Thus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society: it is
belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day) that Christ
is not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto been to you,
but a rallying centre for revolutionary influences which all
established States and Churches fight, you must look to
yourselves; for you have brought the image to life; and the mob
may not be able to bear that horror.


THE ALTERNATIVE TO BARRABAS.

But mobs must be faced if civilization is to be saved. It did not
need the present war to show that neither the iconographic Christ
nor the Christ of St. Paul has succeeded in effecting the
salvation of human society. Whilst I write, the Turks are said to
be massacring the Armenian Christians on an unprecedented scale;
but Europe is not in a position to remonstrate; for her
Christians are slaying one another by every device which
civilization has put within their reach as busily as they are
slaying the Turks. Barabbas is triumphant everywhere; and the
final use he makes of his triumph is to lead us all to suicide
with heroic gestures and resounding lies. Now those who, like
myself, see the Barabbasque social organization as a failure, and
are convinced that the Life Force (or whatever you choose to call
it) cannot be finally beaten by any failure, and will even
supersede humanity by evolving a higher species if we cannot
master the problems raised by the multiplication of our own
numbers, have always known that Jesus had a real message, and
have felt the fascination of his character and doctrine. Not that
we should nowadays dream of claiming any supernatural authority
for him, much less the technical authority which attaches to an
educated modern philosopher and jurist. But when, having entirely
got rid of Salvationist Christianity, and even contracted a
prejudice against Jesus on the score of his involuntary
connection with it, we engage on a purely scientific study of
economics, criminology, and biology, and find that our practical
conclusions are virtually those of Jesus, we are distinctly
pleased and encouraged to find that we were doing him an
injustice, and that the nimbus that surrounds his head in the
pictures may be interpreted some day as a light of science rather
than a declarations of sentiment or a label of idolatry.

The doctrines in which Jesus is thus confirmed are, roughly, the
following:

1. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the son of God;
and God is the son of man. God is a spirit, to be worshipped in
spirit and in truth, and not an elderly gentleman to be bribed
and begged from. We are members one of another; so that you
cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping
yourself. God is your father: you are here to do God's work; and
you and your father are one.

2. Get rid of property by throwing it into the common stock.
Dissociate your work entirely from money payments. If you let a
child starve you are letting God starve. Get rid of all anxiety
about tomorrow's dinner and clothes, because you cannot serve two
masters: God and Mammon.

S. Get rid of judges and punishment and revenge. Love your
neighbor as yourself, he being a part of yourself. And love your
enemies: they are your neighbors.

4. Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother you meet is
as much your mother as the woman who bore you. Every man you meet
is as much your brother as the man she bore after you. Don't
waste your time at family funerals grieving for your relatives:
attend to life, not to death: there are as good fish in the sea
as ever came out of it, and better. In the kingdom of heaven,
which, as aforesaid, is within you, there is no marriage nor
giving in marriage, because you cannot devote your life to two
divinities: God and the person you are married to.

Now these are very interesting propositions; and they become more
interesting every day, as experience and science drive us more
and more to consider them favorably. In considering them, we
shall waste our time unless we give them a reasonable
construction. We must assume that the man who saw his way through
such a mass of popular passion and illusion as stands between us
and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite aware of all
the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in the first
five minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a
considerable extent by the considerations that occur to
stockbrokers in the first five minutes; but as the result is that
the world is so badly governed that those who know the truth can
hardly bear to live in it, an objection from an average
stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima facie case for any
social reform.


THE REDUCTION TO MODERN PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY.

All the same, we must reduce the ethical counsels and proposals
of Jesus to modern practice if they are to be of any use to us.
If we ask our stockbroker to act simply as Jesus advised his
disciples to act, he will reply, very justly, "You are advising
me to become a tramp." If we urge a rich man to sell all that he
has and give it to the poor, he will inform us that such an
operation is impossible. If he sells his shares and his lands,
their purchaser will continue all those activities which oppress
the poor. If all the rich men take the advice simultaneously the
shares will fall to zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man
sells out and throws the money into the slums, the only result
will be to add himself and his dependents to the list of the
poor, and to do no good to the poor beyond giving a chance few of
them a drunken spree. We must therefore bear in mind that
whereas, in the time of Jesus, and in the ages which grew darker
and darker after his death until the darkness, after a brief
false dawn in the Reformation and the Renascence, culminated in
the commercial night of the nineteenth century, it was believed
that you could not make men good by Act of Parliament, we now
know that you cannot make them good in any other way, and that a
man who is better than his fellows is a nuisance. The rich man
must sell up not only himself but his whole class; and that can
be done only through the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The dis-
ciple cannot have his bread without money until there is bread
for everybody without money; and that requires an elaborate
municipal organization of the food supply, rate supported. Being
members one of another means One Man One Vote, and One Woman One
Vote, and universal suffrage and equal incomes and all sorts of
modern political measures. Even in Syria in the time of Jesus his
teachings could not possibly have been realized by a series of
independent explosions of personal righteousness on the part of
the separate units of the population. Jerusalem could not have
done what even a village community cannot do, and what Robinson
Crusoe himself could not have done if his conscience, and the
stern compulsion of Nature, had not imposed a common rule on the
half dozen Robinson Crusoes who struggled within him for not
wholly compatible satisfactions. And what cannot be done in
Jerusalem or Juan Fernandez cannot be done in London, New York,
Paris, and Berlin. In short, Christianity, good or bad, right or
wrong, must perforce be left out of the question in human affairs
until it is made practically applicable to them by complicated
political devices; and to pretend that a field preacher under the
governorship of Pontius Pilate, or even Pontius Pilate himself in
council with all the wisdom of Rome, could have worked out
applications of Christianity or any other system of morals for
the twentieth century, is to shelve the subject much more
effectually than Nero and all its other persecutors ever
succeeded in doing. Personal righteousness, and the view that you
cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament, is, in fact, the
favorite defensive resort of the people who, consciously or
subconsciously, are quite determined not to have their property
meddled with by Jesus or any other reformer.


