But let us ask ourselves this question: If all the members of the communal government had been communists in the ordinary sense of the word, would communism have been necessarily condemned? I think that another question will help us to answer this. All the members of that government were republicans: was republicanism then necessarily condemned? No one but a rabid tory would think of giving an affirmative answer to this second question. It is at once seen that the republican form of government is not responsible for the conduct of every scoundrel who professes republican principles. It is urged further that communism and socialism would destroy religion and the family institution. The reason of this complaint is evident enough. A number of social reformers have been at the same time atheists and advocates of free love. The questions of atheism and free love are, however, totally different from that of even communism, the most radical of all the reforms proposed. There is no necessary connection whatever between them. If it could once be shown that communism were practicable, it would be easy to give many reasons for supposing that in such a society the love between man and wife and parents and children would be freer from selfish and sordid motives than at present.[13] The clergy are partly to blame for the irreligious attitude of many modern socialists. They have too often made themselves the advocates of conservatism simply as conservatism, regardless of all abuses which it embraced. In countries where Church and State are connected, the clergy have been too often a sort of police, assisting the government to maintain existing institutions, and to oppose change, good or bad. They have favored the higher classes, upon whom their support has depended, and neglected the interests of the poor and down-trodden. I do not write this as an enemy of the Church, but as her friend. Nor do I express myself differently from the best of our clergymen at present. Rev. Dr. Rylance, indeed, has, in his “Lectures on Social Questions,” clothed this same thought in stronger language. In one place he says, “The proper relations of Christianity to the legitimate efforts of socialism to improve the condition of the suffering classes will never be understood, or the minds of those now alienated from the religion of Christ will never be disabused of their antipathy, till the essential claims of that religion be set in fairer and fuller light; all the perversions it has suffered being frankly acknowledged, and the wrongs done in its name, as far as possible, atoned for. Your Church histories are full of such perversions, while your most expert apologists cannot disguise the wrongs ... Ecclesiasticism[14] has often been a fraud and a tyranny in history. As the Church grew in power and wealth, it allied itself to power and wealth in the hands of civil rulers and their creatures, and the fruits of the alliance have often been wicked and infamous.”