CHARITY AND PHILANTHROPY.
There is no denying that our age, in its dormant tendency, places philanthropy above charity, and holds it higher praise to call a man philanthropic than to call him charitable. In its eyes charity is to philanthropy as a part to the whole, and consists, chiefly, in giving the beggar a penny or sending him to the poor-house, and in treating error and sin with even more consideration than truth and virtue. Could anything better indicate the distance it has fallen below the Christian thought, or its failure to grasp the principle of Christian morals?
Philanthropy, according to the etymology of the word, is simply the love of man; charity, according to Christian theology, is the love of God, and of man in God. Philanthropy is simply a natural human sentiment; charity is a virtue, a supernatural virtue, not possible without the assistance of grace—the highest virtue, the sum and perfection of all the virtues, the fulfilment of the whole law, the bond of perfectness which likens and unites us to God; for God is charity, Deus est caritas. It does not exclude but includes the love of man, our neighbor or our brother; "for if any man say, I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar. For if he loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not?" Whoever loves God must necessarily love his brother, for his brother is included in God, as the effect in the cause, and he who loveth not his brother proves clearly thereby that he doth not love God. But charity, though it includes philanthropy, is as much superior to it as God is to man.
The natural sentiments are all good in their origin and design, as much so since as before the fall; and man would be worthless without them; would be a monster, not a man. But in themselves they are blind. Each one tends, when left to itself, to become exclusive and excessive, and hence comes that internal disorder, anarchy, or war of conflicting sentiments of which we are all more or less conscious, and in which originate all life's tragedies. Even when developed, restrained, and directed by the understanding, as they all need to be, they are not even then moral virtues, meriting praise. Moral virtue is a rational act, an act of free will, done for the sake of the end prescribed by the law of God; but in the sentiments there is no free will, except in restraining and directing them, and man acts in them only as the sun shines, the rain falls, the winds blow, or the lightnings flash. There may the beauty and goodness in them, as in the objects of nature, but there is no virtue, because the spring of all sentimental action is the indulgence or gratification of the sentiment itself, not the will to do our duty, or to obey the law by which we are morally bound.
Indeed, what most offends this age—perhaps all ages—and for which it has the greatest horror, is duty or obedience; for duty implies that we are not our own, and, therefore, are not free to dispose of ourselves as we please; and obedience implies a superior, a lord and master, who has the right to order us. It, therefore, sets its wits to work and racks its brains to invent a morality that excludes duty, and exacts no such hateful same as obedience. It has found all that it is far nobler to act from love than from duty, and to do a thing because we are prompted to do it by our hearts, then because God, in his law, commands it. [{435}] In other words, it is nobler, more moral, to act to please ourselves, than it is to act to please God. This passes for excellent philosophy, and you may hear it in conversation of many young misses just from boarding-school, read it in most popular novels and magazines, and be edified by it from the pulpit of more than one professedly Christian denomination.
This philosophy sets the so-called heart above the head, that is, it distinguishes the heart from the understanding and will, and places it, as so distinguished, above them. Hence we find the tendency is to treat faith, considered as an intellectual act, and consequently the Christian dogmas, with great indifference; and to say, if the heart is right, it is no matter what one believes, and, it may be added, no matter what one does. What one does is of little consequence, if one only has fine sentiments, warm and gushing feelings. Jack Scapegrace is hard drinking a gambler, a liar, a rake, and seldom goes near a church; but for all that he is a right down good fellow—has a warm heart. He gives liberally to the missionary society, and makes large purchases at charity fairs. Hence a good heart, which at best means only quick sensibilities, and which is perfectly compatible with the grossest self-indulgence, and the most degrading and ruinous vices, constitutes the sum and substance of religion and morality, atones for the violation of every precept of the Decalogue, and supplies the absence of faith and Christian virtue.
All errors are half truths. Certainly, love is the fulfilling of the law, and the heart is all that God requires. "My son, give me thy heart." But the "heart" in the scriptural sense is reason, the intellect, and the will; and the love that fulfils the law is not a sentiment, but a free act of the rational soul, and, therefore, a love which it is within our power to give or withhold. It is a free, voluntary love, yielded by intelligence and will. In this sense, love cannot be contrasted with duty; for it is duty, or its fulfilment, and indistinguishable from it; the heart cannot be contrasted with the head, in the scriptural or Christian sense of the word; for in that sense it includes the head, and stands for the whole rational soul—the mistress of her own acts. To act from the promptings of one's own heart, in this sense, is all right, for it is to act from a sense of duty, from reason and will, or intelligence and free volition. In souls well constituted and trained, or long exercised in the practice of virtue, no long process of reasoning or deliberation ever takes place, and the decision and execution are simultaneous, and apparently instantaneous, but the act is none the less an act of deliberate reason or free will.
