II.

Before we proceed with our thesis let us, dear friends, sum up in a few words the essence of our first sermon. In the social-democratic movement we have found a new form of religion, inasmuch as both are striving for the same end : the salvation of man from poverty with which he helplessly began his struggle for existence in the midst of a world of adversities. Even the most superstitious soul cannot claim for religion more than the success of spiritual salvation. The pagan gods have scarcely any share in that spiritual world, while the Tri-personal God of Christianity could only mitigate the misery of the people by making it a virtue. I shall not deny that this doctrine was beneficial for a time. As long as man had neither the capacity nor the means to throw off his cross, resignation was not only a divine balm, but also an effective discipline which trained him for the rigorous mental work civilization requires. Mind was cultivated by religion. But what purpose could such a culture serve if it didn’t enable us to cultivate the real world and to improve material conditions with the help of the mind? I am quite aware, my friends, that Christianity disowns this only earthly reason of its existence; I am quite aware, that Christianity claims its Kingdom not to be of this world, and that its only mission was the salvation of our immortal soul. We know, however, that we do not always achieve what we intend to achieve, and that we don’t really always do what we mean to do. We distinguish intentions from realizations. And the materialistic social-democrat has made it his special duty, to judge people not by their flashes of thought, but by their palpable actions. Indeed, the aim of religion can only be attained by material culture, by a cultivation of the material. Work we called the redeemer of humanity. Science and mechanical arts, mental and manual labor, are, like God-father and Son, two different forms of one and the same being. This truth I should like to call the cardinal dogma of the social-democratic church, if social-democracy could be called a church, and reasonable knowledge a dogma. Science has been an idle speculation as long as it didn’t reach the truth that thinking, perceiving and learning required external objects and sense-impressions. The combination of the activity of the brains and the senses distinguishes natural science from all ancient speculative sciences. The science of the ancients was largely speculation, that is, they believed it possible to evolve truth by mental activity alone, without the help of external objects and experience. But the result thus obtained was no science. No wonder, that the contents of many a library of folio-volumes with their wooden and pigskin bindings have now chiefly an antiquarian value. On the other hand, the craftsmen of the past did not sever manual from mental labor, and though their hand work has largely been consumed or damaged, yet the science of those practical investigators has been carefully guarded by tradition and handed down, nearly unimpaired, from generation to generation. There are among us a good many people who, instead of regarding science as a handmaid to civilization, idolize and worship it with boundless and servile admiration as something preternatural. They are like the barbarians who turned the natural and social law into a divinity and thus deprived them selves of the power to control that law and to use it for the benefit of mankind. It is incumbent upon social-democracy to destroy both the religious and the scientific superstition. Man shall not look up to science, but shall draw it down to earthly purposes. The mental shall be the tool of manual labor. With this we by no means disparage the just claims of science. The manifest futility of mere speculative brooding, the demonstrated barrenness of pure reason, may be a lesson for the learned profession, that there can be no science without the action of our senses upon material objects. Conversely, let the craftsmen learn from the wonderful results of modern industry that labor needs the co-operation of science.

The mutual permeation going on for centuries of those two forms of activity helped humanity to reach that point where the foundation-stone to the temple of social-democracy can be laid. It consists in the power of our material production, in the productivity of modern industry. But let us take care not to think in this connection of mental power only! The labor, which has been accumulated in the course of ages, does not consist of mental or scientific achievements only, but to a much higher degree in the material wealth existing around us, insofar as it constitutes a necessary instrument of modern labor. Although this instrument or wealth is at present under the control of private individuals, yet the social-democrat must learn to conceive that it could not be the creation of private efforts. All our material wealth as well as our scientific and literary achievements can only be due to the collective work of many and various generations, countries and races, and is therefore, despite the private control under which it is at present, the collective product of all.

