THE ANTI-SOCIAL FORCES OF TO-DAY.

 [By the Bishop of Melbourne.]

Lawless force is now again taking form, and it is too ominously like that awful symbol of St. John. As before, it shows itself as a wild beast of human idleness, lust, and cruelty. But now, instead of seven, it has ten myriad head. It is the mass of the demoralised proletariate of Europe. This wild beast of our own time is like its apostolic prototype, idle, lustful, cruel, and unbelieving ; knowing nothing but that it has five senses, seeking nothing but the means of their enjoyment. There is nothing on earth that it hates so much as to see another with richer sense-food than it possesses itself. Rather than suffer that, it will pull down all institutions, burn down all buildings, ravage all lands, and wipe out a civilisation which is the inheritance of ages. Envy longing to get tries to pass itself off as the love which longs to give. These, too, as opposite in nature and aim as heaven and hell, are everywhere confused. The beast apes the God, and is worshipped.
Do not suppose that I am here referring to socialism as such. With the aims of the higher socialism I have the heartiest sympathy. I believe with it that the present condition of the poor is intolerable, and that the alleviation of the misery of the poor is the one question of the day. I agree with the author of "Gesta Christi" that a "condition of society in which an enormous pass of human beings are born to an almost inevitable lot of squalor, penury, and ignorance, and still other multitudes to incessant labor with few alleviations or enjoyments ; a society which presents on one side enormous fortunes and endless accumulations of wealth, while on the other it offers classes ground down by poverty and pinched with want, is certainly not the Christian ideal of society, or any approach to 'the kingdom of God' on earth." It is not only Mario, the communist, who calls "the granting the few enjoyment at the expense of many" a " heathenish principle ;" such a state of things is called "a new heathenism, and that of the most flagrant kind," by a bishop no less venerated than the profound Martensen. It is certain that the task of the statesmen of the future is to devise such a system of distributing wealth that a greater share of the products of industry shall fall to the lot of the producers. So far I am heartily in accord with the socialists. Nay, I go further. I freely own that the methods of thoughtful modern socialists like Lassalle, Marx, and Treischke, have been widely misunderstood. They do not advocate confiscation, nor even in the strict sense, community of goods. It is Lassalle, who says, "The artisan must and ought never to forget that all property once acquired is unassailable and legitimate." And the socialists give the true ground of this position. " Its accumulation was justified by the laws which allowed it." It is those laws which they would alter, so as to dispose differently of the wealth of the future. Again, it is unjust to accuse philosophic German communists of holding the doctrine of free love. They emphatically repudiate it. "We recognise and prize," says says Herr Treischke, " the moral right of marriage more than you do, and it is on this ground that we are such implacable foes to the modern constitution of society," with its inevitable fruits of prostitution and concubinage. Very many of the socialists again appeal to the moral authority of the Christian religion, recognising with M. Laveleye that in such a state of society as the present, Christianity must create socialistic aspirations. Nay, the old canon law even is on the side of the socialists. The canons lay it down that no man might sell goods for more than what they cost him. All profit in merchandise was robbery. Again, if a man borrowed money of another it was enough if he paid the capital ; for interest was robbery. I think these principles of the canonists and communists as little justified by Christianity as by reason, and that such a life as they recommend would not only diminish production and injure character, but also make life intolerably monotonous and commonplace. I have said so much that you may not suppose that the charge I am about to bring is levelled at socialism generally.
I say, then, in spite of all my admissions, that a power is growing and gathering its forces in the depths of European society which is an exact counterpart of the wild beast of the Apocalypse. It is as blasphemous and sensual wherever it be found, whether in France, Spain, Germany, Russia, or Ireland. At an immense meeting of women in Berlin in 1878 the president cried, amidst stormy applause, "I want no Bible, no pastor, and no law. If you want a belief, invent one for yourselves." The notorious Most exclaimed at the same meeting, with the same kind of tumultuous approval, " We will have our heaven upon earth, for that which is future we believe not in. Here on earth will we enjoy ourselves. Here we will revel and not rot." "No God, no church, no master," is the common cry at the anarchist meetings in Paris ; and we are told by the anonymous author of "Underground Russia," who traces the belligerent phase of Nihilism to the influence of the Paris Commune, that the Russian Nihilist " has no longer any religious feeling in his disposition," and he describes one of the leaders of that movement as "full of that cold fanaticism which stops before no human consideration," and as ready "to hold out his hand to the devil himself, if the devil could have been of any use to him." Of the foul blasphemies of Foote and his fellows — men with whom the Melbourne Secularist Society has just been condoling— we have heard from Rev. S. Hansard, one of the most large-minded and earnest friends of the poor who ever worked in the east of London. He says he will not foul his pen by retailing the worst parts of the "Comic History of Christ," published by those men ; but he does tell us of caricatures of the most Sacred Figure in all human history " pulling Peter out of the water by his big nose ;" and of God— one almost hesitates to repeat the horror — "as a fat ugly man, with spectacles on, sitting on a cloud cross-legged, sewing a pair of trousers." Covered with names of blasphemy, filled, oh heaven, with hate of the eternal love, with scorn of the tender fatherly pity which is pleading with all hearts ; what can save men who are in such a state as that? Who can wonder that the souls which have made themselves so hard against God should sink into the foulnesses of a beastly lust and a merciless ferocity; that we should read of Irish assassins trying their victim in a brothel, and writing the order for his murder on the curl-paper of a courtesan ; that we should near the Russian terrorist boasting that he made himself the demon he was " by nourishing sanguinary projects in his mind," and by constantly reminding himself "that bullets were better than words;" or that as M. Laveleye tells us, " working men of London, Pesth, Vienna, and Berlin, applauded the struggles and excused all the crimes of the Commune in Paris?" The "Mano Nera" organisation in Spain openly declare that " the rich are to participate no longer in the rights of man, and that to combat them all means are good and necessary, not excepting steel, fire, and even slander." That last infernal touch is even more devilish than the programme of Bakounine himself, requiring, as this does, absolute and universal anarchy, the destruction of everything that has come down to us from the past till " not one stone shall be left upon another, in all Europe first, and afterwards in the entire world."
Let no one comfort himself with the idea that these are the mere ravings of madmen. The wild beast of savage godless force has broken loose. It has committed its cowardly murders in Ireland by scores. In Russia it has murdered one Emperor, and imprisoned another for months in a fortress in spite of the hosts of mailed warriors who protect him. It is combating to-day in Spain, straining savagely at its chains in France and Russia, and threatening every moment scenes of horror such as history has never witnessed. It may be very true that all these sanguinary dreams are as stupid as they are criminal, and that if ever the dreamers tried to realise them, they would only drive society to seek shelter beneath the shield of some despotic ruler from that vilest and cruellest tyranny— the tyranny of a godless mob. But meanwhile the danger threatens, and it is the duty of every man among us to consider how best we may preserve the people from the consequences of their own madness. Not by callous agnosticism, not by sentimental culture, not by a heedless headlong plunging into the mad riot of sensual pleasure ; but, as of old, by the patience, the purity, and the heroism of a true faith in the Son of God, is the wild beast to be overcome and cast into perdition.

South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide, SA : 1881 - 1889), Saturday 1 September 1883, page 16