Subject: for truth. Be that as it may, John

From: Digilio <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:48:11 +0200

H 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 persecutor