New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialismWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Socialism
I write this of the Anarchism that is opposed to contemporary
Socialism, the political Anarchism. But there is also another sort of
Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought must keep
clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other
brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor
counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and
spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the
moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define
very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the nobler
Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism which many of us now
make our practical guide in life's activities, to say just where they
touch and where they are apart.
Now the ultimate ideal of human intercourse is surely not Socialism at
all, but a way of life that is not litigious and not based upon
jealously-guarded rights, which is free from property, free from
jealousy, and "above the law." There, there shall not be "marriage or
giving in marriage." The whole mass of Christian teaching points to
such an ideal; Paul and Christ turn again and again to the ideal of a
world of "just men made perfect," in which right and beauty come by
instinct, in which just laws and regulations are unnecessary and
unjust ones impossible. "Turn your attention," says my friend, the
Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his admirable tract on Christian Socialism--
"Turn your attention to that series of teachings of Christ's
which we call parables--comparisons, that is to say, between
what Christ saw going on in the every-day world around Him and
the Kingdom of Heaven. If by the Kingdom of Heaven in these
parables is meant a place up in the clouds, or merely a state
in which people will be after death, then I challenge you to
get any kind of meaning out of them whatever. But if by the
Kingdom of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts of
Christ's teaching is the case) the righteous society to be
established upon earth, then they all have a plain and
beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so
often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, 'Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all
these things shall be added unto you;' or, in other words,
'Live,' Christ said, 'all of you together, not each of you by
himself; live as members of the righteous society which I have
come to found upon earth, and then you will be clothed as
beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the
birds.'"
And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes to Socialism by way of
Nonconformity, is equally convincing in support of this assertion that
the "Kingdom of Heaven" was and is a terrestrial ideal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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