Unlike Howells, who admired Tolstoy, Carnegie advocated a more flexible moral standard. He proposed not an imitation of Christ, as he said Tolstoy tried, but a new method that recognized “the changed conditions under which we live.” This was the new gospel, the Gospel of Wealth that threw out the old beatitudes and denigrated charity. In effect, it imagined a Christ fit for the Gilded Age, a tycoon, amassing a fortune and dispersing it all, but only to the worthy poor, “those who desire to improve.”
