Equality | Page 2

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 made by all
the citizens; and he based this sovereignty of the people upon the
greater likelihood of laws being better obeyed, and also being good
laws, when they were made by the whole body of the persons affected.
In 1750 and 1753, J. J. Rousseau published his two discourses on
questions proposed by the Academy of Dijon: "Has the Restoration of
Sciences Contributed to Purify or to Corrupt Manners?" and "What is
the Origin of Inequality among Men, and is it Authorized by Natural
Law?" These questions show the direction and the advance of thinking
on social topics in the middle of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's
Contrat- Social and the novel Emile were published in 1761.
But almost three-quarters of a century before, in 1690, John Locke
published his two treatises on government. Rousseau was familiar with
them. Mr. John Morley, in his admirable study of Rousseau, [Rousseau.
By John Morley. London: Chapman & Hall. 1873--I have used it freely
in the glance at this period.]--fully discusses the latter's obligation to
Locke; and the exposition leaves Rousseau little credit for originality,
but considerable for illogical misconception. He was, in fact, the most
illogical of great men, and the most inconsistent even of geniuses. The
Contrat-Social is a reaction in many things from the discourses, and
Emile is almost an entire reaction, especially in the theory of education,
from both.
His central doctrine of popular sovereignty was taken from Locke. The

English philosopher said, in his second treatise, "To understand
political power aright and derive it from its original, we must consider
what state all men are naturally in; and that is a state of perfect freedom
to order their actions and dispose of their persons and possessions as
they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking
leave or depending upon the will of any other man--a state also of
equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one
having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that
creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the
advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be
equal