MODERN COMMUNISM.

Now let us see what modern experience and modern sociology has to
say to the teaching of Jesus as summarized here. First, get rid
of your property by throwing it into the common stock. One can
hear the Pharisees of Jerusalem and Chorazin and Bethsaida
saying, "My good fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of
Judea equally today, before the end of the year you would have
rich and poor, poverty and affluence, just as you have today; for
there will always be the idle and the industrious, the thrifty
and the wasteful, the drunken and the sober; and, as you yourself
have very justly observed, the poor we shall have always with
us." And we can hear the reply, "Woe unto you, liars and
hypocrites; for ye have this very day divided up the wealth of
the country yourselves, as must be done every day (for man liveth
not otherwise than from hand to mouth, nor can fish and eggs
endure for ever); and ye have divided it unjustly; also ye have
said that my reproach to you for having the poor always with you
was a law unto you that this evil should persist and stink in the
nostrils of God to all eternity; wherefore I think that Lazarus
will yet see you beside Dives in hell." Modern Capitalism has
made short work of the primitive pleas for inequality. The
Pharisees themselves have organized communism in capital. Joint
stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return to individual
properties as the basis of our production would smash
civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get
the fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator.
Take the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to
you the particular length of rail, the particular seat in the
railway carriage, the particular lever in the engine that is his
very own and nobody else's; and he will shun you as a madman,
very wisely. And if, like Ananias and Sapphira, you try to hold
back your little shop or what not from the common stock,
represented by the Trust, or Combine, or Kartel, the Trust will
presently freeze you out and rope you in and finally strike you
dead industrially as thoroughly as St. Peter himself. There is no
longer any practical question open as to Communism in production:
the struggle today is over the distribution of the product: that
is, over the daily dividing-up which is the first necessity of
organized society.


REDISTRIBUTION.

Now it needs no Christ to convince anybody today that our system
of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have
million-dollar babies side by side with paupers worn out by a
long life of unremitted drudgery. One person in every five dies
in a workhouse, a public hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like
London the proportion is very nearly one in two. Naturally so
outrageous a distribution has to be effected by violence pure and
simple. If you demur, you are sold up. If you resist the selling
up you are bludgeoned and imprisoned, the process being
euphemistically called the maintenance of law and order. Iniquity
can go no further. By this time nobody who knows the figures of
the distribution defends them. The most bigoted British
Conservative hesitates to say that his king should be much poorer
than Mr. Rockefeller, or to proclaim the moral superiority of
prostitution to needlework on the ground that it pays better. The
need for a drastic redistribution of income in all civilized
countries is now as obvious and as generally admitted as the need
for sanitation.


SHALL HE WHO MAKES, OWN.

It is when we come to the question of the proportions in which we
are to redistribute that controversy begins. We are bewildered by
an absurdly unpractical notion that in some way a man's income
should be given to him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort
of Sunday School Prize for good behavior. And this folly is
complicated by a less ridiculous but quite as unpractical belief
that it is possible to assign to each person the exact portion of
the national income that he or she has produced. To a child it
seems that the blacksmith has made a horse-shoe, and that
therefore the horse-shoe is his. But the blacksmith knows that
the horse-shoe does not belong solely to him, but to his
landlord, to the rate collector and taxgatherer, to the men from
whom he bought the iron and anvil and the coals, leaving only a
scrap of its value for himself; and this scrap he has to exchange
with the butcher and baker and the clothier for the things that
he really appropriates as living tissue or its wrappings, paying
for all of them more than their cost; for these fellow traders of
his have also their landlords and moneylenders to satisfy. If,
then, such simple and direct village examples of apparent
individual production turn out on a moment's examination to be
the products of an elaborate social organization, what is to be
said of such products as dreadnoughts, factory-made pins and
needles, and steel pens? If God takes the dreadnought in one hand
and a steel pen in the other, and asks Job who made them, and to
whom they should belong by maker's right, Job must scratch his
puzzled head with a potsherd and be dumb, unless indeed it
strikes him that God is the ultimate maker, and that all we have
a right to do with the product is to feed his lambs.

