The Banner of Christ in the Hands of the Socialists

 

Sermons and Society (Ed Welsby)

Title: The Banner of Christ in the Hands of the Socialists

27^th February 1887

Text:

“In that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people: to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.

And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people which shall be left … “ Isa. 11:10-11

 

The ‘masses of the common people’ will deliver the church from the patronage and control of the rich; the church is on the side of ‘mammon and caste’, of feudal and commercial interests; the Socialists are the true exponents of the life and teaching of Christ.

For fifty years the national bishops and the patron-made clergy – pastors who have been chosen for ‘the masses’ by Mammon and Caste – have been at their wits’ end how to persuade the crowds of the disinherited and oppressed to become, or own themselves to be, members incorporate of Christ’s Church. They have spent millions of pounds, they have held thousands upon thousands of anxious discussions for the solution of the pressing question – ‘How are we clergy going to get the masses?’ I can only repeat, what I have perhaps said often enough, that they are beginning at the wrong end: that it is the will of God that the so-called masses should ‘get’ the clergy who are appointed by the state. Commonwealth, or fatherland, they are indirectly ‘got’ by the masses, at least by so many amongst them as are freemen, are citizens, possess votes. By becoming voters they have become, in their place and degree, factors of the government, electors of the government; and thus they indirectly, through their government, nominate the bishoprics. But the parochial clergy, the pastors of the local communes, do not even possess as legitimate and as Christian a foundation for their position as that which can be claimed by the parish churchwardens. The parish churchwardens are the elect of the people, church, or congregation: they are the men chosen for office by ‘the masses’; they stand on exactly as secure a ground, in point of popular authority, as St Stephen or St Phillip did. They have been placed where they are, as St Stephen and St Phillip were, by ‘the multitude of the disciples’ – by ‘the masses’ as we now talk. He has been placed there by some individual lord or land, some individual owner of money, or by some caucus of trustees who want to continue the Universal Church of all ages and all persons within the narrow bounds of some party which represents the prejudices, ignorances, and negligences of one particular age or class. The assistant clergy – who in really civilised states and parishes are freely elected by ‘the masses’ – in our semi-civilized England are dismissible wage-servants of the patron-imposed incumbent. Unless they are careful to offend neither Caste nor Mammon – the feudal and commercial exploiters of the one common church – they usually find themselves, when they have arrived at middle-age, excluded by these two allied Antichrists from any further exercise of the ministry which they have received of the Lord. No power but that of ‘the multitudes of the disciples’, nothing but an extension of so-called ‘invasion of the Church by the masses’ from the material to the spiritual or social Church – can restore to Jesus Christ the service and ministry of which he is now robbed by Caste and Mammon. The poor priests of the Lord ought to look to the poor alone, to the masses of the common people, to ‘the multitudes of the disciples’, to liberate His Church ‘from the patronage and control of anti-Christian Caste and Mammon. ‘The mighty’ and ‘the rich’ of the Magnificat, by getting the officering of all the local congregations of Christ into the grasp of the landlords and money lords have not only despoiled every local people of their highest spiritual rights and obligations, but by substituting ‘patronage’ for free election they have perverted the very tribune of the people, the local representative of Jesus Christ the redeemer – the parish priest – into a creature and a representative of class and ‘property’.

The ’masses’ know, or are beginning now in the Father’s good providence to know, not merely what it is to be robbed, but that they have been and are being robbed. They are beginning to learn that they have been thrust off the common land: the ‘commons’ of the local commonwealths have been perverted into sporting preserves for Caste, or into ‘eligible building estates’ for Mammon. They are beginning to learn that the free common schools have been appropriated to the sole profit of the same two antichrists. But they have yet to learn to learn the last and most momentous lesson of all – that Caste ‘the mighty’ and Mammon ‘the rich’ have successively expropriated ‘the multitude of the disciples’, or ‘the masses’, or ‘the common people’ of that which is God’s appointed witness to their rights in the land and the school. Caste and Mammon have made the Church and its priesthood their own. The mighty and the rich have carried away Sion itself into captivity in Babylon. If ‘the masses’ – the carpenters, the fishermen, the rate-collectors, the tent-makers – had retained the common church and her ministry, which the Son of Man entrusted to their keeping, in which his disciples declared them to be rightful freemen or electors, it would have been impossible for them to be robbed of the common land or the common school. If ‘ the whole multitude of the disciples’, the masses, the common people, will but reassert their claims and place in the universal Spiritual Society, in the common Church of all the peoples, then the common land and the common school must infallibly return to that whole humanity to which the Lord gave the one and for which he instituted the other. The church is his permanent spiritual and social witness – to ‘all nations’ by the apostolic or epistolic order, to every local parish or commune by its own freely-elected priest – that the earth hath he given to the children of men, and not the caste of Raubritter or Raubadel, robber-nobles or robber-knights, which in ‘the times of ignorance’ degraded Christ’s freemen into its own slaves or villeins. The bishops and priests of the common Spiritual Society are God’s witnesses that ‘every man that cometh into the world’ is the subject of His own inward enlightening and educating Word, and therefore an inheritor by divine right of the school.

