The Ideas of the Christian Socialists of 1848

• Date: 01 September 1951
• Published date: 01 September 1951
• Author: Gordon K. Lewis
• DOI: 10.1177/106591295100400302
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE IDEAS OF THE CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS OF 1848
GORDON K. LEWIS
University of Puerto Rico
I
HE RELATIONSHIP of the Christian ethic to movements of social
radicalism has given birth, historically, to an important body of
political thought. The social composition of the early Christian
communities led inescapably to the evocation of a Promised Land set
within the terms of social equality. However, as Troeltsch has made
evident,’ the ideal thus created was deemed to be as much an organized
religious community existing peaceably for its own purposes in an alien
society as it was a utopian anarchism that was hostile to the life of secular
institutions. Yet the very absolutism of the ideal, and the uncompromising
character of the personal behavior it has exacted from its devotees, have
made it contingently revolutionary. The very generality of its postulates
has driven it to be sceptical of the particulars of any society in which it
has grown up. The history of the Christian radical sects is, consequently,
a commentary upon the meaning of Whitehead’s remark that a general
idea is always a danger to the existing order. The Franciscan Fraticelli, the
Waldensian heretic, the Anabaptist, the agrarian Digger, the Christian
Socialist, despite their separation in historical time, are united on the
common
ground of the radical utopianism of the Christian message. They
appeal, substantially, to the same qualities: the passion for humility, the
blessedness of poverty, the sufficiency of grace, the denunciation of riches
and the suspicion that their ownership at least endangers the certainty
of salvation, the distrust of organization in the life of the spirit.
The replacement of the classical by the Christian virtues, it is true,
was not always a noble advance, a fact which both Machiavelli and
Rousseau employed effectively in their respective criticisms of a Christianity
they both regarded (and legitimately) as the enemy of their civil religions.
Rather, it was a replacement of the dispassionate Stoic, at best patiently
bearing a fate he deemed irrevocable, with the spectacle of the Christian
actively contemptuous of the world, yet convinced that its conquest is the
final test of his creed. It is equally true, as such critics as Robertson have
indicated,2 that the Christian victory over the Roman empire accelerated
the degradation of its culture; yet, despite that antirationalist note, it
widened the area of moralization beyond Platonic philosopher and Stoic
dilettante to the disinherited multitudes of the ancient world. To its
obscure devotees, it gave hope, a sense of worth, a conviction of unique
1 Ernest Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: Allen and Unwin, 1931),
pp. 82-89.
2
J. M. Robertson, A Short History of Christianity (London: Watts and Co., 1902), pp. 100-105.
397

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personality. It made them feel that their lives were things of import in
the universe, that their economic servitude and social oppression were not
necessarily items of an order of natural law beyond their control. It
helped them toward the realization that co-operation, not competition,
is the best institutive principle of social relations. Not least important, it
made plural the concept of loyalty and thereby helped to break down
the dangerous monism of the classical theory of the state.
Every age of crisis in the western world has led to a restatement of
those general ideas by the minorities in the organized churches. In the
nineteenth century, these ideas became sources of protest against the new
civilization ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. In France, secularists
and priests such as Fourier and Lammenais developed a social theory
which sought to limit the anarchy of economic liberalism by subduing
it either to a modernized guild system of industrial association or to a
renovated Catholicism.3
3
In Germany, Protestants and Catholics, such as
Huber, Baader, and Von Ketteler, urged the regulation of the new com-
petitive spirit by the Pauline theory of social duty and the extension of the
virtues of ownership to the propertyless worker through the institutions
of the trade union and the co-operative society; and this became the
genesis of the Catholic socialism of the great papal encyclicals.4 In the
American republic, the social conscience of Unitarianism, coupled with
the impact of St. Simon and Fourier, led to the demand of men like
Brisbane, Noyes, and Parke Godwin for the collectivist organization of
labor predicated on Godwin’s insight that &dquo;your democratic civilization,
which began in aristocratic feudalism-the progress of which has emanci-
pated the working class from direct and personal servitude only-will end
in a moneyed aristocracy, will lead to a collective and indirect servitude
just as oppressive as that from which we have been so lately relieved.&dquo;
That insight became the foundation of successive experiments in search
of the socialist utopia.5 In England, finally, a small group of Christian
Socialists, led by the remarkable trio-John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow,
John Frederick Denison Maurice, and Charles Kingsley-attempted after
1848 to construct a satisfactory compromise between a secular radicalism
which emphasized the transformation of the social and economic order
and a conventional Christianity which promulgated the prior necessity of
individual salvation-a compromise they believed to be doctrinally possible
on the basis of Maurice’s dictum that socialism is the assertion of the
Divine order.6
3
G. Isambert, Les Ideés socialistes en France de 1815 à 1848 (Paris: 1905).
4
M. Turmann, Le Développement du Catholicisme Social depuis L’Encyclique Rerum Novarum (Paris:
Alcan, 1900).
5
V. F. Calverton, Where Angels Feared to Tread (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), chaps. xii-xx.
6
M. Kaufmann, Christian Socialism (London: Kegan Paul, 1888); A. V. Woodworth, Christian Socialism
in England (London: Sonnenschein, 1903); C. E. Raven, Christian Socialism, 1848-1854 (London:
Macmillan, 1920); G. C. Binyon, The Christian Socialist Movement in England (London: S.P.C.K.,
1931).

