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 disciple 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.