On the narrative as given in the Acts it may be remarked, —
1. That the conduct of these early Christians was purely spon- taneous. They were not commanded by the Apostles to sell their possessions and to have all things in common. There is not the slightest intimation that the Apostles gave any encouragement to this movement. They seem simply to have permitted it. They allowed the people to act under the impulse of their own feelings, each one doing what he pleased with his own.
2. It can hardly be deemed unnatural that the early Christians were led into this experiment. To us the wonders of redemption are " the old, old story," inexpressibly precious indeed, but it has lost the power of novelty. In those to whom it was new it may well have produced an ecstatic bewilderment, which led their judgment astray. There are two great truths involved in the Gospel, the clear perception of which may account for the deter- mination of those early converts to have all things in common. The one is that all believers are one body in Christ Jesus ; all united to Him by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit ; all equally partakers of his righteousness ; all the objects of his love ; and all destined to the same inheritance of glory. The other great truth is contained in the words of Christ, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." It was no wonder, then, that men whose minds were filled with these truths, were oblivious of mere prudential consider- ations.
3. This experiment, for all that appears, was confined to the Christians in Jerusalem, and was soon abandoned. We nover hear of it elsewhere or afterwards. It has, therefore, no precep- tive force.
4. The conditions of the success of this plan, on any large scale, cannot be found on earth. It supposes something near per- fection in all embraced within the compass of its operation. It supposes that men will labour as assiduously without the stimulus of the desire to improve their condition and to secure the welfare of their families as with it. It supposes absolute disinterested- ness on the part of the more wealthy, the stronger, or the more able members of the community. They must be willing to forego all personal advantages from their superior endowments. It supposes perfect integrity on the part of the distributors of the common fund, and a spirit of moderation and contentment in each member of the community, to be satisfied with what others, and not he, may think to be his equitable share. We shall have to
480 FART IH. Ch. XIX. — THE LAW.
wait till the millennium before these conditions can be fulfilled. The attempt to introduce a general community of goods in the present state of the world, instead of elevating the poor, would reduce the whole mass of society to a common level of barbarism and poverty. The only secure basis of society is in those immut- able principles of right and duty which God has revealed in his Word, and written upon the hearts of men. And these truths, even if acknowledged as matters of opinion, lose their authority and power if they cease to be regarded as revelations of the mind and will of God, to which human reason and human conduct must conform.
Communism and Socialism.
Heaven is not higher than " the lower parts of the earth,' ' than the principles and aims of the early Christians were exalted above those of the modern advocates of the community of goods. This idea is not of modern origin. It appears in different forms in all ages of the world. It entered into the scheme of Plato's Republic, for in his view private property was the chief source of all social evils. It was included in the monasticism of the Middle Ages. Renunciation of the world included the renunciation of all prop- erty. Voluntary poverty was one of the vows of all monastic in- stitutions. It was adopted by many of the mystical and fanatical sects which appeared before the Reformation, as the Beghards, and " Brethren of the Free Spirit," who taught that the world should be restored to its paradisiacal state, and that all the dis- tinctions created by law, whether of social organization, property, or marriage, should be done away. At the time of the Reforma- tion the followers of Miinzer adopted the same principles, and their efforts to carry them into practice led to the miseries of the " peasant- war." All these movements were connected with fa- natical religious doctrines. The leaders of these sects claimed to be inspired, and represented themselves as the organs and messengers of God.
Modern communism, on the contrary, so far as its general char- acter is concerned, is materialistic and atheistic, and in some of its forms pantheistic. * This is consistent with the admission that
1 Enfantin, a disciple of St. Simon, began one of his public discourses, delivered in Paris in 1831, with the words, "Dieu est tout ce qui est; Tout est en lui, tout est par lui, Nul de nous n'est hors de lui ; " and Henri Heine called himself a Hegelian. On the other hand, one of St. Simon's books is entitled Le nouveau Christianisme. See Guerike's Kir- chen-Geschickte, vn. D. § 220, 6th edit. Leipzig, 1846, vol. iii. p. 679, foot-notes. We are tempted to quote a single characteristic sentence from Guerike, ut supra, pp. 678-682-.