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II
The leaders of the English movement were an able group of men.
Maurice, its acknowledged leader, was a profound theologian, yet deeply
concerned with the human aspects of his theology; anxious to make his
belief a ground of social action, yet afraid of the poison of power he felt
to be inherent in all human planning; with a noble mind so humble,
as Ludlow pointed out, that he was afraid of his own greatness.7 Ludlow
was widely travelled and had a gift for organization. His experiences in
France saved him from that genteel condescension to the poor so charac-
teristic of most of the Victorian social reformers. Kingsley, the most
dramatic yet least profound of the three, was one of those men who, in
English history, are compact of all the qualities which go to make the
species homo anglicanus: thoroughly argumentative, boisterously aggressive,
eager in heart rather than logical in mind; a nervous temperament dis-
covering characteristically Victorian outlets in a pre-Raphaelite view of
women and a gospel of physical energy. Some of the lesser figures of the
group were no less interesting. Thomas Hughes had the irresistible charm
of the Rugby public school type. The lives of such parish priests as
Hansard were eloquent testimony to the simple beauty of the Christian
ethic. In such figures as Lloyd Jones, the disciple of Owen, there was a
direct link with the Chartist revolt. Vansittant Neale gave up an entire
fortune to finance the co-operative experiments of the movement. Except
for Maurice, all of them were outstanding not so much in intellect as in
character. They seem to have been incapable of meeting the monumental
criticisms made upon their theological structure by Strauss, Feuerbach and
other scholars. Maurice, indeed, was even disturbed by the mild heresies
of Bishop Colenso.8 In none of them did the seminal ideas of the
Tubingen school of Biblical criticism provoke that intellectual storm which
swept George Eliot into scepticism.9 They were, indeed, instinctively on
the side of orthodoxy in matters of faith. J. S. Mill, in writing of Maurice,
noted a timidity of conscience which made him fearful of the unaided
consequences of reason and drove him to the acceptance of a dogma which
offered him comfort in return for the sacrifice of critical inquiry.,-,,
The movement created very little new or significant thought. Before
its emergence, Morgan, Greaves, and other obscure figures had attempted
to elaborate a socialist creed out of their Christianity; the radicalism of
Morgan’s suggestive books,&dquo; went back in inspiration to the remarkable
7
J. M. Ludlow, "Some of the Christian Socialists of 1848 and the Following Years," in The Economic
Review (London: The Christian Social Union, 1893), pp. 486-500.
8
F. Maurice, Life of J. F. D. Maurice (London: Macmillan, 1884), Vol. II, p. 485.
9
Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), chap. viii.
10
Autobiography, in World’s Classics Ed. O.U.P., p. 130.
11
Remarks on the Practicability of Mr. Robert Owen’s Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower
Classes (1819); and An Inquiry Respecting Private Property and the Authority and Perpetuity of
the Apostolic Institution of a Community of Goods (1827).

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schemes of the Quaker John Bellers. The conservative aspects of Christian
Socialism had already received their classic formulation in Southey and
Carlyle; and the Tractarian Ward’s The Ideal...