 
LABOR TIME.

So maker's right as an alternative to taking the advice of Jesus
would not work. In practice nothing was possible in that
direction but to pay a worker by labor time so much an hour or
day or week or year. But how much? When that question came up,
the only answer was "as little as he can be starved into
accepting," with the ridiculous results already mentioned, and
the additional anomaly that the largest share went to the people
who did not work at all, and the least to those who worked
hardest. In England nine-tenths of the wealth goes into the
pockets of one-tenth of the population.


THE DREAM OF DISTRIBUTION ACCORDING TO MERIT.

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School theorists
"Why not distribute according to merit?" Here one imagines Jesus,
whose smile has been broadening down the ages as attempt after
attempt to escape from his teaching has led to deeper and deeper
disaster, laughing outright. Was ever so idiotic a project mooted
as the estimation of virtue in money? The London School of
Economics is, we must suppose, to set examination papers with
such questions as, "Taking the money value of the virtues of
Jesus as 100, and of Judas Iscariot as zero, give the correct
figures for, respectively, Pontius Pilate, the proprietor of the
Gadarene swine, the widow who put her mite in the poor-box, Mr.
Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr. Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac
Newton, Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr. Paul
Cinquevalli, your family doctor, Florence Nightingale, Mrs.
Siddons, your charwoman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the
common hangman." Or "The late Mr. Barney Barnato received as his
lawful income three thousand times as much money as an English
agricultural laborer of good general character. Name the
principal virtues in which Mr. Barnato exceeded the laborer three
thousandfold; and give in figures the loss sustained by
civilization when Mr. Barnato was driven to despair and suicide
by the reduction of his multiple to one thousand." The Sunday
School idea, with its principle "to each the income he deserves"
is really too silly for discussion. Hamlet disposed of it three
hundred years ago. "Use every man after his deserts, and who
shall scape whipping?" Jesus remains unshaken as the practical
man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the
unpractical visionaries. The moment you try to reduce the Sunday
School idea to figures you find that it brings you back to the
hopeless plan of paying for a man's time; and your
examination paper will read "The time of Jesus was worth nothing
(he complained that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air
nests whilst he had not a place to lay his head). Dr. Crippen's
time was worth, say, three hundred and fifty pounds a year.
Criticize this arrangement; and, if you dispute its justice,
state in pounds, dollars, francs and marks, what their relative
time wages ought to have been." Your answer may be that the
question is in extremely bad taste and that you decline to answer
it. But you cannot object to being asked how many minutes of a
bookmaker's time is worth two hours of an astronomer's?


VITAL DISTRIBUTION.

In the end you are forced to ask the question you should have
asked at the beginning. What do you give a man an income for?
Obviously to keep him alive. Since it is evident that the first
condition on which he can be kept alive without enslaving
somebody else is that he shall produce an equivalent for what it
costs to keep him alive, we may quite rationally compel him to
abstain from idling by whatever means we employ to compel him to
abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other crime. The one
supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing; that is,
to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with him as he is
in dealing with us. Even if we provided work for him instead of
basing, as we do, our whole industrial system on successive
competitive waves of overwork with their ensuing troughs of
unemployment, we should still sternly deny him the alternative of
not doing it; for the result must be that he will become poor and
make his children poor if he has any; and poor people are cancers
in the commonwealth, costing far more than if they were
handsomely pensioned off as incurables. Jesus had more sense than
to propose anything of the sort. He said to his disciples, in
effect, "Do your work for love; and let the other people lodge
and feed and clothe you for love." Or, as we should put it
nowadays, "for nothing." All human experience and all natural
uncommercialized human aspiration point to this as the right
path. The Greeks said, "First secure an independent income; and
then practise virtue." We all strive towards an independent
income. We all know as well as Jesus did that if we have to take
thought for the morrow as to whether there shall be anything to
eat or drink it will be impossible for us to think of nobler
things, or live a higher life than that of a mole, whose life is
from beginning to end a frenzied pursuit of food. Until the
community is organized in such a way that the fear of bodily want
is forgotten as completely as the fear of wolves already is in
civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent social life.
Indeed the whole attraction of our present arrangements lies in
the fact that they do relieve a handful of us from this fear; but
as the relief is effected stupidly and wickedly by making the
favored handful parasitic on the rest, they are smitten with the
degeneracy which seems to be the inevitable biological penalty of
complete parasitism, and corrupt culture and statecraft instead
of contributing to them, their excessive leisure being as
mischievous as the excessive toil of the laborers. Anyhow, the
moral is clear. The two main problems of organized society, how
to secure the subsistence of all its members, and how to prevent
the theft of that subsistence by idlers, should be entirely
dissociated; and the practical failure of one of them to
automatically achieve the other recognized and acted on. We may
not all have Jesus's psychological power of seeing, without any
enlightenment from more modern economic phenomena, that they must
fail; but we have the hard fact before us that they do fail. The
only people who cling to the lazy delusion that it is possible to
find a just distribution that will work automatically are those
who postulate some revolutionary change like land
nationalization, which by itself would obviously only force into
greater urgency the problem of how to distribute the product of
the land among all the individuals in the community.