Plato speaks of a love which is not an affection of the sensibility, and which is one of the wings of the soul on which she soars to the Empyreum; but I can understand no love that contrasts with duty, except it be an affection of the sensitive nature, what the Scriptures call "the flesh," which is averted by the fall from God, and, as the Council of Trent defines, "inclines to sin"—"the carnal mind," which, St. Paul tells us, is at enmity with God, is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. Christianity recognizes an antagonism between the flesh and the spirit, between the law in our members and the Law of the mind, but none between the love she approves and the duty she enjoins, or between the heart which God demands and the head or the understanding. Love by the Christian law is demanded as a duty, as that which is due from us to God. We are required to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. This is our duty, and therefore the love must be an act of free will—a love which we are free to yield or to withhold, for our duty can never exceed our liberty. The Christian loves duty, loves self-denial and sacrifice, loves the law, and delights in it after [{436}] the inner man; but in loving the law he acts freely from his own reason and will, and he obeys it not for the sake of the delight he takes in it, but because it is God's law; otherwise he would act to please himself, not to please God, and his act would be simply an act of self-indulgence.
The age, in its efforts to construct a morality which excludes duty and obedience, tends to resolve the love which Christianity demands into an affection of the sensibility, and thence very logically opposes love to duty, and holds it nobler to act from inclination than from duty, to follow the law in our members than the law of the mind. It may then substitute, with perfect consistency, the transcendentalist maxim, Obey thyself, for the Christian maxim. Deny thyself!
But this is not all. The age, or what is usually called the age, not only resolves virtue, which old-fashioned ethics held to be an act of free will done in obedience to the Divine law, into a sentiment, or interior affection, of the sensibility, but it goes further and resolves God into man, and maintains that the real sense of the mystery of the Incarnation, of the Word made flesh, is that man is the only actual and living God, and that beyond humanity there is only infinite possibility, which humanity in its infinite progress and evolution and absorption of individual life is continually actualizing, or filling up. So virtually teaches Hegel, inconsiderately followed by Cousin, in teaching that das reine Seyn, or simply possible being, arrives at self-consciousness first in man. So teach the Saint Simonians, Enfantin, Bazard, Carnot, and Pierre Leroux; and so hold the school or sect of the Positivists, followers of Auguste Comte, who have actually instituted un culte or service in honor of humanity. The Positivists are too modest to claim to be themselves each individually God, but they make no bones of calling humanity, or the great collective man, God, and offering him, as such, a suitable worship. This is taught and done in France, the most lettered nation in Europe; and the principle that justifies it pervades not a little of the popular literature of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.
If man or humanity is God, of course the highest virtue is and must be philanthropy, the love of all men in general, and of no one in particular. Resolve now God into man, and philanthropy or the love of man into an affection of the sensibility or sensitive nature, and you have in a nutshell the theology, religion, and morality to which the age tens, which the bulk of our popular literature favors, which our sons and daughters inhale with the very atmosphere they breathe, and which explains the effeminacy and sentimentalism of modern society. It is but a logical sequence that the age, since women are ordinarily narily more sentimental than men, places woman at the head of the race, and holds woman—if young, beautiful amiable, sentimental, and rich—to be the most perfect and adorable embodiment of the divinity. The highest form of philanthropy is the love of woman. I would say, philogyny, only that might be taken to imply that the highest virtue is the love of one's wife, or wifehood, which is to old-fashioned, unless by wife is meant the wife of one's neighbor. But, my dear young lady, be not too vain of the homage you receive; it will be withheld with the first appearance of the first wrinkle or the first gray hair. It is better to be honored as a true woman than to be worshipped as a goddess or even as an angel.
The sentimental worship of humanity, or the reduction of the virtue of charity to the sentiment of philanthropy, necessarily weaken and debases the character; and whatever we may say under various aspects and praise of our age, and however strong our confidence that God in his providence will turn even its evil tendencies to good, we cannot deny its moral weakness; and it is doubtful if [{437}] the debasement of individual character was greater, even in the Lower Empire, or that men were more dishonest or fraudulent, more sordid or venal. Other ages have been marked, perhaps, by less refinement of manners, more violent crimes, and great criminals, but few are found less capable either of great virtues or great expiations. This need not surprise us, for it is only the natural effect of substituting sentiment for virtue, and sentimental for moral culture, which we are constantly doing.
