Of these we may take the author of "The Gospel for To-day" as a type.

He, we may assume, advocates his socialistic programme, not because he thinks that to do so is a shrewd clerical manoeuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at once Christian and practicable.

How does it come about, then, that an educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous?
Let us examine his arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer.
By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing things as they are.

But he sees them from a distance only, as though they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual configuration he has no idea whatever.

Thus when he contemplates the inequalities of men's economic powers, these appear to him alternately in two different forms--as genuine powers of production and as powers of mere seizure--without his discerning where in actual life the operation of the one ends and the operation of the other begins: and, though for a certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some able men are able in the sense of being exceptionally productive, his thoughts and his feelings alike through the larger part of his argument are dominated by the idea that ability is merely acquisitive.