EQUAL DISTRIBUTION.

When that problem is at last faced, the question of the
proportion in which the national income shall be distributed can
have only one answer. All our shares must be equal. It has always
been so; it always will be so. It is true that the incomes of
robbers vary considerably from individual to individual; and the
variation is reflected in the incomes of their parasites. The
commercialization of certain exceptional talents has also
produced exceptional incomes, direct and derivative. Persons who
live on rent of land and capital are economically, though not
legally, in the category of robbers, and have grotesquely
different incomes. But in the huge mass of mankind variation Of
income from individual to individual is unknown, because it is
ridiculously impracticable. As a device for persuading a
carpenter that a judge is a creature of superior nature to
himself, to be deferred and submitted to even to the death, we
may give a carpenter a hundred pounds a year and a judge five
thousand; but the wage for one carpenter is the wage for all the
carpenters: the salary for one judge is the salary for all the
judges.


THE CAPTAIN AND THE CABIN BOY.

Nothing, therefore, is really in question, or ever has been, but
the differences between class incomes. Already there is economic
equality between captains, and economic equality between cabin
boys. What is at issue still is whether there shall be economic
equality between captains and cabin boys. What would Jesus have
said? Presumably he would have said that if your only object is
to produce a captain and a cabin boy for the purpose of
transferring you from Liverpool to New York, or to manoeuvre a
fleet and carry powder from the magazine to the gun, then you
need give no more than a shilling to the cabin boy for every
pound you give to the more expensively trained captain. But if in
addition to this you desire to allow the two human souls which
are inseparable from the captain and the cabin boy, and which
alone differentiate them from the donkey-engine, to develop all
their possibilities, then you may find the cabin boy costing
rather more than the captain, because cabin boy's work does not
do so much for the soul as captain's work. Consequently you will
have to give him at least as much as the captain unless you
definitely wish him to be a lower creature, in which case the
sooner you are hanged as an abortionist the better. That is the
fundamental argument.


THE POLITICAL AND BIOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO INEQUALITY.

But there are other reasons for objecting to class stratification
of income which have heaped themselves up since the time of
Jesus. In politics it defeats every form of government except
that of a necessarily corrupt oligarchy. Democracy in the most
democratic modern republics: Prance and the United States for
example, is an imposture and a delusion. It reduces justice and
law to a farce: law becomes merely an instrument for keeping the
poor in subjection; and accused workmen are tried, not by a jury
of their peers, but by conspiracies of their exploiters. The
press is the press of the rich and the curse of the poor: it
becomes dangerous to teach men to read. The priest becomes the
mere complement of the policeman in the machinery by which the
countryhouse oppresses the village. Worst of all, marriage
becomes a class affair: the infinite variety of choice which
nature offers to the young in search of a mate is narrowed to a
handful of persons of similar income; and beauty and health
become the dreams of artists and the advertisements of quacks
instead of the normal conditions of life. Society is not only
divided but actually destroyed in all directions by inequality of
income between classes: such stability as it has is due to the
huge blocks of people between whom there is equality of income.


JESUS AS ECONOMIST.
 
It seems therefore that we must begin by holding the right to an
income as sacred and equal, just as we now begin by holding the
right to life as sacred and equal. Indeed the one right is only a
restatement of the other. To hang me for cutting a dock laborer's
throat after making much of me for leaving him to starve when I
do not happen to have a ship for him to unload is idiotic; for as
he does far less mischief with his throat cut than when he is
starving, a rational society would esteem the cutthroat more
highly than the capitalist. The thing has become so obvious, and
the evil so unendurable, that if our attempt at civilization is
not to perish like all the previous ones, we shall have to
organize our society in such a way as to be able to say to every
person in the land, "Take no thought, saying What shall we eat?
or What shall we drink? or Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" We
shall then no longer have a race of men whose hearts are in their
pockets and safes and at their bankers. As Jesus said, where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also. That was why he
recommended that money should cease to be a treasure, and that we
should take steps to make ourselves utterly reckless of it,
setting our minds free for higher uses. In other words, that we
should all be gentlemen and take care of our country because our
country takes care of us, instead of the commercialized cads we
are, doing everything and anything for money, and selling our
souls and bodies by the pound and the inch after wasting half the
day haggling over the price. Decidedly, whether you think Jesus
was God or not, you must admit that he was a first-rate political
economist.


