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EQUALITY

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

It is sufficient for our purpose to take the well-defined theory of
modern times. Whether the ideal republic of Plato was merely a
convenient form for philosophical speculation or whether as the
greatest authority on political economy in Germany Dr. William Roscher
thinks it "was no mere fancy"; whether Plato's notion of the identity of
man and the State is compatible with the theory of equality or whether
it is as many communists say indispensable to it we need not here
discuss. It is true that in his Republic almost all the social theories
which have been deduced from the modern proclamation of equality are
elaborated. There was to be a community of property and also a
community of wives and children. The equality of the sexes was insisted
on to the extent of living in common identical education and pursuits
equal share in all labors in occupations and in government. Between
the sexes there was allowed only one ultimate difference. The Greeks as
Professor Jowett says had noble conceptions of womanhood; but Plato's
ideal for the sexes had no counterpart in their actual life nor could
they have understood the sort of equality upon which he insisted. The
same is true of the Romans throughout their history.

More than any other Oriental peoples the Egyptians of the Ancient Empire
entertained the idea of the equality of the sexes; but the equality of
man was not conceived by them. Still less did any notion of it exist in
the Jewish state. It was the fashion with the socialists of 1793 as it
has been with the international assemblages at Geneva in our own day
to trace the genesis of their notions back to the first Christian age.
The far-reaching influence of the new gospel in the liberation of the
human mind and in promoting just and divinely-ordered relations among men
is admitted; its origination of the social and political dogma we are
considering is denied. We do not find that Christ himself anywhere
expressed it or acted on it. He associated with the lowly the vile
the outcast; he taught that all men irrespective of rank or possessions
are sinners and in equal need of help. But he attempted no change in
the conditions of society. The "communism" of the early Christians was
the temporary relation of a persecuted and isolated sect drawn together
by common necessities and dangers and by the new enthusiasm of self-
surrender. ["The community of goods of the first Christians at
Jerusalem so frequently cited and extolled was only a community of use
not of ownership (Acts iv. 32) and throughout a voluntary act of love
not a duty (v. 4); least of all a right which the poorer might assert.
Spite of all this that community of goods produced a chronic state of
poverty in the church of Jerusalem." (Principles of Political Economy.
By William Roscher. Note to Section LXXXI. English translation. New
York: Henry Holt & Co. 1878.)]--Paul announced the universal
brotherhood of man but he as clearly recognized the subordination of
society in the duties of ruler and subject master and slave and in all
the domestic relations; and although his gospel may be interpreted to
contain the elements of revolution it is not probable that he undertook
to inculcate by the proclamation of "universal brotherhood" anything
more than the duty of universal sympathy between all peoples and classes
as society then existed.

If Christianity has been and is the force in promoting and shaping
civilization that we regard it we may be sure that it is not as a
political agent or an annuller of the inequalities of life that we are
to expect aid from it. Its office or rather one of its chief offices on
earth is to diffuse through the world regardless of condition or
possessions or talent or opportunity sympathy and a recognition of the
value of manhood underlying every lot and every diversity--a value not
measured by earthly accidents but by heavenly standards. This we
understand to be "Christian equality." Of course it consists with
inequalities of condition with subordination discipline obedience; to
obey and serve is as honorable as to command and to be served.

If the religion of Christ should ever be acclimated on earth the result
would not be the removal of hardships and suffering or of the necessity
of self-sacrifice; but the bitterness and discontent at unequal
conditions would measurably disappear. At the bar of Christianity the
poor man is the equal of the rich and the learned of the unlearned
since intellectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth. The
content that Christianity would bring to our perturbed society would come
from the practical recognition of the truth that all conditions may be
equally honorable. The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is
we imagine the sum and substance of the equality and communism of the
New Testament. But we are to remember that this is not merely a "gospel
for the poor."

Whatever the theories of the ancient world were the development of
democratic ideas is sufficiently marked in the fifteenth century and
even in the fourteenth to rob the eighteenth of the credit of
originating the doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the early
writers--[For copious references to authorities on the spread of
communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and
women in four periods of the world's history--namely at the time of the
decline of Greece in the degeneration of the Roman republic among the
moderns in the age of the Reformation and again in our own day--see
Roscher's Political Economy notes to Section LXXIX. et seq.]--
Marsilio a physician of Padua in 1324 said that the laws ought to be
...

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