Todt, however, after seeming thus to commit himself and Christianity without reserve to socialism, suddenly shrinks from his own boldness, and draws back. Collective property may be countenanced by Scripture, but he finds private property to be as much or even more so; and he cannot on any consideration consent to the abolition of private property by force. It was right enough to abolish slavery by force, for slavery is an unchristian institution. But though private property is certainly founded on selfishness, there are so many examples of it presented before us in the New Testament without condemnation, that Todt shrinks from pronouncing it to be an unchristian institution. Collective property may be better, but private property will never disappear till selfishness is swallowed up of love; and a triumph of socialism at present, while its disciples are unbelievers and have not Christ, the fount of love, in their hearts, would involve society in much more serious evils than those which it seeks to remove. Todt's socialism, therefore, is not a thing of the present, but an ideal of the distant future, to be realized after Christian proprietors have come of their own accord to give up their estates, and socialists have all been converted to Christianity. For the present, in spite of his stern view of the great wrong and injustice the working classes suffer, Todt has no remedy to suggest, except that things would be better if proprietors learnt more to regard their wealth as a trust of which they were only stewards, and if employers treated their workmen with the personal consideration due to Christian brothers; and he thinks the cultivation of this spirit ought to be more expressly aimed at in the work of the Church. This is probably, after all, the sum of what Christianity has to say on the subject; but it seems a poor result of so much figuring and flourishing, to end in a general truth which can give no offence even in Manchester.