JESUS AS BIOLOGIST.

He was also, as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It took a
century and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and
Goethe to Butler and Bergson, to convince us that we and our
father are one; that as the kingdom of heaven is within us we
need not go about looking for it and crying Lo here! and Lo
there!; that God is not a picture of a pompous person in white
robes in the family Bible, but a spirit; that it is through this
spirit that we evolve towards greater abundance of life; that we
are the lamps in which the light of the world burns: that, in
cohort, we are gods though we die like men. All that is today
sound biology and psychology; and the efforts of Natural
Selectionists like Weismann to reduce evolution to mere
automatism have not touched the doctrine of Jesus, though they
have made short work of the theologians who conceived God as a
magnate keeping men and angels as Lord Rothschild keeps buffaloes
and emus at Tring.


MONEY THE MIDWIFE OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM.

It may be asked here by some simple-minded reader why we should
not resort to crude Communism as the disciples were told to do.
This would be quite practicable in a village where production was
limited to the supply of the primitive wants which nature imposes
on all human beings alike. We know that people need bread and
boots without waiting for them to come and ask for these things
and offer to pay for them. But when civilization advances to the
point at which articles are produced that no man absolutely needs
and that only some men fancy or can use, it is necessary that
individuals should be able to have things made to their order and
at their own cost. It is safe to provide bread for everybody
because everybody wants and eats bread; but it would be absurd to
provide microscopes and trombones, pet snakes and polo mallets,
alembics and test tubes for everybody, as nine-tenths of them
would be wasted; and the nine-tenths of the population who do not
use such things would object to their being provided at all. We
have in the invaluable instrument called money a means of
enabling every individual to order and pay for the particular
things he desires over and above the things he must consume in
order to remain alive, plus the things the State insists on his
having and using whether he wants to or not; for example,
clothes, sanitary arrangements, armies and navies. In large
communities, where even the most eccentric demands for
manufactured articles average themselves out until they can be
foreseen within a negligible margin of error, direct communism
(Take what you want without payment, as the people do in Morris's
News From Nowhere) will, after a little experience, be found not
only practicable but highly economical to an extent that now
seems impossible. The sportsmen, the musicians, the physicists,
the biologists will get their apparatus for the asking as easily
as their bread, or, as at present, their paving, street lighting,
and bridges; and the deaf man will not object to contribute to
communal flutes when the musician has to contribute to communal
ear trumpets. There are cases (for example, radium) in which the
demand may be limited to the merest handful of laboratory
workers, and in which nevertheless the whole community must pay
because the price is beyond the means of any individual worker.
But even when the utmost allowance is made for extensions of
communism that now seem fabulous, there will still remain for a
long time to come regions of supply and demand in which men will
need and use money or individual credit, and for which,
therefore, they must have individual incomes. Foreign travel is
an obvious instance. We are so far from even national communism
still, that we shall probably have considerable developments of
local communism before it becomes possible for a Manchester man
to go up to London for a day without taking any money with him.
The modern practical form of the communism of Jesus is therefore,
for the present, equal distribution of the surplus of the
national income that is not absorbed by simple communism.


JUDGE NOT.

In dealing with crime and the family, modern thought and
experience have thrown no fresh light on the views of Jesus. When
Swift had occasion to illustrate the corruption of our
civilization by making a catalogue of the types of scoundrels it
produces, he always gave judges a conspicuous place alongside of
them they judged. And he seems to have done this not as a
restatement of the doctrine of Jesus, but as the outcome of his
own observation and judgment. One of Mr. Gilbert Chesterton's
stories has for its hero a judge who, whilst trying a criminal
case, is so overwhelmed by the absurdity of his position and the
wickedness of the things it forces him to do, that he throws off
the ermine there and then, and goes out into the world to live
the life of an honest man instead of that of a cruel idol. There
has also been a propaganda of a soulless stupidity called
Determinism, representing man as a dead object driven hither and
thither by his environment, antecedents, circumstances, and so
forth, which nevertheless does remind us that there are limits to
the number of cubits an individual can add to his stature morally
or physically, and that it is silly as well as cruel to torment a
man five feet high for not being able to pluck fruit that is
within the reach of men of average height. I have known a case of
an unfortunate child being beaten for not being able to tell the
time after receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures on a
clock dial, the fact being that she was short-sighted and
could not see them. This is a typical illustration of the
absurdities and cruelties into which we are led by the
counter-stupidity to Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will. The
notion that people can be good if they like, and that you should
give them a powerful additional motive for goodness by tormenting
them when they do evil, would soon reduce itself to absurdity if
its application were not kept within the limits which nature sets
to the self-control of most of us. Nobody supposes that a man
with no ear for music or no mathematical faculty could be
compelled on pain of death, however cruelly inflicted, to hum all
the themes of Beethoven's symphonies or to complete Newton's work
on fluxions.