Many, perhaps, will be disposed to deny that we have substituted sentimental for moral culture, and it must be concluded that the didactic lessons given in our schools throughout Christendom, for the most part, remain very much as they have been ever since there was a Christendom, and in general accord with pure Christian ethics. There are few, if any, schools for children and youth, in which the sentimental and humanitarian morality, or rather immorality, is formally taught. But we should remember that the didactic lessons of the school-room do very little toward forming the character of our youth, and that the culture that really forms it is given by the home circle, associations, the spirit and tone of the community in which they are brought up. There is a subtle influence, what the Germans call der Welt-Geist, which pervades the whole community, and affects the faith, the morals, and character of all who grow up in that community without any formal instruction or conscious effort of any one. So far as formal lessons and words go, the culture of our children and youth is, for the most part, Christian; but these lessons and words receive a practical interpretation by der Welt-Geist, what I call s spirit of the age, and should, "the prince of this world," which deprives them of their Christian sense, takes from them all meaning, or gives them an anti-Christian meaning. It is one of the striking peculiarities of the age that it inculcates the baldest infidelity, the grossest immorality in the language of Christian faith and virtue. It is this fact which deceives so many, and that makes the assertion of sentimental for moral culture appear to be a total misstatement, or, at least, a gross exaggeration of the fact.
It will, no doubt, also be said that a decided reaction in our popular literature against sentimentalism has already commenced. The realism of Dickens and the Trollopes is opposed to it, Bulwer Lytton, in his late novels at least, is decidedly hostile to it, and Thackeray unmercifully ridicules it. These and other popular writers have undoubtedly reacted against one form of sentimentalism, the dark and suicidal form placed in vogue by Goethe in his Sorrows of Werter, and now nearly forgotten; but they have not ridiculed or reacted against the form of sentimentalism which substitutes the sentiment of philanthropy for the virtue of charity. They encourage humanitarianism, and make the love of man for woman or woman for man the great agent in developing, enlarging, and strengthening the intellect, the spring of the purest and sublimest morality. The hero of popular literature is now rarely an avowed unbeliever or open scoffer, and in all well-bred novels the heroine says her prayers night and morning, and the author decidedly patronizes Christianity, and says many beautiful and even true things in its favor; but, after all, his religion is based on humanity, is only a charming sentimentalism, embraced for its loveliness, not as duty or the law which it would be sin to neglect; or it is introduced as a foreign and incongruous element, never as the soul or informing spirit of the novel.
The fact is undeniable, whether people are generally conscious of it or not, and we see its malign influence not only on individual character, but on domestic and social life. It has nearly broken up and rendered impossible the Christian family in the easy and educated classes. [{438}] Marriage is, it is said, where and only where there is mutual love, and hence the marriage is in the mutual love, is lawful between any parties who mutually love, unlawful between any who do not. Love is an interior affection of the sensibility, a feeling, and like all the feelings independent of reason and will. All popular literature makes love fatal, something undergone, not given. We love where we must; not where we would nor where we should, but where we are fated to love. It needs not here to speak of infidelity to the marriage vows, which this doctrine justifies to any extent, for those vows are broken when broken from unreasoning passion or lust, not from a theory which justifies it. I speak rather of the misery which it carries into married life, the destruction of domestic peace and happiness it causes. Trained in the sentimentalism of the age, and to regard love as a feeling dependent on causes beyond our control, our young people marry, expecting from marriage what it has not, and cannot give. They expect the feeling which they call love, and which gives a roseate hue to everything they look upon, will continue as fresh, as vivid, and as charming after marriage as before it; but the honeymoon is hardly over, and they begin to settle down in the regular routine of life, before they discover their mistake, the roseate hue has gone, their feelings have undergone a notable change, and they are disappointed in each other, and feel that the happiness they counted on is no longer to be expected. The stronger and more intense the mutual feeling the greater the disappointment, and hence the common saying: Love matches are seldom happy matches. Each party is disappointed in the other, frets against the chain that binds them together, and wishes it broken.
