As for the Church, it is failing in its mission, because it refuses to insist equally on the two aspects of the message it has undertaken to deliver to mankind.
If religion is received in a purely dogmatic sense, it can appeal only to our emotions and to the spiritual cravings of the more mystical side of men’s natures. This is only confusing and quite unsatisfying to our more rationalistic inclinations, which prefer a simple and direct ethical teaching. Christianity combines the two elements—the mystical and the rational—and fuses them together. Unfortunately there is a proneness to detach the former as all-important and sufficient in itself and to neglect the latter. The former has been built up gradually in successive centuries of varying and imaginative speculation, and however much it may appeal to the religious-minded, it is valueless when broken off from the latter. The ethical precepts for duty and conduct are, on the other hand, immutable, and in their pristine simplicity carry all their original force of authority and lose nothing from being divorced from dogmatic teaching. It requires no heights of spiritual exaltation to accept Christ’s explicit precepts as to sacrifice, humility, altruism, and the renunciation of worldly possessions, but men are encouraged by the Church to seek consolation in a fog of doctrinal obscurantism. Christ no doubt foresaw that we should take refuge in the incomprehensible in our failure to accept what to the humblest intelligence was perfectly comprehensible when he said, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven.”
His immediate successors were not handicapped by considerations for or subservience to those in authority who held the worldly power, and they spoke with no uncertain voice.
What is wanted in the Church to-day is something of the uncompromising spirit of those bygone days. Not condonation, or at the most half-hearted criticism, but wholesale denunciation in words of splendid vehemence such as the passage in the Epistle of St. James:
“Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rest of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just, and he doth not resist you.”
Chapter X
Results of influence of money—No motive in lives of the rich—Money as our master—If money ideal could be discarded—Possibility of change of ideal for all classes.
Only the surface of the subject has been touched, only a few of the many heads into which the discussion might be divided have been considered at all, and only some of the more patent dangers have been very briefly indicated. But enough has been said to support the original contention and to bring us fairly to the conclusion that in all directions the influence of the money possessed by individuals beyond the limit of what constitutes a full competence is harmful and noxious. It has a hardening, crippling, and deadening effect on the highly susceptible and sensitive organism of human vitality, like varnish would have on the wings of a butterfly. It substitutes patronage for fraternity, arrogance for humility, indolence for effort, vanity for love, the spirit of submission for the spirit of independence, an artificial class society for a natural society of mutual respect and affection. It saps vitality by surfeit and superabundance, and at the same time stunts healthy development by misery and want. It is a false and vicious standard for estimating worth. Greed and Cupidity are its parents, Envy and Jealousy its children.
But it is easier to disregard all this and to go on in what appears to be the natural and, indeed, inevitable course. We must take the world as it is, is the common cry, not as it ought to be, and unless we are prepared to be submerged and trodden under, we must follow in the throng and push forward and struggle with the rest. Some of us are able to feel resentment at A’s riches, but, alas! it is not because he is rich, but because he is rich. It is said that the craving to satisfy material wants is as inseparable a part of human nature as any other appetite. This may be so to some extent, but it is clearly a matter of proportion. After the appetite has reached a certain point it is no more natural than gluttony, drunkenness, or any other form of debauchery. In far too many cases that point has long been passed and a state of society has been evolved to suit the new order, and not only to excuse, but to extol and strengthen the power of money.