LIMITS TO FREE WILL.

Consequently such of our laws as are not merely the intimidations
by which tyrannies are maintained under pretext of law, can be
obeyed through the exercise of a quite common degree of reasoning
power and self-control. Most men and women can endure the
ordinary annoyances and disappointments of life without
committing murderous assaults. They conclude therefore that any
person can refrain from such assaults if he or she chooses to,
and proceed to reinforce self-control by threats of severe
punishment. But in this they are mistaken. There are people, some
of them possessing considerable powers of mind and body, who can
no more restrain the fury into which a trifling mishap throws
them than a dog can restrain himself from snapping if he is
suddenly and painfully pinched. People fling knives and lighted
paraffin lamps at one another in a dispute over a dinner-table.
Men who have suffered several long sentences of penal servitude
for murderous assaults will, the very day after they are
released, seize their wives and cast them under drays at an
irritating word. We have not only people who cannot resist an
opportunity of stealing for the sake of satisfying their wants,
but even people who have a specific mania for stealing, and do it
when they are in no need of the things they steal. Burglary
fascinates some men as sailoring fascinates some boys. Among
respectable people how many are there who can be restrained by
the warnings of their doctors and the lessons of experience from
eating and drinking more than is good for them? It is true that
between self-controlled people and ungovernable people there is a
narrow margin of moral malingerers who can be made to behave
themselves by the fear of consequences; but it is not worth while
maintaining an abominable system of malicious, deliberate, costly
and degrading ill-treatment of criminals for the sake of these
marginal cases. For practical dealing with crime, Determinism or
Predestination is quite a good working rule. People without
self-control enough for social purposes may be killed, or may be
kept in asylums with a view to studying their condition and
ascertaining whether it is curable. To torture them and give
ourselves virtuous airs at their expense is ridiculous and
barbarous; and the desire to do it is vindictive and cruel. And
though vindictiveness and cruelty are at least human qualities
when they are frankly proclaimed and indulged, they are loathsome
when they assume the robes of Justice. Which, I take it, is why
Shakespear's Isabella gave such a dressing-down to Judge Angelo,
and why Swift reserved the hottest corner of his hell for judges.
Also, of course, why Jesus said "Judge not that ye be not judged"
and "If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not"
because "he hath one that judgeth him": namely, the Father who is
one with him.

When we are robbed we generally appeal to the criminal law, not
considering that if the criminal law were effective we should not
have been robbed. That convicts us of vengeance.

I need not elaborate the argument further. I have dealt with it
sufficiently elsewhere. I have only to point out that we have
been judging and punishing ever since Jesus told us not to; and I
defy anyone to make out a convincing case for believing that the
world has been any better than it would have been if there had
never been a judge, a prison, or a gallows in it all that time.
We have simply added the misery of punishment to the misery of
crime, and the cruelty of the judge to the cruelty of the
criminal. We have taken the bad man, and made him worse by
torture and degradation, incidentally making ourselves worse in
the process. It does not seem very sensible, does it? It would
have been far easier to kill him as kindly as possible, or to
label him and leave him to his conscience, or to treat him as an
invalid or a lunatic is now treated (it is only of late years, by
the way, that madmen have been delivered from the whip, the
chain, and the cage; and this, I presume, is the form in which
the teaching of Jesus could have been put into practice.)


JESUS ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY.

When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the
same objection to that individual appropriation of human beings
which is the essence of matrimony as to the individual
appropriation of wealth. A married man, he said, will try to
please his wife, and a married woman to please her husband,
instead of doing the work of God. This is another version of
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Eighteen
hundred years later we find a very different person from Jesus,
Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man with a
family, said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this,
though not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to
be a moral objection to marriage. As long as a man has a right to
risk his life or his livelihood for his ideas he needs only
courage and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he
forfeits that right when he marries. It took a revolution to
rescue Wagner from his Court appointment at Dresden; and his wife
never forgave him for being glad and feeling free when he lost it
and threw her back into poverty. Millet might have gone on
painting potboiling nudes to the end of his life if his wife had
not been of a heroic turn herself. Women, for the sake of their
children and parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that
no unattached woman would endure.

This was the beginning and the end of the objection of Jesus to
marriage and family ties, and the explanation of his conception
of heaven as a place where there should be neither marrying nor
giving in marriage. Now there is no reason to suppose that when
he said this he did not mean it. He did not, as St. Paul did
afterwards in his name, propose celibacy as a rule of life; for
he was not a fool, nor, when he denounced marriage, had he yet
come to believe, as St. Paul did, that the end of the world was
at hand and there was therefore no more need to replenish the
earth. He must have meant that the race should be continued
without dividing with women and men the allegiance the individual
owes to God within him. This raises the practical problem of how
we are to secure the spiritual freedom and integrity of the
priest and the nun without their barrenness and uncompleted
experience. Luther the priest did not solve the problem by
marrying a nun: he only testified in the most convincing and
practical way to the fact that celibacy was a worse failure than
marriage.


