Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 59:234 (Apr 1902)
Article: The Growing Socialism
Author: Andrew Burns Chalmers

BSac 59:234 (April 1902) p. 254

The Growing Socialism

Rev. Andrew Burns Chalmers

“All, that I have is mine, and all that you have is mine if I can get it,” is an expression of the selfish individualism of our race at the beginning. Every babe begins where the race began,—in selfishness. The great race-man was ready selfishly to seize and appropriate everything, bidden and forbidden; the baby of to-day will toddle off his own yard to the playground of his little neighbor, and become a first-class freebooter. To the strong baby belong the spoils of the selfish struggle. Each individual is a miniature of the race. The human family began in individualism, and is surely, if slowly, going toward socialism; the individual always begins in selfishness, and gradually grows toward unselfishness. The last man of the race must win anew in his personal life the victories that all the struggles of our humanity have won since the beginning. All the dead ancestors of a man arise from the grave of a hundred thousand years, and compel him—a new child of the race—to conquer them anew, on his march toward the goal of goodness.

If each individual has, gathered up in his completed physical life, all the elementary forms of animal life, from the simplest protoplasmic process to the Divine-human form, shall he not personally pass through all the degrees of growth, mentally and morally? At one period in his development he has no more mentality than a tadpole; at another, no more spirituality than a Hottentot.

BSac 59:234 (April 1902) p. 255

Original sin was man’s earliest possession, according to theologians; if proved that he had original sin, it was his only possession, according to biologists. The theologian and the scientist believe now that man had no more original sin than he had original art or science or literature. He had nothing originally except a bundle of hereditary tendencies, plus a power, not his own, that has made for progress. The race goes back to Adam to find Eden; the individual finds both Adam and Eden in his personal history. If the race has a memory of an Eden, where all were perfect and innocent, the individual has the same memory of a time when he lived unconscious of selfish choices and innocent of willful transgression. A baby without clothing and without shame is in Eden. He must go from Eden, even as the race did, and the Eden of the future for him is better than the Eden of the past, even as it is for the race. Wherever there are undeveloped and unclothed races or individuals, there is Eden to-day.

The “flaming swords” that kept the first man from returning to the race-Eden, forbid the last man from returning to his personal Eden of ignorant innocence. Eden for the race was individualism; Eden for the individual is the territor...