This is only what might have been expected. Nothing is more variable or transitory than our feelings, and nothing that depends on them can be unchanging or lasting. When the feelings of the married couple change toward each other, the marriage bond becomes a galling chain, and is felt to be a serious evil, and divorce is desired and resorted to as a remedy. It is usually no remedy at all, or a remedy worse even than the disease; but it is the only remedy practicable where feeling is substituted for rational affection. Hence, in nearly all modern states, the legislature, in direct conflict with the Christian law, which makes marriage a sacrament and indissoluble, permits divorce, and in some states for causes as frivolous as incompatibility of temper. It is easy to censure the legislature but it must follow and express the morals, manners, sentiments, and demands of the people, and when these are repugnant to the divine law, it cannot in its enactments conform to that law; and if did, it's enactments would be resisted as tyrannical and oppressive, or remained on the statute book a dead letter, as did so much wise and just legislation inspired by the church in the middle ages. The evil lies further back, in the humanitarianism of the age, which reverses the real order, puts the flesh in the place of the spirit, philanthropy in the place of charity, and man in the place of God, and which promotes an excessive culture of the sentiments, at the expense of rational conviction and affection. There is no remedy but in returning to the order we have reversed, to the higher culture of reason and free will, not possible without faith in God and the Christian mysteries.
But passing over the effects of sentimental morality on individual character, the private virtues, and domestic happiness, we find it no less hostile to social ameliorations and reforms in the state. The age is philanthropic, and wages war with every form of vice, poverty, and suffering, and is greatly shocked at the evils it finds past ages tolerated without ever making an effort to remove them, hardly even to mitigate them. [{439}] This is well as far as it goes; but in an age when the sensitive nature is chiefly cultivated, when physical pain is counted the chief evil, and sensible pleasures held to be the chief good, practically, if not theoretically, many things will be regarded as evils which, in a more robust and manly age, were unheeded, or not counted as evils at all. Many things in our day need changing, simply because other things having been changed, they have become anomalous and are out of place. What in one state of society is simple poverty, is really distress in another; and poverty, which in itself is no evil, becomes a great evil in a community where wealth is regarded as the supreme good, and the poor have wants, habits, and tastes which only wealth an satisfy. The poorer classes of today in civilized nations would suffer intensely if thrown back into the condition they were in under the feudal régime, but it may be doubted if they do not really suffer as much now as they did then. Perhaps such wants as they then had were more readily met and supplied than are those which they now have. In point of fact, Christian charity did infinitely more for the poor and to solace suffering in all its forms, even in the feudal ages, than philanthopy does now; and we find the greatest amount of squalid wretchedness now precisely in those nations in which philanthopy has been most successful in supplanting charity.
Philanthropy effects nothing except in so far as it copies or imitates Christian Charity, and its attempted imitations are rarely successful. It has for years been very active and hard at work in imitation of charity; but what has it effected? what suffering has it solaced? what crime has it diminished? what vice has it corrected? what social evil has it removed? It has tried its hand against licentiousness, and licentiousness is more rife and shameless than ever. It has made repeated onslaughts on the ruinous vice of intemperance, and yet drunkenness increases instead of diminishing, and has become the disgrace of the country-. It has professed great regard for the poor, but does more to remove them out of sight than to relieve them. It treats poverty as a vice or a crime, looks on it as a disgrace, a thing to be fled from with all speed possible, and makes the poor feel that wealth is virtue, honor, nobility, the greatest good, and thus destroys their self respect, aggravates their discontent, and indirectly provokes the crimes against property become so general and so appalling. What a moral New York reads us in the fact that she makes her commissioners of "Public Charities" also commissioners of "Public Corrections!" Philanthropy rarely fails to aggravate the evil she attempts to cure, or to cure one evil by introducing another and a greater evil. Her remedies are usually worse than the disease.
Owen, Fourier, Cabet, and other philanthropists have made serious efforts to reorganize society so as to remove the inequalities or the evils of the inequalities of wealth and social position; but have all failed, because they needed, in order to succeed, the habits, character, and virtues which, on their own theories, can be obtained only from success. As a rule, philanthropy must succeed in order to be able to succeed.
Philanthropy—humanitarianism—has been shocked at slavery, and in our country as well as in some others it formed associations for its abolition. In the West India Islands, belonging to Great Britain, it succeeded in abolishing it, to the ruin of the planters and very little benefit to the slave. In this country, if slavery is abolished, it has not been done by philanthropy, which served only to set the North and the South by the ears, but by the military authority as a war measure, necessary, or judged to be necessary, to save the Union and to guard against future attempts to dissolve it. Philanthropy is hard at work to make abolition a blessing to the freedmen. It talks, sputters, [{440}] clamors, legislates, but it can effect nothing; and unless Christian charity takes the matter in hand, it is very evident that, however much emancipation may benefit the white race, it can prove of little benefit to the emancipated, who will be emancipated in name, but not in reality.