WHY JESUS DID NOT MARRY.

To all appearance the problem oppresses only a few exceptional
people. Thoroughly conventional women married to thoroughly
conventional men should not be conscious of any restriction: the
chain not only leaves them free to do whatever they want to do,
but greatly facilitates their doing it. To them an attack on
marriage is not a blow struck in defence of their freedom but at
their rights and privileges. One would expect that they would not
only demur vehemently to the teachings of Jesus in this matter,
but object strongly to his not having been a married man himself.
Even those who regard him as a god descended from his throne in
heaven to take on humanity for a time might reasonably declare
that the assumption of humanity must have been incomplete at its
most vital point if he were a celibate. But the facts are flatly
contrary. The mere thought of Jesus as a married man is felt to
be blasphemous by the most conventional believers; and even those
of us to whom Jesus is no supernatural personage, but a prophet
only as Mahomet was a prophet, feel that there was something more
dignified in the bachelordom of Jesus than in the spectacle of
Mahomet lying distracted on the floor of his harem whilst his
wives stormed and squabbled and henpecked round him. We are not
surprised that when Jesus called the sons of Zebedee to follow
him, he did not call their father, and that the disciples, like
Jesus himself, were all men without family entanglements. It is
evident from his impatience when people excused themselves from
following him because of their family funerals, or when they
assumed that his first duty was to his mother, that he had found
family ties and domestic affections in his way at every turn, and
had become persuaded at last that no man could follow his inner
light until he was free from their compulsion. The absence of any
protest against this tempts us to declare on this question of
marriage there are no conventional people; and that everyone of
us is at heart a good Christian sexually.


INCONSISTENCY OF THE SEX INSTINCT.

But the question is not so simple as that. Sex is an exceedingly
subtle and complicated instinct; and the mass of mankind neither
know nor care much about freedom of conscience, which is what
Jesus was thinking about, and are concerned almost to obsession
with sex, as to which Jesus said nothing. In our sexual natures
we are torn by an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming
repugnance and disgust. We have two tyrannous physical passions:
concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex: we
become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we
gratify our desire the race is lost: unless we restrain it we
destroy ourselves. We are thus led to devise marriage
institutions which will at the same time secure opportunities for
the gratification of sex and raise up innumerable obstacles to
it; which will sanctify it and brand it as infamous; which will
identify it with virtue and with sin simultaneously. Obviously it
is useless to look for any consistency in such institutions; and
it is only by continual reform and readjustment, and by a
considerable elasticity in their enforcement, that a tolerable
result can be arrived at. I need not repeat here the long and
elaborate examination of them that I prefixed to my play entitled
Getting Married. Here I am concerned only with the views of Jesus
on the question; and it is necessary, in order to understand the
attitude of the world towards them, that we should not attribute
the general approval of the decision of Jesus to remain unmarried
as an endorsement of his views. We are simply in a state of
confusion on the subject; but it is part of the confusion that we
should conclude that Jesus was a celibate, and shrink even from
the idea that his birth was a natural one, yet cling with
ferocity to the sacredness of the institution which provides a
refuge from celibacy.


FOR BETTER OR WORSE.

Jesus, however, did not express a complicated view of marriage.
His objection to it was quite simple, as we have seen. He
perceived that nobody could live the higher life unless money and
sexual love were obtainable without sacrificing it; and he saw
that the effect of marriage as it existed among the Jews (and as
it still exists among ourselves) was to make the couples
sacrifice every higher consideration until they had fed and
pleased one another. The worst of it is that this dangerous
preposterousness in marriage, instead of improving as the general
conduct of married couples improves, becomes much worse. The
selfish man to whom his wife is nothing but a slave, the selfish
woman to whom her husband is nothing but a scapegoat and a
breadwinner, are not held back from spiritual or any other
adventures by fear of their effect on the welfare of their mates.
Their wives do not make recreants and cowards of them: their
husbands do not chain them to the cradle and the cooking range
when their feet should be beautiful on the mountains. It is
precisely as people become more kindly, more conscientious, more
ready to shoulder the heavier part of the burden (which means
that the strong shall give way to the weak and the slow hold back
the swift), that marriage becomes an intolerable obstacle to
individual evolution. And that is why the revolt against marriage
of which Jesus was an exponent always recurs when civilization
raises the standard of marital duty and affection, and at the
same time produces a greater need for individual freedom in
pursuit of a higher evolution. This, fortunately, is only one
side of marriage; and the question arises, can it not be
eliminated? The reply is reassuring: of course it can. There is
no mortal reason in the nature of things why a married couple
should be economically dependent on one another. The Communism
advocated by Jesus, which we have seen to be entirely
practicable, and indeed inevitable if our civilization is to be
saved from collapse, gets rid of that difficulty completely. And
with the economic dependence will go the force of the outrageous
claims that derive their real sanction from the economic pressure
behind them. When a man allows his wife to turn him from the best
work he is capable of doing, and to sell his soul at the highest
commercial prices obtainable; when he allows her to entangle him
in a social routine that is wearisome and debilitating to him, or
tie him to her apron strings when he needs that occasional
solitude which is one of the most sacred of human rights, he does
so because he has no right to impose eccentric standards of
expenditure and unsocial habits on her, and because these
conditions have produced by their pressure so general a custom of
chaining wedded couples to one another that married people are
coarsely derided when their partners break the chain. And when a
woman is condemned by her parents to wait in genteel idleness and
uselessness for a husband when all her healthy social instincts
call her to acquire a profession and work, it is again her
economic dependence on them that makes their tyranny effective.


THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE.

Thus, though it would be too much to say that everything that is
obnoxious in marriage and family life will be cured by Communism,
yet it can be said that it will cure what Jesus objected to in
these institutions. He made no comprehensive study of them: he
only expressed his own grievance with an overwhelming sense that
it is a grievance so deep that all the considerations on the
other side are as dust in the balance. Obviously there are such
considerations, and very weighty ones too. When Talleyrand said
that a married man with a family is capable of anything, he meant
anything evil; but an optimist may declare, with equal half
truth, that a married man is capable of anything good; that
marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens; and that men and
women will, for love of their mates and children, practise
virtues that unattached individuals are incapable of. It is true
that too much of this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is
not a virtue at all; but then the following of the inner light at
all costs is largely self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal,
just as weak, just as cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes
us into the matter far more resolutely than Jesus, is unable to
find any golden rule: both Brand and Peer Gynt come to a bad end;
and though Brand does not do as much mischief as Peer, the
mischief he does do is of extraordinary intensity.


CELIBACY NO REMEDY.

We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against marriage
and family ties as the claim of a particular kind of individual
to be free from them because they hamper his own work
intolerably. When he said that if we are to follow him in the
sense of taking up his work we must give up our family ties, he
was simply stating a fact; and to this day the Roman Catholic
priest, the Buddhist lama, and the fakirs of all the eastern
denominations accept the saying. It is also accepted by the
physically enterprising, the explorers, the restlessly energetic
of all kinds, in short, by the adventurous. The greatest
sacrifice in marriage is the sacrifice of the adventurous
attitude towards life: the being settled. Those who are born
tired may crave for settlement; but to fresher and stronger
spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of any institution
that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and
adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the
moralizings of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our
souls to its slavery. The unmarried Jesus and the unmarried
Beethoven, the unmarried Joan of Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence
Nightingale seem as they should be; and the saying that there is
always something ridiculous about a married philosopher becomes
inevitable. And yet the celibate is still more ridiculous than
the married man: the priest, in accepting the alternative of
celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are those who
have been men of this world before they became men of the world
to come. But as the taking of vows does not annul an existing
marriage, and a married man cannot become a priest, we are again
confronted with the absurdity that the best priest is a reformed
rake. Thus does marriage, itself intolerable, thrust us upon
intolerable alternatives. The practical solution is to make the
individual economically independent of marriage and the family,
and to make marriage as easily dissoluble as any other
partnership: in other words, to accept the conclusions to which
experience is slowly driving both our sociologists and our
legislators. This will not instantly cure all the evils of
marriage, nor root up at one stroke its detestable tradition of
property in human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to effect
a cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.

 This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus which are
still matters of controversy. They are all in line with the best
modern thought. He told us what we have to do; and we have had to
find the way to do it. Most of us are still, as most were in his
own time, extremely recalcitrant, and are being forced along that
way by painful pressure of circumstances, protesting at every
step that nothing will induce us to go; that it is a ridiculous
way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic way, an atheistic way, an
immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be ashamed of
themselves and must be made to turn back at once. But they find
that they have to follow the vanguard all the same if their lives
are to be worth living.


AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION.

Let us now return to the New Testament narrative; for what
happened after the disappearance of Jesus is instructive.
Unfortunately, the crucifixion was a complete political success.
I remember that when I described it in these terms once before, I
greatly shocked a most respectable newspaper in my native town,
the Dublin Daily Express, because my journalistic phrase showed
that I was treating it as an ordinary event like Home Rule or the
Insurance Act: that is (though this did not occur to the editor),
as a real event which had really happened, instead of a portion
of the Church service. I can only repeat, assuming as I am that
it was a real event and did actually happen, that it was as
complete a success as any in history. Christianity as a specific
doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was
hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please),
before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the
level of the thing it has remained ever since. And that thing
the intelligent heathen may study, if they would be instructed in
it by modern books, in Samuel Butler's novel, The Way of All
Flesh.