I am quite aware that some will object, ‘Do you call the organised mob of socialists who thronged into St Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday [* A visit to St Paul’s Cathedral for Evensong by an army of Socialists in February 1887 which caused considerable disturbance, both inside and outside the cathedral. It was organised as a protest against the government] a ‘multitude of the disciples?’ ‘I will not stay to indicate in detail the signs of discontent, murmuring, and quarrelling which the apostles saw in those ‘masses’ in Jerusalem, whom they nevertheless included within ‘the multitude of disciples’. A ‘disciple’, I need scarcely tell you, is a learner. A disciple is one who adopts the maxims and laws of another as the only full and complete expression of his own belief and his own duties. It is very hard indeed to conceive of the minority whom the journalists call ‘the respectable churchgoers’ – who regard the church-going of the Socialists as an invasion of their own private spiritual ecclesiastical preserve, who think that the proper use of St Paul’s Cathedral is to provide gratuitous concerts and entertaining sermons for the well-to-do – as ‘disciples of Jesus Christ. The very first lesson which Jesus teaches every ‘disciple’ who enters his school is the ungodliness and inhumanity of the attempt to be rich. I need not quote texts. You know them all. Although you will not find them in the publications of the Tract Societies which Caste and mammon maintain for the ‘conversion’ of the masses, and although you will never see them exposed upon the walls of a railway station, you can easily find them in a New Testament, or you may read them on the banners of the Socialists.

If some old Athenian philosopher had risen from the dead, or some Mohammedan, ignorant of the words of Christ and his apostles, had come into the streets of London on Sunday and watched the great multitude surging into St Paul’s Cathedral, they would naturally have asked, ‘Whose disciples are all these men? It is not Caesar’s, not Victoria’s, not Gladstone’s, not Schnadhorst’s, not Hyndman’s.

You see that they carry banners with mottoes upon them. Who is the author of those texts which express the social faith of this huge multitude? From what teacher have they borrowed the dogmas which they call upon all the city to read and to respect, to observe and to obey? On whose authority are these innumerable crowds of the poor and the rough doing this unwonted thing? They, or a great many of them, call themselves ‘Socialists’. Let us read what is on their banners; let us discover who is the ultimate dogmatist of this multitudinous sect.

Christians, as you watch the mighty multitude pass by, you will soon be shaken out of many of your hasty a priori  conjectures. Do you expect to read upon their banners wild words of their own invention? Do you expect extracts from Babeuf or from Proudhon, or even from Ferdinand Lasalle or Karl Marx? Are not the ‘Socialists’ their disciples? Ought not the mottoes by which they declare before the world their convictions, their demands, their faith, to be extracted from Das Kapital or from the Arbeiterprogramm? Oh come, all ye faithful! Look again and again at these inscriptions. Recognize, while you have time, what they are: see clergy and laity, out of whose mouth the cries of ‘the mob’ have come. They are the words of your Master. They are the laws of the Eternal Father. They are the lessons which he taught us by his Son. They are the new commandments which you and I were pledged at our baptism to keep. ‘Feed my lambs!’ ‘My house is a house of prayer but ye (capitalists and landlords) have made it a den of thieves!’ ‘I was hungred and ye gave Me no meat; naked and ye clothed Me not.’ It is a small matter to what sect or party this great ‘multitude’ fancies it belongs, or by what denomination it pleases to call itself. You can see to whom they have felt obliged to go in order to find the fullest expression of their faith. ‘In the name of our God’, said the crowds of the London poor, as well as the Hebrew psalmist, ‘we will set up our banners.’ We have not seen in our generation any other such warning, or any other such as acknowledgement, that Jesus Christ the crucified is he whom the Father has exalted to be the Head of Humanity, to lift up an ensign for the peoples, to be the one and only all-sufficient mediator, representative, spokesman, and avenger of ‘all that are desolate and oppressed’. This ‘sign of the son of Man’ is all the more amazing because it is so unintentional.

What is the after-dinner talk at the tables of Caste and Mammon, or all the unmoral and unsocial wordspinning of Christian Evidence companies, over the possibility of reconciling Darwinism and ‘Christianity’ compared with that evidence which the Son of Man himself sets before the corrupt and unbelieving Church in the faith and hope, in the hunger and thirst after righteousness, of those who do not even know that He is their teacher and their leader? Can we doubt that it is the Son of Man himself who has come again into his Church in the persons of this rough multitude of his disciples? ‘The Son of God goes forth to war.’ These, whatever they may call themselves, are bearing his banner; they ‘follow in his train’. Thery are marching ‘manfully under his banner’, as the office for Holy Baptism puts it, ‘against sin, the world, and the devil’ – against selfishness, Caste-rule, and Mammon-rule. May each one of them ‘continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end’. May he freely subject himself to the rule of him by whom he sees the world needs to be ruled.

The undogmatic ‘socialism’ of the desolate and oppressed, when it speaks freely out of its own heart and conscience, falls back upon the words with which the crucified and ascended Head of Humanity has provided his brothers and sisters. It reminds ‘Christians’ that they are living in rebellion against Christ. It does not articulately name itself ‘Christian Socialism’. No: but it declares inarticulately that the thing which economists, politicians, scholars – in hatred or in love – call ‘Socialism’ is itself ‘Christian’.