The Christian socialism of England has peculiarities which render it exceedingly interesting in connection with an account of French and German Christian socialism, furnishing, as it does, opportunities for instructive comparisons. It arose about thirty years ago. Its founders were men like Charles Kingsley, Frederick Maurice, and Thomas Hughes. They were filled with horror at the wrongs and hardships of the lower classes, and rejected with lofty moral indignation the theory of the Manchester men that state and society were to do nothing about it. They refused to believe that the action of self-interest led to the most perfect social harmony, or that government should do nothing to alleviate suffering and elevate the masses. Some of their expressions might have satisfied even a social democrat. Kingsley expressed his opinion of economic liberalism by describing the Cobden and Bright scheme of the universe as the worst of all narrow, hypocritical, anarchic, and atheistic social philosophies; while he predicted the coming of good times to the poor, and the overthrow of mammonism, in these words: “Not by wrath and haste, but by patience made perfect through suffering, canst thou proclaim this good news to the groaning masses, and deliver them, as thy Master did before thee, by the cross and not the sword. Divine paradox! Folly to the rich and mighty—the watchword to the weak, in whose weakness is God’s strength made perfect. ‘In your patience possess ye your souls, for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.’ Yes, he came then, and the Babel-tyranny of Rome fell, even as the more fearful, the more subtle, and more diabolic tyranny of mammon shall fall ere long—suicidal, even now crumbling by its innate decay. Yes; Babylon the Great—the commercial world of selfish competition, drunken with the blood of God’s people, whose merchandise is the bodies and souls of men—her doom is gone forth. And then—then—when they, the tyrants of the earth, who lived delicately with her, rejoicing in her sins, the plutocrats and bureaucrats, the money-changers and devourers of labor, are crying to the rocks to hide them, and to the hills to cover them, from the wrath of him that sitteth on the throne; then labor shall be free at last, and the poor shall eat and be satisfied, with things that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, but which God has prepared for those who love him.”[207]