Great inventions and discoveries, which are bound up with certain names, are but nominally the property of those famous individuals. They are in fact, like the material achievements, the result of collective labor, the product of society. And it is but a survival of the barbarian past to regard great historic names not only as brilliant leaders, but also as demigods, though such opinions are still prevalent among many learned as well as ignorant men. To be sure, had not Columbus made use of the accumulated means, ideas and aspirations to undertake the discovery of America, some other sailor would have done it; the talent and courage requisite for such a voyage are by no means rare among sailors generally.

Or as Thomas Buckle says of James Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine: “He would have surely not achieved what he has, without his predecessors.” This may be applied to all men who distinguished themselves and achieved great successes as well as to common people.

It is, dear friends, the supreme duty of science to reduce the extraordinary, i.e., which appears to the general superstition as extraordinary, to the level of the ordinary, the usual, the natural or normal. The saints and the sanctuaries, the religious and the worldly ones, must disappear in order that the only eternal and true sanctuary : humanity or mankind, may live. To make brotherhood a reality ; to make it impossible to despise any one, it is necessary to cease to humbly look up to any one. The social-democrat should not stare at the chief of a republic as the peasant does at the priest; he should not regard him as a biped God, as the chosen supreme master. We are all born chiefs, while the elected chief is simply the temporary administrator of the ordinary state of affairs, the business manager the like of whom there are hundreds among the people. The tribe of David should intermingle with the tribe of Melchizedek and form one tribe of citizens with equal rights.

Let us now return to the doctrine of our social-democratic church, the foundation-stone of which is the accumulated material and mental wealth, and which teaches us to believe that that heavy stone had been hewn and brought to light neither entirely without nor altogether by the effort of certain select individuals and noble families, but by the exceedingly hard labor, material and mental, of the whole society. Only knaves and fools call this a system of crude levelling-up. Those, however, who have studied our church-fathers know that our social hierarchy, the difference between the great and the small, the virtuous and the wicked, the noble and the common, the learned and the untaught, have only been established in order to endow the few with privileges and to keep the masses in servitude. No, fellow-citizens! the equality of social-democracy is by no means a fantastic equality. It does not exclude diversity. Nature has given us the same desire to satisfy our hunger, to clothe our body and to develop our capacities. Men have always and everywhere the same imperious instinct of self-preservation and the same desire to live in enjoyable activity, without misery or servitude. The equality in the desire does not interfere with the natural diversity, with the peculiar talents and proclivities given to each of us. Just as in nature as a matter of fact equality and diversity intermingle and form one united whole, so will the social order of the future make all men equal in rank and value, by giving them the equal right to the enjoyment of their individual life, without obliterating the diversity which requires of every one to act according to his gifts. A new era has dawned upon mankind. It bids us approach its message in the light of new ideas and a new understanding.

The first and foremost thing in this respect is to revise our present notion of the supreme being and our idea of perfection. Until now we have been taught to regard and to revere the sublime, the supreme, the divine and the perfect as a single thing or being. Here the barbarians found it in a tree, there in a golden calf, then in the thunder and lightning as the fierce justice, finally the Christians deified the spirit of love. Why was the spirit of love so imperfect? Because he lacked the antithesis, the flesh and bone. We shall give him reality when we search for the perfect, the great and sublime not in one single thing, nor in one single quality, nor in one particular personality, but in the communion and intimate connection of all men and things. Various peoples and various ages idolized the most diverse things as the supreme perfection. Here it was bodily strength and martial prowess, there it was Samaritan pity and spiritual power. But none of these single things has stood the test of time. The deified qualities have proved to be as transient as the gods themselves, and as the peoples who have for a long time been looking for the true God, until the truth has forced itself to the front that men as well as things are all equally sublime, equally perfect and divine. I hear already the shrill voice of the heretics, i.e., of the adversaries of our gospel, charging us with iniquitous blasphemy. Our respectable citizens cannot perceive a state of things without masters and servants, without nobles and commoners, without virtuous and wicked. They think it quite strange to ascribe the same value to the crooked as to the straight, to the donkey as to the miller. Verily, I tell you, the more reasonable the miller the more will he value his donkey. Both of them are in this point equal, that they serve each other, and that either of them is, in the right time and the right place, a valuable part of a united whole. Only that and no more is the meaning of the social-democratic doctrine of equality. The privileged divinity of the individual must be abolished if the general deviltry should once for all be done away with. Nothing shall be rejected as impure, everything shall be worthy of a place in the tabernacle, that it may be able, in its time and station, to serve for the best of all. Humanity, knowing how to live in mutual service and to supplement one another with the things of this world, is the bodily representation of the supreme being and of divine perfection.

