CHAPTER XXIV
Christianity has hitherto only partially, feebly, and waveringly taught its great doctrine. Christendom has not believed its own gospel. Forsaking the vital religion of Jesus, and of all the heroes and saints as impracticable, men have put up with a sort of conventional Christianity, from which the great essential ideas of the Golden Rule and the real presence of God were dropped out.
—C. F. Dole.
“I have spoken for three nights in this place, and for three nights you have heard me patiently. I have not regarded the favour of any man, but neither have I wished to bruise or wound. And yet, as I stand here now for the last time, I must declare the whole truth as it has been given to me. I have charged upon our present social and industrial conditions grave responsibility. To-night I declare plainly that you who calmly accept and profit by them, whether you know it or whether you know it not, are rejecting Jesus of Nazareth and his kingdom.”
The speaker was John Gregory, the place a large hall in the city of Burlington, crowded to its utmost with eager listeners, for the theories which he proclaimed were new and startling in that day.
As in his earlier revival preaching, so now, Gregory’s utterance was attended with peculiar power. There was this difference, however, between his relation to his audience now and in that other time: then a familiar appeal was reënforced, even though involuntarily and unconsciously, by the full weight of his personal and psychic influence; now he relied wholly, it appeared, upon the dynamic of his message. His manner was more impassioned than in that earlier time, but less exciting.
Keith and Anna Burgess, from their places in the audience with Mrs. Ingraham, whose guests they were, watched and listened with almost breathless intensity of interest. They had not heard it on this wise before.
“Do you remember,” continued Gregory, with searching emphasis, “that on a certain day the Master said, ‘Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven’? Do you remember how the twelve men who followed him were said to have been ‘exceedingly amazed’? From the fourth century, when the Church and the world formed their unhallowed union, down to the present day, men have continued to be ‘exceedingly amazed’ at a saying so inconvenient and so revolutionary, and have set themselves to blunt its sharp edge or to explain it away altogether.
“To-night I am here to say to you plainly, This is a faithful saying, worthy of all acceptation, and woe unto him who seeks to take it away from the words of Christ. Put with it, if you will, other like words from the lips of Christ and his Apostles, rather than seek to abate the force of these. But why are the rich condemned? Surely they are the most law-abiding, most influential class in every community! Because the riches of the rich man are founded upon a lie! This is the lie: that a man has the right to build up his own prosperity and enjoyment upon the suffering and privation of his fellow-men.
“Ask yourselves, men who listen to me now, do I tell the truth?
“You made your money in trade; very well—is trade just? Could you, under present conditions, have made money, had you dealt justly and loved mercy? had you lived the truth, shown the truth? Could your trade have prospered if you had followed the simplest rule of Christ, ‘Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you?’
“Is not the very basis of your trade and of your gains that you force other men into failure, dejection, and poverty, and rise upon the wreck of them? Well has it been said, ‘A rich man’s happiness is built up of a thousand poor men’s sorrows.’
“Many men make their money in manufacture, perhaps not largely so in this city; but the conditions are familiar to us all. Very well, is manufacture true to God, true to men?
“The profits, we will say of a given manufacture, were not great enough last year; the owners had a large income, but not as large as they wanted; some of the rich stockholders grumbled. What did they do? They reduced the beggarly wages of the toilers in their iron prisons, sent them home to their wives and children with less than sufficed to give them daily bread and shelter, and they knew it. They sent pure girls to the life of shame, and honest men to the black refuge of despair. Thus they declared their dividend, and their rich neighbours praised their business genius and pocketed their share of the gains complacently; and the rich grew richer, and the poor, poorer. This done, they come before God with pious words; they pass boxes in the churches to gather the widows’ and the orphans’ mites whose burdens they do not lift, no, not with one finger; they build a hospital now and then; they found a university, and their names are exalted; they sit in their homes with all their treasures of art, of intellect, and of refinement about them, and thank the Lord that they are not as other men are, or even as that poor fellow they hear reeling, profane and drunken, down the street, because no home is his, no hope, no God.
