lay the case of the working men fully before a House of Commons Committee on the Savings and Investments of the Middle and Working Classes, to interest several M. P.’s in the matter, and eventually to obtain the passing of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, 1862, drawn by us, the first of a sequence which still continues. That act, however. still withheld limited liability from coöperative societies ; nor was this granted till 1862, seven years after it had been given to companies. And without a limitation of liability, English working men will not associate together in any number.

Again, the Christian Socialist movement brought its promoters into connection with trade-unions, — of all forms of association the one still dearest to the bulk of the skilled workers of the United Kingdom. For, if the greater number of trade-unions, especially the smaller and less educated ones, looked askance upon coöperation, as I have said, we were sought after by that one which contains the very élite of the working class, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers; and to nothing in my life do I look back with more satisfaction than to the endeavors I made — in conjunction with Vansittart Neale, T. Hughes, the present Marquis of Ripon, and other friends — towards obtaining a fair hearing for them during the great lockout of engineers in 1852. From the friendly relations then formed between members of the educated clashes and the pick of the working class — relations which were extended and confirmed through the establishment of the Working Men’s College—may be traced, I believe, by direct filiation, one of the latest and most promising social experiments of our day, the Industrial Union of Employers and Employed, established in June last; and one of the two chairmen of sections of this union was the secretary of the very society (the Amalgamated Society of Engineers) which it was the object of the lockout of 1852 to crush out of existence.

But even in reference to coöperation itself Christian Socialism did not die out. Before ceasing to direct the movement, our association provided for itself a substitute, calling together, in July, 1852, a Coöperative Conference, of delegates from coöperative bodies throughout the country, by which an executive committee was appointed, and similar conferences were called from year to year. To this body our association, in November, 1854, virtually resigned the direction of the movement. Those conferences, confined latterly to the societies of Lancashire and Yorkshire, were, I believe, continued without break till 1860, when the first Coöperative Congress was called in London, parent of an unbroken annual series which still continues. On the list of its convening committee, in 1860, appear the names of Charles Kingsley, T. Hughes, E. Vansittart Neale, my own, and those of three other members of our old body, besides those of various working men with whom we had been brought into contact; T. Hughes presided on the opening day. Later on, in 1879, it was two old Christian Socialists, T. Hughes and Vansittart Neale, who were charged by the Coöperative Union, the outcome of these congresses, with the drawing up of a Manual for Coöperators. Scholarships at Oriel College have been founded by the coöperative body in their two names, and for many years Vansittart Neale held office with unwearied zeal and patience as the secretary of the Coöperative Union. Finally, at the holding, in August last, of an International Coöperative Congress, one of the old Christian Socialists remained to be asked to take the chair on one of the days of meeting, and another to hold it in his place. The breath of the older Christian Socialism is on English coöperation to this day.

Moreover, when our association abdicated, so far as coöperation was concerned, in favor of the committee appointed by the Coöperative Conference, it did not go out of existence ; its energies were simply transferred in the main, with help from outside, to another field, which it had already opened up. For a twelvemonth we had held classes in various subjects in our Hall of Association, chiefly, but not exclusively, for working associates and their families, and Mr. Maurice’s Bible class had been transferred to the hall, and was held on Sunday evenings instead of Saturdays. These classes were now expanded into the Working Men’s College, of which Mr. Maurice became the principal. This still subsists and flourishes after fortyone years of existence, and is looked ujrnn with singular affection by its students. From it, again, have grown other institutions, the most interesting of which is the South London Art Gallery and Library, established by a most remarkable man, the first student Fellow of the W orking Men’s College, W. Rossiter. The college, moreover, brought to us as teachers men who, without sharing our views in religious matters, it may be, were in turn brought thereby into contact with the working class, and learned to understand it and Sympathize with it; several of them have shown themselves its true friends. I speak of such men as Frederic Harrison and Sir Godfrey Lushington. Certainly, to the minority report of the late Lord Lichfield, F. Harrison, and T. Hughes, as members of the Trade-Union Commission appointed in 1867, is mainly due the Trade-Union Act of 1871 and all subsequent legislation on the subject.

I may seem to have been dwelling too much on what I may call external results ; but the Christian Socialist movement was, above all things, a leaven, leavening the whole of English society. It is impossible to measure the effects of Kingsley’s novels and poetry on the generation which grew up under their influence ; and by their side came to place themselves Hughes’s two novels, Tom Brown (first published in 1857) and Tom Brown at Oxford, the teaching of which, I believe, has gone deeper still. I can only say that, nowadays, I find boys fresh from school, girls from the governess’s room, with minds at once better instructed and more open on social subjects than were those of their fathers and mothers thirty or forty years ago.

The name of our master, Maurice, may seem, in these recollections, to have dropped out of sight. A man whose sensitiveness was all but morbid, for many years he kept out of any active connection with the various movements directly springing from the Christian Socialist one; not from want of sympathy, which never failed on his part, but from fear of compromising them by his name and aid. But never in his teaching did he depart by one hair’s breadth from the principles which he had sought to lay down. I find the whole spirit of Christian Socialism in the last pages of his last work, the Lectures on Social Morality: “ We want for the establishment and rectification of our Social Morality not to dream ourselves into some imaginary past or some imaginary future, but to use that which we have, to believe our own professions, to live as if all we utter when we seem to be most in earnest were not a lie. Then we may find that the principle and habit of selfsacrifice. which is expressed in the most comprehensive human worship supplies the underground for national Equity, Freedom, Courage, for the courtesies of common intercourse, the homely virtues and graces which can be brought under no rules, but which constitute the chief charm of life, and tend most to abate its miseries. Then every tremendous struggle with ourselves, whether we shall degrade our fellow-creatures, men or women, or live to raise them, — struggles to which God is not indifferent, if we are, — may issue in a real belief that we are members one of another, and that every injury to one is an injury to the whole body. Then it will be found that refinement and grace are the property of no class, that they may be the inheritance of those who are as poor as Christ and his apostles were, because they are human. So will there be discovered beneath all the polities of the earth, sustaining the order of each country, upholding the charity of each household, a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. It must be for all kindreds and races; therefore, with the Sectarianism which rends Humanity asunder, with the Imperialism which would substitute for Universal Fellowship a Universal Death, must it wage implacable war. Against these we pray as often as we ask that God’s will may be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

In concluding, I may observe that I have not dwelt on those attacks that in the early years of which I have spoken, met us from all sides, and in the case of Mr. Maurice rose to bitter persecution. All parties in Church and State treated us alike as dangerous madmen. For some years, at least, I do not think there was any one of us who did not suffer more or less in his profession or prospects for having dared to call himself a Christian Socialist; and a few there were who, having put their hand to the plough, looked back. For myself, whilst thanking God for having granted me to take part in the Christian Socialist efforts of the mid-century, I can only feel ashamed that I did not do more and do better.

J. M. Ludlow.