The social-democratic equality, my friends, is there fore something quite different from the insipid political equality to which the liberal parties want to treat the people. They want political equality, that we may help them to establish a state of things in which they could use us unreservedly for the preservation and augmentation of their wealth, while the aim and end of our equality is to restore the wealth to those who in the course of centuries created it by hard, ceaseless toil, namely, to the people. The wealth of to-day is the instrument of future labor. In the present it serves private ends, in the future it shall serve social ends. The restoration of that instrument to the people shall not take the form of a division. It shall not be divided up in the manner which obtains to-day, where some get more than their due, while some get nothing at all and are consequently forced into the servitude of the rich ; nor shall it be divided up in equal but petty shares so that each individual is to start out on his own hook on a life of drudgery, or is to run the risk of being cheated out of his heritage by the jugglery of the cunning. No, that instrument shall not be subjected to any partition, but it shall be handled with organized skill by co-operative labor; the product only shall be divided and consumed. That is the communism of social-democracy.

While Nature ruled with the overpowering force of fate or of a god, and cowed humanity into poverty, it might have been useful to entrust certain individuals or certain classes with the power of government that they might serve as guides for the people. The ancient, the feudal and to-day’s bourgeois order of slavery are progressive steps to the organization of labor. Now, how ever, the time is approaching which calls upon us to take a much farther step than the liberal and democratic parties are dreaming of. By the productivity of labor the people have arrived at the point where they want that all class-domination shall cease. They feel themselves competent to continue the economic development without the help of privileged leaders. The liberty, with which the bourgeoisie goads the people into a struggle against the landed interests or against bureaucracy; the equality and fraternity, which priestcraft promises us with the purpose of binding us to it with ropes of superstition, turns into the real liberty, equality and fraternity of social-democracy.

If religion consists in the belief in supernatural beings and forces, in the belief in gods and spirits, then social-democracy is without religion. In its place we put the consciousness of the insufficiency of the individual, who needs therefore to his completion and perfection the co-operation of the whole, and consequently acknowledges his submission to the whole. Civilized human society is the supreme being in which we believe; on its transformation to socialism we build our hope. Such a humanity will make love a reality, of which the religious enthusiasts have only been dreaming. The deluded and the obdurate, who cannot believe in the social-democratic development of society, may feel the necessity of transferring their hope from this earth to a Hereafter. Not so the social-democrat. In order to really participate in the consolation which the believer finds in the idea of a heavenly father who protects and defends his children, we are striving for a society which shall assist the help less individual in all his needs. We call upon society – and by virtue of its accumulated wealth we are entitled to call upon society – that it shall vouchsafe to each of its members not only work, but also daily bread, and that it shall feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, in short, it shall carry out the work of love and mercy. We appeal to society, not only to call itself human but to be human. In the place of religion, social-democracy puts humanity, which shall no more rest on the basis of an ethical commandment, but on the recognition that its savior can only be found in co-operative, brotherly work: in economic communism. The original sin, from which mankind has been suffering, is selfishness. Moses and the prophets, all religious founders and legislators together have been unable to extirpate it. “The sin dwelleth in the flesh as the nail in the wall.” No preaching or teaching and commanding could eradicate it, for the whole constitution of our present society hinges upon that nail. Bourgeois society rests on the selfish distinction of mine and thine, rests on social war, on competition, on the cunning devices of getting the best of each other.

In conclusion let me point out the moral : it demands – and its whole being depends on this demand – that we reconcile the antithesis between love and selfishness; that we constitute our society on this reconciliation; that men shall join hands and with united strength and labor force Nature to yield us our daily bread in plenty.