Dr. Rylance also declares that Christianity is a sort of socialism, and quotes in proof these texts of Scripture, among others: “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another.” “If ye fulfil the royal law, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well; but if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin.” “This commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God, love his brother also.”[15] “One way of aspersing the doctrines of communism,” says another writer,[16] “is to call them anti-Christian. It is forgotten that the Christian idea of equality underlies all the reasonings of communism, and communism has succeeded only in so far as it was Christian in principle, having for its fundamental maxim brotherly love. In this, communism is much more Christian than the hankering after privileges of the old aristocracy, or the unbounded avarice of the plutocracy.” There are other false accusations brought against communism and socialism, which it is not necessary to examine now. A well-disposed person will scarcely experience difficulty in separating them from scientific argument. It behooves us to disabuse our minds of all prejudice and ill-will. It is _only_ thus that we shall be able to meet and overcome the social dangers which threaten even our own country in a not very distant future. We have never had a _permanent_ laboring class, but with the increase of population one is rapidly developing. If it is _now_ becoming extremely difficult for the laborer to rise, what will the condition of things be when we number two hundred millions? And that time is not so far off. At our present rate of increase, it will come when some of us are still living. It is a laboring class without hope of improvement for themselves or their children which will first test our institutions. But he must be singularly blind or unacquainted with the views of the various social classes who is unable to detect even now, in certain quarters, the formation of habits and modes of thought characteristic of the poorer classes in Europe. The fact of this growth was twice brought home to me forcibly two winters ago. As I was walking by the Union League Club-house, in New York city, at the time of its house-warming, while the people were driving up in their fine carriages, one poor fellow stood on the opposite side of the street watching the ladies enter in their luxurious and extravagant toilets. He was a good-looking, intelligent-appearing man, but wore no overcoat. It was a cold evening, and he seemed to me to be shivering. He was evidently thinking of the difference between his lot and that of the fashionable people he was observing; and I heard him mutter bitterly to himself, “A revolution will yet come and level that fine building to the ground.” A friend of mine, about the same time, passed a couple of laborers as he was walking by Mr. Vanderbilt’s new houses on Fifth Avenue. Some kind of bronze work, I