_Das Kapital_ is a doctrinaire book which works with definitions and tables, but never goes very deeply into questions of living and the conditions of living. The great influence it exerts rests on the fact that it preaches belief in a progress which is inherent in events, and works itself out in them automatically. It undertakes to unveil the mechanism of history, and to show how the succession of different methods of social organization—slavery, feudalism, the bourgeois wage-system—tend towards the final replacement of private production by State-communistic [pg 162] production as the logical crown of completed evolution. Through Marx, Hegel’s belief in inherent progress becomes, if with a somewhat different interpretation, the conviction of the masses. His optimistic feeling for reality takes the helm. Through the rise of socialism ethical utilitarianism loses in importance. The hopes of the crowd begins to centre no longer on what can be accomplished in the world by an ethical temper which is steadily growing stronger, and working ever more and more effectively in social matters, but on what is reached when free course is secured for the laws of progress which are assumed to be inherent in things. It is true that ethical utilitarianism still maintains itself as an influential reforming temper among the educated. In the competition with socialism there even starts a strong movement which stirs individuals, society, and the State alike into effective action against social distress. One of its leaders is Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875), the author of _The History of Materialism_ (1866). In his work _The Labour Question in its Significance for the Present and the Future_ (1866) he discusses the social tasks of the time and the measures that will be effective for their accomplishment, and appeals for ethical idealism without which, he says, nothing profitable can be accomplished._(_63_)_ Christianity too supports the movement. In 1864 Bishop Ketteler, of Mainz, comes forward, demanding in his book _The Labour Question and Christianity_ the creation of a Christian-social temper._(_64_)_ In England it is the clergymen, Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) and Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who bid Christendom adopt a social temper. The latter’s [pg 163] famous sermon _The Message of the Church to Working Men_ was preached in the evening of Sunday, June 22nd, 1851, before the workers who had come to London to see the first International Exhibition. On account of the excitement it caused, the Bishop of London inhibited him from preaching [in his diocese]._(_65_)_