This, you see, is Religious Socialism. It proclaims the spiritual equality of all men. The _spiritual_ equality, let us notice; it will have nothing to do with the social equality. “_My kingdom is not of this world.... Give unto Cæsar the things which be Cæsar’s, and to God the things which be God’s._” “Honour all men,” says Peter, “love the brotherhood, fear God, honour the king.” And more: Religious Socialism has a tendency to be careless of the dogmas of the creeds. “Is the Army hostile,” asks Mr. Booth, “to the existing evangelical denominations? Just the contrary. Numbers of its converts go to swell the membership of the churches. More than 400 persons, converted and trained in its ranks, have been engaged by other different religious organisations as Evangelists, Ministers,” etc., etc., etc. We notice that he says “_evangelical_ denominations?” The Catholics, of course, from (who shall I say?) Augustine to Pascal and Newman, are poor belated idolaters, only slightly better than the heathen. This, you see, is where Mr. Booth, like Mr. Spurgeon and the rest, so pleasantly shows us what nonsense an earnest short-sighted man is capable of believing and brandishing about the world with a godless blatancy. Personally, I cannot make myself angry with any of them for it. For what would an earnest man be without his faults? without, as D’Israeli puts it, a single redeeming vice?
In Melbourne there is a tendency now to let the Salvation Army have its own way unmolested with the criminals and the prostitutes. “It can’t do any harm,” people say, “and it may do good, and really, you know, the—the Social Evil wants looking to.” Nay, more: having made this nice expression “Social Evil,” we are at last plucking up courage to acknowledge that it exists, and that it is not necessarily a sign of filthy-mindedness to wish to discuss it. We speak of it now in papers which come under the eye of those dear creatures about whose stainless purity of mind we are all so anxious (even that Puritanic print, the _Melbourne Bulletin_ is anxious, and the _Sydney Bulletin_, also, for all I know to the contrary)—“our wives and daughters.” Why, possibly there are those among us who will live to see the day when the expression “fearful sinner,” as applied to some poor girl driven out into the miseries of the streets, will be confined to the utterance of our good friends of the Scotch Presbytery, and other few such like. Then, it will be amusing: at present, it is only detestable.