The great difficulty with philanthropy is, that she acts from feeling and not reason, and uses reason only as the slave or instrument of feeling. Wherever she sees an evil she rushes headlong to its removal, blind to the injury she may do to rights, principles, and institutions essential to liberty and the very existence of society. Hence she usually in going to her end tramples down more good by the way than she can obtain in gaining it. She has no respect for vested rights, regards no geographical lines, and laughs at the constitutions of states, if they stand in her way. Liberty with us was more interested in maintaining inviolate the constitution of the Union and the local rights of the several states, than it was even in abolishing negro slavery, and hence many wise and good men, who had no interest in retaining slavery, and who detested it as an outrage upon humanity, did not and could not act or sympathize with the abolitionists. They yield in nothing to them in the earnest desire to abolish slavery, but they would abolish it by legal and peaceful means—means that would not weaken the hold of the constitution and civil law on conscience, and destroy the safeguards of liberty. The abolitionists did not err in being opposed to slavery, but in the principles on which they sought its abolition. Adam did not sin in aspiring to be God; for that, in a certain sense, he was destined, through the incarnation, one day to become. His sin was in aspiring to be God without the incarnation, in his own personal right and might, and in violation of the divine command, or by other means than those prescribed by his Creator and Lawgiver, the only possible means of attaining the end sought.
Philanthropy commits the same error whatever the good work she attempts, and especially in all her attempts at political reforms. She finds herself "cabined, cribbed, confined" by old political institutions, and cries out, Down with them. She demands for the people a liberty which she sees they have not and cannot have under the existing political order, and so proceeds at once to conspire against it, to revolutionize the state, deluges the land in blood, and gets anarchy, the Reign of Terror, or military despotism for its pains. Never were there more sincere or earnest philanthropists than the authors of the old French Revolution. The violent revolutions attempted in modern Europe in the name of humanity, have done more harm to society by unsettling the bases of society and effacing in men's minds and hearts the traditional respect for law and order, than any good they could have done by sweeping away the social and political abuses they warred against. The French are not politically or individually freer to-day than they were under Louis Quatorze.
There are, no doubt, times when an old political order, as in Rome after Marius and Sulla, has become effete, and can no longer fulfil the duties or discharge the offices of a government, in which a revolution, like that effected under the lead of Julius an Augustus Caesar, may be desirable and advantageous, for it establishes a practicable and a real government in the place of a government that can no longer discharge the functions of government, and is virtually no government at all. The empire was a great advance on the republic, which was incapable of being restored. But revolutions properly so-called, undertaken for the subversion of an existing order and the introduction of another held to be theoretically more perfect, have never, so far as history records, been productive of good. No doubt England is to-day in advance of what she was under the Stuarts, but who dares say that she is in advance of [{441}] what she would have been had she not expelled them, or that she has become greater under the Whig nobility than she might have been under the Tory squirarchy?
There has been, I readily concede, a real progress in modern society, at least dating from the fifth century of our era; but, as I read history, the progress has been interrupted or retarded by modern socialistic or political revolutions, and has in no case been accelerated by philanthropy as distinguished from Christian charity. Moreover, in no state of Christendom has charity ever been wholly wanting. Nations have cast off the authority of the church, and have greatly suffered in consequence; but in none has divine charity been totally wanting, and the influence of Christianity on civilization, even in heretical and schismatic nations, is not to be counted as nothing. I am far from believing that the nations that broke away from the church are not better than they would have been if they had not had the benefit of the habits formed under her teaching and discipline. I know that extra ecclesiam nulla sit salus; but I know also that the church is as a city set on a hill, and that rays from the light within her may and do extend beyond her walls, and relieve in some degree the darkness of those who are outside of them. How much the church continues to influence nations once within her communion, but now severed from it, nobody is competent to determine, nor can any one but God himself say how many, in all these nations, though not formally united to the body of the church, are yet not wholly severed from her soul. The Russian Church retains the Orthodox faith and the sacraments, and is officially under no sentence of excommunication from the body of Christ, and only those who are individually and voluntarily schismatic, are guilty of the sin of schism; and in other communions, though undoubtedly heretical, there may be large numbers of baptized persons who do really act on Christian principles, and from purely Christian motives. All I mean to deny is, that society or humanity ever gains anything from violent or sentimental revolutions.
