Research On British Christian Socialism Of The 19^th Century

British Christian socialism is an important branch of a great many socialism schools in 19th century, Its principal leaders are F.D. Maurice, John Ludlow, Charles Kingsley and so on. They were concerned about the destiny of the poor, censured growing social problems caused by Industrial Revolution based on the justice spirit of Christianity and expectation to the kingdom of God. They advocated the equal treatment of Labor classes in social economic life, promoted the love, co-operation, sympathy and understanding among people, as well as expecting to realize their beautiful dreams through the reform or the return of the law of God.In order to save the people from the suffering caused by Industrial Revolution, Christian socialists had greatly and positively explored British society in the transforming period. However, for diverse reasons, this problem has been misunderstood and overlooked by Chinese academic circles. Whereas this, this article tries to analyze the background and main activities of British Christian socialism, manage to have an objective evaluation of its historical influence.This paper is divided into three partsThe first part deals with the reason for Christian socialism's appearance. In this article, Christian socialism is placed in the background of social economic development and analyzed it from different perspective. It explored the internal connection among the defects of Industrial Revolution, the decline of The Anglican Church and different thoughts of delivering poor people together with the emergence of Christian socialism.The Second part deals with Christian socialism's co-operative movement, which contains two parts, that is, productive and consumptive co-operation. Despite their development is short, it has improved the laborer's economic position to a certain extent, alleviated social conflicts and spread social well-fare ideals. The formulation of Co-operation Law has affected the rising of co-operative movement profoundly.The third part introduced the education activities of Christian socialism, analyzed their beneficial exploration in enlarging the numbers of educated and expanding the educational content, which has promoted modernization of the education in England.