Since it is thus better to give than to receive or take, many may think that the way to the salvation of the world must be to suddenly dispossess all wealthy people of their wealth or deprive everyone of their "private property" in order immediately to share all the world's things of value absolutely equally between all its individual people, but this is not the case. Such a distribution would of course also be dictatorship.
      The fact that the things of value exist as "private property" and that some people have appropriated them while others have none is of course a consequence of evolution. The present circumstances are a specific expression of a particular evolutionary step, which means a direct, average result of the particular temporary mental state of the collected terrestrial human beings on the scale of neighbourly love. It is thus the pinnacle of everything that they can give one another in a purely mental way.
      Just as it is a fact that this present form of giving is not the most primitive imaginable, or indeed the most supreme either, and that at the same time it is growing and that people are really evolving towards being of greater and greater mutual benefit to one another, it is further established as fact that it is a matter of evolution, which is to say its transformation is analogous to a being's transformation from child to adult and is therefore just as unlikely to take place by command. Indeed, we would also see the spectacle that if all things of value today were divided equally among all the people of the Earth, in the course of a very short time thousands upon thousands of people would languish in a state of ruin while others would perish from affluence, abundance and gluttony. People would be on exactly the same step as before. Making laws with the drastic requirement that no one may own more than others would give rise to a desperate resistance that would have Providence itself or the whole of Nature as its comrade-in-arms; this resistance would therefore be just as victorious over terrestrial human beings and insurmountable as changing the course of the moon and the orbit of the sun.
      Taking wealth from the wealthy and giving it to the poor would be merely a transfer of wealth, not an ending of the relationship between rich and poor. We would not find that the poor in general would manage wealth better and be more generous towards the rich, who would now have taken the place of the poor, than the rich had been when they were affluent. Is it not apparent in daily life that poor people who suddenly come into great wealth in most cases are not ennobled by this at all but manifest arrogance or self-importance to a great extent in their mentality, indeed, sometimes to such an extent that they even avoid communication with their parents simply because they are poor? They would be ashamed of them in front of their rich friends and acquaintances. Indeed, the poor are not better than the rich, and the rich are not better than the poor. The beautiful residences and extravagances that characterise the rich are not a real question of evolution but merely a question of money and can be achieved by anyone who comes into possession of a fortune. A criminal can wear fine clothes just as well as a morally developed person can.
      It is true that living in luxurious houses and wearing fine clothes comes under "culture" and "refinement" but this is in many cases not a question of evolution but only an acquired "training", an outer mental "varnish" or "veneer" with which one prevents the "proletarian" in one's innermost self from becoming far too visible to one's "distinguished" circle of acquaintances. This "training" is merely a recipe that, up to a certain limit, can be bought and acquired by the undeveloped and the developed alike if only they have money, for it is not a raising of the person from one real evolutionary step to another but, on the contrary, merely a disguise with which one can give a lower step the outer semblance of a higher one.
      So being rich is not any favouritism on the part of Providence, just as little as being poor is any punishment or disfavour from this same centre of power.
      Being rich or poor is thus not in any way whatsoever an irrefutable characteristic or expression of being highly developed. Christianity's greatest wise man expressed his economic situation thus: "Foxes have holes, the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to rest his head", while other wise men, for example Solomon, had great wealth, and Buddha was the son of a prince.
      Judging people's true evolutionary step from their material wealth or poverty would thus be contrary to all absolute logic and all perfect ways of calculating or perceiving. Anyone who regards these two factors alone as characteristics of, or criteria for, evolution must of necessity sooner or later give up this view. The most infallible characteristic of evolution is revealed not in the form of how much one owns but, on the contrary, in the form of how much joy one is able to feel when giving one's neighbour one or more of the things that one owns. Our relationship to "giving" is our relationship to evolution. It shows where one stands. It shows how far the terrestrial human is from being a "finished" being, which means the state of being that is expressed in "Livets Bog (The Book of Life)" as a "real human being".
      The nature of animals is the principle of "taking"; the nature of real human beings is the principle of "giving".