man for me,” than I would be in the position of the well-to-do
manufacturer who is persuaded of the reality of Heaven and Hell and of
the truth of all the theology of the Church of England, but can
reconcile his religion with the deliberate establishment of a colossal
fortune on the ruin of his fellow creatures.
But I do not believe that the feeling of the working man for Jesus of
Nazareth could long confine itself to admiration. It is not so easy to
make a happy nation or a happy world as the working man thinks: and this
he will soon find out. When sanitation, education, culture, science,
political rearrangements, enlargements for the poor, and restrictions
for the rich, have all done their best and failed—as they necessarily
must fail, unless helped by something more—then the working man will
find what that “something more” is, without which nothing effectual can
be done. Then he will perceive that, after all, unless there is a spirit
of mutual concession in classes and individuals, no Acts of Parliament
can ever be devised to secure lasting prosperity and concord. Then he
will awaken to the fact that Jesus of Nazareth revealed and exemplified
that spirit of concession or self-sacrifice, and that it was by this
means that He went as far as He did toward “turning the world upside
down;” and so he will be gradually led still further to see that the way
which He went was after all not such a very “long way round,” but a
divine way, a way truly worthy of the Son of God. I believe that the
recognition of this single fact would go further than even the
recognition of the marvellous phenomena which manifested the
Resurrection of Christ, to convince working men that the man who
possessed this sublime intuition into spiritual truth, and the perfect
unselfishness and self-control needful to give effect to his plans for
the raising up of mankind, must be no other than the Son of God. The
rest would follow. They would find they had been all their lives on a
wrong track in their search after the divine reality; worshipping brute
force while protesting against it; bowing in their hearts to pomp, and
wealth, and high birth, even while they professed to deride them;
despising things familiar and near; gaping in stupid servile admiration
at things far and unknown; yet all the time God was near them, among
them, in them; the Spirit of God was none other than the spirit of true
socialism; the Son of God was none other than the poor and lowly Workman
of Nazareth.
APPENDIX
XXX
MINISTERIAL TESTS
MY DEAR——,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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