“Hear the words which God hath sworn by his holy prophets:
“‘Forasmuch, therefore, as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat; ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.
“‘For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins; they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.
“‘Woe to the City of Blood!
“‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!
“‘Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!... that lie upon beds of ivory and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, that chant to the sound of the viol and invent to themselves instruments of music, ... that drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph!
“‘Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity!
“‘Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord’s wrath.
“‘For, behold, the Lord said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, A plumb-line. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumb-line in the midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass by them any more.
“‘For judgment will I lay to the line and righteousness to the plumb-line: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place.
“‘For ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.
“‘But your covenant with death shall be disannulled and your agreement with hell shall not stand.’”
As the speaker went on marshalling and massing with stern conviction the tremendous indictments and declarations of the Hebrew prophets, which the people before him had never heard thus definitely applied to their own social conditions, the dramatic effect became irresistible. A mighty blast of wind seemed to bow their heads, and many trembled and grew pale.
Suddenly John Gregory, whose whole face and figure had been rigid and set with the awe of what he spoke, stepped out to the very edge of the platform, and, with a gesture of gentleness and reconcilement, and a smile which relaxed the tense mood of his hearers, cried:—
“But this is not all! Never did the prophets leave the people without a ray of hope—never did they withhold
“‘Belief in plan of God enclosed in time and space,
Health, peace, salvation.’
“‘Is it a dream?
Nay, but the lack of it a dream,
And failing it life’s love and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream.’”
These words were spoken with no less conviction than those which had gone before, but the change of voice, of expression, of attitude and gesture, were those which only a master of oratory could have so swiftly effected. The audience, now wholly under his control, felt a new thrill of comfort, of hope, even of exultation.
“The Spirit of God is brooding in the bosom of all this chaos, and a new day dawns. Fear not, but look within. Your own heart confesses the bond of brotherhood which unites you to all the race. Let your heart speak.
“Men everywhere see the new light, and confess and deny not that it is the true light, the light which lighteth every man coming into the world, until sin and selfishness quench it.
“The day is come when men shall no longer greedily seek their own salvation; the straitened individualism of the fathers has had its day; even the passion for personal perfection is refined selfishness from the new point of view. Many Christian souls have been misled in the past by the mistaken idea of self-sacrifice and renunciation, not for their results to humanity, but for the perfecting of self, a fruitless, joyless, Christless thing. The continual seeking for the safety here and hereafter of the individual—the man’s own advantage, what if spiritual?—held up always as his chief and noblest aim, have resulted in Christianity becoming a symbol for sublimated selfishness.
“A greater, nobler motive is ours to-day—no new gospel, but a right reading of the old, a deeper insight into his purpose who said, ‘If any man serve me, let him follow me.’
“Here may we, at last, and perhaps for the first time in long years of blind and baffled longing for the fellowship of Christ our Sacrifice, learn the awful joy of dying in our own lives that so we may not live alone.
“Your soul cannot rise toward God, my brother, while you are treading down other souls beneath your feet. Cease the hopeless effort. Take the world’s burden on your heart, and you shall know Christ. Refuse the joys which can only be for the few and the rich. Take nothing but what you can share. Learn poverty and simplicity and hardihood; unlearn luxury, exclusiveness, epicureanism. Be pioneers in the new state, apostles of the new-old gospel—the Gospel of Brotherhood, of Fellowship, of Sacrifice.”
As Anna Mallison, in her early girlhood, had responded with swift, unquestioning response to the simple appeal of the missionary, and had offered herself unreservedly to the work of seeking lost souls in the heathen world, so now, in the maturity of her womanhood, her inmost soul confessed that her hour had come. The message of John Gregory, heard vaguely and partially before, had now reached her fully, and she found its claim upon her irresistible.
“Where this leads, I follow,” a voice said in her heart; “I follow though I die! It is for this I have waited.”
Turning, she looked into her husband’s face, and their eyes met. Keith Burgess read what he intuitively expected in the deep awe of Anna’s eyes; while she read in his a sympathy and response, real, and yet strangely sad.