The impotence of philanthropy without charity, or pure humanism, is demonstrable à priori, and should have been foreseen. It is opposed to the nature of things, and implies the absurdity that nothing is something, and that what is not can act. It is an attempt to found religion, morals, society, and the state without God; when without God there is and can be nothing, and consequently nothing for them to stand on. It assumes that man is an independent being, and suffices for himself; which, whether we mean by man the individual or humanity, "the universal man," "the one man" of the Transcendentalists, or "the grand collective Being" of the Positivists, we all feel and know to be not the fact. Man in either sense is a creature, and depends absolutely on the creative act of God for his existence; and let God suspend that act, and he sinks into the nothing he was before he was created. Therefore it is in God mediante his creative act he lives and moves and has his being. Hence it is, whether we know it or not, that we assert the existence of God as our creator in every act we perform, every thought we think, every resolution we take, every sentiment we experience, and every breath we draw, for no human operation—physical, intellectual, or moral—is possible without the divine creative act and concurrence.
Philanthropy, or the love of man, separated from charity, or the love of God and of man in God, is therefore simply nothing, a mere negation, for it supposes man separated from God is something, and separated from God he is nothing. Hence St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, says: "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries, and have [{442}] all knowledge, and have all faith, so I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and should give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." This is so not by virtue of any arbitrary decree or appointment of the Almighty, even if such decree or appointment is possible, but in the very, nature of things, and God himself cannot make it otherwise. God is free to create or not to create, and free to create such existences as he pleases; but he cannot create an independent self-sufficing being, for he cannot create anything between which and himself there should not be the relation of creator and creature. The creature depends wholly, in all respects whatever, on the creator, and without him is and can be nothing. The creature depends absolutely on the creator in relation to all his acts, thoughts, and affections, as well as for mere existence itself. God could not, even if it were possible that he would, dispense with charity and count the love of man as independent of God, as something, because he is truth, and it is impossible for him to lie, and lie he would were he to count such supposed love something, for independent of him there is no man to love or to be loved. Man can love or be loved only where he exists; and as he exists in God, so only in God can we possibly love him, that is, we can love our neighbor only in loving God. The humanitarian love or morality is, therefore, a pure negation, simply nothing.
Man is, indeed, a free moral agent, and he would not be capable of virtue or a moral action, if he were not; but he can act, notwithstanding his moral freedom, only according to the conditions of his existence. He exists and can exist only by virtue of a supernatural principle, medium, and end. He exists only by the direct, immediate creative act of God, and God in himself and in his direct immediate acts, always and everywhere, is supernatural, above nature, because its creator, and, as its creator, its proprietor. The maker has a sovereign right to the thing made. The creature can no more be its own end than its own principle or cause. Man cannot take himself self as his own end, because he is not his own, but is his creator's, and because independent of God who he is nothing. So God is both his principle and end. But the end is not possible without a medium that places it in relation with the principle, as theologians demonstrate in their dissertations on the mystery of the ever blessed Trinity, and as common sense itself teaches. As the principle and end are supernatural, so the medium must be supernatural, for the medium must be on the plane of the principle and end between which is the medium. The medium, in the moral or spiritual order, the gospel teaches us, is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which infused by the Holy Ghost into the soul elevates her to the plane of her supernatural destiny, and strengthens her to gain or fulfil it. Hence, as says the apostle, Ex ipso, et per ipsum, et in ipso sunt omnia—things are from him, and by him, and to or in him. These are the essential conditions of all life, alike in the natural or physical order, and in the moral or spiritual. In all orders God is the principle, medium, and end of all existence, of all action.
In the moral or spiritual order, not in the natural or physical order, man is a free agent, and acts from free will, as Pope sings:
"God, binding nature fast in fate,
Leaves free the human will."
