"All human governments," said Ammonius, "have one thing in common: they agree in one pernicious law and custom which is the cause of failure in them all; for all human governments alike maintain the legal right of individuals to acquire, hold, and transmit private property-rights in estates, offices, prerogatives; even in women and in slaves. This is the idolatry of mammon, of which all nations are guilty, the only idolatry which Jesus ever denounced by name, the only one that opposeth his kingdom with a potent logic based upon selfishness. Many are learning to hate this idolatry in respect of the royal offices: even the debased Romans scorn the name of ’king,’ and call their master ’imperator,’ the commander of the army; some tribes hate it in its application to men, and own no slaves; the Scythians and some other nations deny the right of property in women, and take but one wife. Jesus Christ denies the right of private property, not only in women, slaves, offices, and prerogatives, but in houses, lands, and everything else. Hence the property-law of his kingdom imperatively demandeth the transfer of all that the believer hath unto the common Church; this sacrifice is hard to make if one hath great possessions, and, therefore, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. No rich man doeth this except under the power of a dominant faith which teacheth him that the thing which is best for all believers is best for him; and that the common good is better than self-aggrandizement. No sane man doubteth that the political economy of Jesus would bless the world, if men would adopt it; but not many great, not many wise, not many rich, not many noble, come into the kingdom, because selfishness revolts at the sacrifice of real or imaginary advantages, secured to them by mammon-worship. It is emphatically the gospel, the glad tidings, for the poor, and it is a regeneration that beginneth at the bottom, not at the top, of every social system. All human governments are founded upon the idolatrous faith that private rights of property are the sacredest thing in human life, and that government over the people is necessary to protect it. Jesus denieth this faith: he saith that liberty is better than wealth, equality better than rank, fraternity better than power. He, therefore, in his kingdom, abolisheth private rights of property in order to reach something that is infinitely higher and better for all men; and he summeth up human life, laws, governments, all that pertaineth to man’s social condition, in one short sentence which containeth in itself the ultimate truth of all social and political economy and wisdom: ’Ye can not serve God and Mammon.’ And the Pharisees hated Jesus only because they were ’covetous’; and the Romans and other nations persecute us even unto death because they know that the triumph of the kingdom of heaven is the overthrow of all government over the people; and they love power, and wealth, and rank."