Gregory had been about to leave the platform, his address ended; but the audience sat unmoving, as if they would hear more. A man rose up then, in the middle of the hall, and spoke.
“Mr. Gregory,” he said, “some of the people are saying that, having told us so much, you ought to tell us more. If it is true that you have some scheme or system by which people like us could live such a life as you describe, we want to hear about it.”
Having so said, he sat down.
John Gregory turned about and came slowly back to his former place. Here he stood, confronting the people with a gravely musing smile. Again, as she saw him, there swept over Anna’s memory the sense that this was the presence of her girlish dream, and the old indefinable sense of joy in the power of this man was shed into her heart.
“You want to hear me say something about Fraternia, I suppose,” said Gregory, slowly.
“I am not here for that purpose. I covet no man’s silver or gold for my project, let that be distinctly understood first of all. Fraternia has not had to beg for support, thus far. Men and women who are like-minded with ourselves are welcome to join themselves to us. No others need apply,” and he smiled a peculiar, humorous smile of singular charm.
“Fraternia,” he continued, “is an experiment. It is only a year old. Is is what may be called a coöperative colony, I should think; that is, a little community of people who believe that no one ought to be idle and no one ought to overwork, and accordingly all work a reasonable number of hours a day. We also believe that an aristocratic, privileged class is not a good thing, not even a necessary evil, but a mere gross product of human selfishness. We have none, accordingly, in Fraternia, nor anything corresponding to it. We are all on a precisely equal footing. That bitterest and tightest of all class distinctions, the aristocracy of money, is unknown among us. Those who have joined us have thus far put their property into the common treasury, and all fare alike. We propose to work out this social problem on actual and practical lines. We all work and all share alike in the results of our work.
“You will ask what we do. Fraternia lies in a valley among the foothills of southwestern North Carolina. We raise all kinds of fruit, some grain, and some cotton. We have water-power, a mountain stream as beautiful as it is useful, and so we have built a cotton mill. We have made it as pretty as we could, this mill,—better than any man’s house, since the house is for the individual, and the mill for the use of all. By the same token our church and our library are to be finer than our houses when we advance so far as to build them. We have nothing costly or luxurious in Fraternia, but our mill is really very attractive. We all like to work in it. You know it is natural to like to work under human and decent conditions. I believe no man ever liked absolute idleness. It is overwork and work under hideous and unwholesome conditions against which men revolt.
“In our personal and home life, simplicity and hardihood are the key-notes. No servants are employed, for all serve. Our luxuries are the mountain laurel and pine, the exquisite sky and air, the voices of the forest, the crystal clearness of the brook. In these we all share. So do we in the books and the few good pictures which we are so happy as to own; in the best music we can muster and in the service of divine worship. Life is natural, homely, simple, joyous. Its motive: By love, serve one another. From no one is the privilege of service withheld. Thank God, we have no forlorn leisure class.
“Our mission, however, is not to ourselves alone, but to the world outside. We are holding up, by our daily living, a constant object-lesson. We are preaching coöperation and social brotherhood louder than any voice can ever preach it, and the small child and the simple girl can preach as well as the cultured woman and the strong man.
“Who are we? We are mostly from England, many from the slums of London, others from its higher circles, some Germans and Scandinavians, and thus far not more than a dozen American families. Some of us had nothing to begin with, and some had large property; some were so unfortunate as to belong to the number of those who oppress the poor in mills and mines, while others were simple peasants. We have no difficulty in living happily together on the broad basis of a common human nature, a common purpose, and a common hope.
“But there is another side to this adventure, friends,” and Gregory spoke with deeper seriousness. “Fraternia is nothing unless it is builded on the immutable laws of God and of righteousness. Never, never can we succeed if sin grows little to us and self large. Our message will be taken from us, our arm will be paralyzed, if the day shall ever come when the lust of gold, the lust of power, the lust of pride, shall taint the free air of our high valley.
“So then, if any among you would join our ranks, see that you shrive your souls and come to us seeking only the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.”