Letter to Karl Kautsky, July 28, 1894

ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY

IN STUTTGART

London, 28 July 1894 122 Regent's Park Road, N. W.

Dear Baron,

There is no hurry about printing the article.^[1] Once I have seen to the proofs you can print it when you wish, in September, say, or even October. I have been mulling the thing ever ever since 1841 when I read a lecture

by F. Benary on Revelation. Since then I have been in no doubt that here we have the earliest and most important book in the New Testament. After a gestation period of fifty-three years there is no great need to hasten its emergence into the world at large. As to your questions.

1. If I have expressed myself correctly in other respects, I certainly would not describe serfs and small peasants^[2] as being amongst the earliest adherents of Christianity; rather I should number them amongst those classes where it might expect to find adherents. And to these they quite certainly belonged— especially in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries. There is no doubt that, from the time Christianity first spread from Judaea to Northern Syria and Asia Minor and Greece, Egypt and Italy, it was in the towns that it developed and found its earliest adherents.

2. You ask whether the millennium is of this world or of the next. That depends on how one interprets it. I call the next world that which comes after death. And on this point Revelation leaves one in absolutely no doubt whatever. The millennium is reserved only for the martyrs and at best for such Christians as happen to be still living when it comes about, and to that extent, for the latter, it is of this world, whereas for the martyrs, who are only then resurrected from the dead, it is of the next. So it's the old story: You PAYS YOUR MONEY AND YOU TAKES YOUR CHOICE. TO my mind what decides the issue is the fact that it is impossible unless one has a concept of immortality and a belief in reward and punishment in the next world. Even less of this world is the New Jerusalem which is to come after the millennium and the Last Judgement.

But the so-called Pauline Epistles also have it that those believers still living at Christ's second coming are to be 'changed', i.e. transformed and magnified from mortals into immortals.

That the millennium was here depicted in earthly colours goes without saying. Even Revelation cannot rest content with such heavenly delights as sitting with a bare bottom on a damp cloud, twanging a harp with more or less gory hands and singing hymns to all eternity.

The preface to Volume II^[3] has 1. not yet been written and 2. I cannot give it to you. This solution of the rate of profit and price question and of the distribution of price can only be given its due in the book itself.

Save for Sorge and Schlüter there are no intelligent correspondents to be found anywhere in America, because the Germans there stick obstinately to the same sectarian attitude towards the workers as is stubbornly adhered to by the Social Democratic Federation 44 over here. Instead of seeing in the movements of the Americans the propulsive element which, even though it may take wrong or circuitous paths, is bound in the end to lead to the same goal as the one they themselves brought with them from Europe, they see only the wrong paths, treat the blind, foolish Americans with arrogant condescension, boast of their own orthodox superiority, repel the Americans instead of attracting them and, as a result, have themselves remained a small, impotent sect. Hence it has come about that their writers have also relapsed into pure ideology and place a false and narrow interpretation on conditions as a whole. Little Hepner, for one, could always be said to have lived in a world of fantasy and when he gets sentimental his stuff beggars description. I once read a comedy of his—though the funny bits were pretty good, the serious love scenes contained so much gush that one became convulsed with laughter.

Kindest regards from one household to another.

Yours,

F.E.