ABSTRACT
There is an extraordinary difficulty in bringing the example of Christ to bear on the vast commercial nexus of the modern world. Very slowly indeed does the light penetrate this obscure region. And political economy, which is the specialised science of the production and distribution of wealth, seems to claim the whole domain of commerce as its own, with warnings erected on all hands that such trespassers as morality or religion will be prosecuted. The new political economy, which sprang out of Ruskin’s fertile brain and has begun to find its exponents in such well-known economists as Professor Marshall, when it has had time to win its way to general acceptance, will make it far easier to accept the precepts and example of Christ as a guide in economic matters. For the essential change in the new political economy is that it declines to treat the making of material wealth in the abstract apart from the human beings that make and use it, and the human lives affected by its use. Wealth has a new meaning, which incidentally includes, but cannot possibly be expressed by, the material commodities to which the term was once confined. Wealth is now recognised as the well-being of human beings; and the wealth of a nation is to be measured only by the number of healthy and happy lives that compose it. In this much larger and truer conception of wealth, the application of Christ’s standard becomes possible, desirable, nay inevitable. He might well decline to be a judge between two brothers quarrelling about an inheritance, because the acquisitive temper, the longing to get as much as possible for one’s self, was to Him quite beside the mark. It did not matter in His eyes how 58much wealth in that material sense a man had, for a man’s life consists not in the abundance of his possessions. If the man seeking his share of the inheritance surrendered it without a murmur to his brother, there at once Christ would see wealth in the generous self-sacrifice, that would, in all probability, be the way by which the brother would be induced voluntarily to share the property. Christ was poor, and remained poor. He never had money in His hands, except a coin that was lent to be the text of a discourse. We can see and acknowledge that He was rich beyond the dreams of avarice in His self-less love and service, in His relation with the Father, in His memories of the glory from which He came, and in His expectation of the glory to which He would return. He is the impressive illustration, therefore, of what the new political economy would regard as wealth. He has taught us to recognise a wealth totally dissociated from money. His example shines now on the world with a new meaning and power since Ruskin and Marshall have thrown a new atmosphere about the economics of Adam Smith or Bastiat.