Grace assisting, man can conform to the essential conditions of his existence—conditions determined and unalterably fixed by his relation to God as his creator—by the free act of his own will; and by doing so he lives morally, or has moral life. He can also, by virtue of his liberty or freedom, refuse to conform, or in theological language, to obey God, but he cannot so refuse and live in the moral order. This refusal is not a living act, it is simply [{443}] the negation of moral life, and therefore is moral death, as the Scriptures call it. He does not necessarily cease to exist in the natural or physical order, for in that order he cannot sever himself from God, even if he would; he may kill his body, but not the physical life of the soul, immortal, except by the will of its creator. But he can extinguish his moral life, or refuse to live a moral life, which is moral or spiritual death; and death is not a positive existence, but the negation of existence, and therefore, nothing. Hence life and death in the moral order are set before us, and we are free to choose which we will. To choose, grace assisting, life, and freely of our own will to conform to the conditions of life, to God as our principle, medium, and and, is precisely what is meant by Christian charity, a virtue that fulfils all the conditions imposed by our relation to God as his creatures, the whole law of our existence, and unites our will with the will of God, and by so doing makes us morally or spiritually one with God. He who refuses charity, or has it not, voluntarily renounces God, separates himself morally, and so far as his own will goes even physically, from God; and as severed from God he exists not at all; and therefore says the apostle, "Without charity I am nothing." He only declares what is real, what is true in the nature of things, and which God himself cannot alter.
Philanthropy is, therefore, necessarily impotent, for it tends to death, not life; and as there is no action, physical or moral, that does not tend to a real end, it is not action, but a negation of action, and is therefore in itself nothing positive. All the sentiments for this reason are negative, simple wants of the soul. The soul may exert her powers to satisfy them, or to fill up the void in her being, which they all indicate, but they are in themselves nothing. They indicate not what the soul has, but what she wants or needs to complete herself; and that can never the obtained from the creature save in God, for the creature out of God, separated or turned away from God, is nothing; it is something only in God. Any morality, then, built on the sentiments is as unsubstantial as castles in the air, and as unreal as "the baseless fabric of a vision." The sentiments being wants, negative, with nothing positive in themselves, are necessarily impotent. They are unsatisfied wants, and incapable of attaining to anything that can satisfy them. They are a hungering and thirsting of the soul for what it is not and has not. Here is the explanation of the misery and wretchedness of a sentimental age, why it is so ill-at-ease, so restless, so discontented in the midst of material progress, and the accumulations of sensible goods. It explains, too, why the damned, or those who fail in their destiny, must suffer for ever. Death and hell are not positive existences or positive creations of God, but are the want of spiritual life, are the unsatisfied wants, the endless cravings of the soul for what can be had only in God, and the lost have turned their backs on God.
Charity is not negative, not a want, but a power; and it is easy, therefore, to understand that while philanthropy is impotent it is effective. Charity grasps, as do all the rational affections, her object, and is effective because she is positive not negative, living not dead; and living, because she conforms to the real conditions of life, and participates, through his creative act, in the life of him who is life himself. She is less pretentious and more modest in her proceedings and promises than philanthropy, but makes up for it in the richness and magnificence of the results she obtains. She works slowly and with patience, for she works for eternity, not time—without pomp or parade, in obscurity and silence, for she seeks the praise of God, not the praise of men. To the onlooker she seems not to move, any more than the sun in the heavens; but after a while we find that she has moved, and has transformed the world. [{444}] Broad in her love and expansive as the universe, and embracing all ages and nations in her affections, she yet wastes not her strength in vague generalities, nor in manifold projects of reform or progress of the race in general, from which no one in particular has anything to expect; but takes men in the concrete as she finds them, does the work nearest at hand and most pressing to be done, and proceeding quietly from the individual to the family, from the family to society and the state, she works out the regeneration of all in working out the regeneration of each. She works as God works, without straining or effort, for her power is great and never fails. Power needs make no effort; it speaks and it is done, commands and it stands fast. Let there be light, and there is light. It is weakness that must strain and tug, as we see in the feeble literature of the day, and philanthropy seems to the observer to be always more in earnest and far harder at work than charity, and attracts far more attention; but while she fills the world with her hollow sounds, charity, unheeded and unheard, fills it with her deeds.
History is at hand to confirm the conclusions of reason, though the full history of charity has never been written, and the greater part of her deeds are known only to him whose eye seeth all things, and will be revealed, only at the last day. But something has been recorded and is known. We in our day think we are doing much to relieve the poor and oppressed, to console the suffering, and to bind up the broken-hearted; but the best of us would be put to shame were we to study what charity did during the decline and fall of the Roman empire and the barbarous ages that immediately followed. We have boasted, and perhaps justly, of the services rendered to humanity during our late civil war by our Christian Commissions and Sanitary Commissions; but what was done by them during four years is nothing in comparison with what was done daily by Christian charity to relieve suffering and distress far greater than were experienced by those even who suffered most from the ravages of our civil war, and that not for four years only, but for four centuries. I have here no room for details, or even for the barest outline of what charity did during the long agony of the old world and the birth of the new; but this much must be said, that it was everywhere present and energetic, and seemed everywhere to renew the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes; and when that old world had passed away, it was found that a new world on a far broader and more durable foundation had taken it's place. Charity had to deal with poverty and want, with sickness and sorrow, and she relieved them; with captives and prisoners of war, and she ransomed them even with the plate from the altar; with barbarians whose highest vision of heaven was to sit in the halls of Valhalla, and quaff from human skulls the blood of their enemies—she tamed, humanized, and civilized them, and made them the foremost nations of the world; with slaves, for Europe was covered over with them—and she mitigated their lot, lightened their oppression, secured for them the moral rights of Christians, and finally broke their chains and made them, not freedmen only, but freemen, Christian freemen, and brothers of the noblest and proudest.
