40 
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
demonstrate dry abstractions. They lack the great spiritual 
breath of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They 
never invoke, like the heroes of the Reformation or of the French 
Revolution, those great principles of truth, right, and justice 
which touch the hearts of men. It is not by splitting hairs 
with dialectics, razor-sharp though they be, that the way is to 
be prepared for a social transformation. 
Bound to the earth by their materialistic doctrines, they 
present us with no ideal to be realized. All that exists is, for 
them, the result of necessary laws which govern human 
societies as immutably as celestial bodies. The French 
Socialists are often ignorant, simple, and tricked by their own 
fancies. Proudhon himself, in spite of his vigour of mind, had 
received only an incomplete and ill-digested education. But 
they are all human ; they dream of universal happiness in their 
own way. They are, in fact, mistaken philanthropists. In spite 
of their errors, or even their insanities, they have a noble aim : 
to bring about the reign of brotherhood among men. They 
are Utopian dreamers who have always condemned the violent 
acts of the Jacobins, which the German Socialists, dry and 
hard as a syllogism, are ready to renew. 
How superior is Christianity, considered merely from the 
point of view of a social reform, to all these systems, in which 
either true charity or a just appreciation of facts is wanting ! 
An infinite tenderness for the oppressed pervades the Gospel, 
together with a sublime sentiment of social justice. The 
essential truth which rises from the whole teaching of Christ is 
that no improvement is possible without first making man him 
self better. Moral renovation ! There is the source of all true 
progress. It is not by the criticism of economic doctrines, 
however keen it may be, nor by a new form of association, be 
it phalanstery or co-operative society, that we shall heal the 
maladies of the existing social system. 
It was by spreading throughout all ranks of society more 
light and a higher morality that Christianity burst the bonds of 
slavery. It will be through the same moral influences that 
poverty will cease. No doubt, “ the poor shall we always have 
with us,” because there will always be some incorrigibly idle