What if it took centuries to abolish slavery? It did not take her centuries to christen the slaves, to bring them spiritual freedom, and provide for their souls. She did not wait till she had abolished the slavery of the body before abolishing the far more grievous slavery of the soul, teaching the slaves the truth that liberates, incorporating them into the church of God, and making them free and equal citizens of the commonwealth of Christ. With this spiritual freedom, of which philanthropy knows nothing, but which is the basis of all real freedom, and with ample provisions for the wants of the soul, [{445}] the slave could wait in patience for the day of deliverance from bodily servitude. That day might be long in coming, come it surely would; and it did come, and peaceably, without civil war, social convulsion, industrial or economical disturbance. But, unhappily, with us only a feeble portion of the slaves were really Christianized, and by their moral and spiritual training as free and equal members of the church, which makes no distinction between the bond and the free, the white and the black, fitted to take their position and play there are parts as free and equal members of civil society Moreover, we have not been able to emancipate them peaceably; we have done it only by a terrible civil war, in the midst of the clash of arms, as a means of saving the life of the nation, or of perpetuating the union of the states; and the most difficult problem remains to be solved, which the humanitarians flatter themselves will be solved without trouble by political economy, or the general law of demand and supply; but which they will find it will need more Christian Charity than the nation has hitherto possessed to solve, without the gradual extinction in this country of the negro race. The last thing to be relied on for adjusting any social question, elevating any class to social or civil equality, or making freedmen really freemen, is political economy, which treats man not as a free moral agent, or as a social being, but simply as a producing, distributing, and and consuming machine, placed in the same category with the steam-plough, patent reaper, spinning-jenny, and the power-loom. If the question, What shall be done with our freedman? be left to politics, political economy, or philanthropy, without the intervention of Christian charity, emancipation will only have changed the form of their slavery, or given them all the cares and burdens of freedom with none of its blessings.
It is the same in all human affairs. No measured of reform or progress, individual or social, domestic or political, ever succeed or succeed without an overbalance of evil, unless inspired and directed by charity. They may and do succeed without perfect charity, but never without the principle of charity. Philanthropy is man's method, and leads to nothing; charity is God's method, and conducts to its end. But we must not confound charity with weakness or effeminacy of character, for that would be to confound it with sentimentalism. Charity is not credulity or mental imbecility; it is always robust and manly, the rational soul raised above itself by divine grace, and endowed in the spiritual order with superhuman power.
Charity loves peace, but follows after the things which make for peace, and shrinks not from following after them, when need is, even through war. Modern peace-societies are founded by philanthropy, not by charity, and though they have been in existence for half a century, and proudly boasted that there would be no more war, yet there have been more wars and bloodshed during the last twenty years than during any period of equal duration since modern history began. Charity founds no anti-hangman societies for the abolition of capital punishment in all cases whatsoever, or prisoners' friends societies to convert our prisons into palaces; yet recoils from all cruelty or undue severity, and seeks to prevent punishment by preventing crime. She never forgets justice, nor sacrifices in her love for individuals the protection of society or the safety of the state. Her great care is to save the soul of the criminal, and to this end she visits the most loathsome cells, takes her stand on the scaffold by the side of the condemned, and will not give him up till she has made his peace with God. She fills the soul with love for enemies and forgiveness of injuries, but they are my enemies she bids me love, and my personal injuries she bids me forgive. I cannot forgive injuries, done to my neighbor, to society, or to my country, for they are not mine; and she herself bids me, when summoned by the proper authority, to shoulder my musket and march to the battle-field to defend public right and repress public wrong. Charity is never weak, sentimental, lackadaisical, or cowardly. It is the principle of all true greatness and manliness, and the most charitable are the strongest, bravest, the most heroic, wherever duty calls them to act as well as to suffer.