"'Christ's mission, therefore,'" Thor read on, "'was not to relieve poverty, but to do away with it. It was to do away with it not by abolition, but by evolution. It is clear that to Christ poverty was not a disease, but a symptom—a symptom of a sick body politic. To suppress the symptom without undertaking the cure of the whole body would have been false to the thoroughness of His methods.'"
Claude appeared on the threshold. Lois smiled. Thor looked up.
"Hello, Claude! Come in. Just wait a minute. Reading Vibart's Christ and Poverty. Only a few lines more to the end of the chapter. 'To the teaching of Christ,'" Thor continued, "'belongs the discovery that the causes of poverty are economic only in the second place, and moral in the first. Economic conditions are shifting, changing vitally within the space of a generation. Nothing is permanent but the moral, as nothing is effectual. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself; on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. On these two commandments hangs also the solution of the problems of poverty, seeing that a race that obeys them finds no such problems confronting it. In proportion to the spread of moral obedience these problems tend to disappear. They were never so near to disappearing as now, when the moral sense has become alive to them.'"
Claude smoked a cigar while they sat and talked. It was talk in which he personally took little share, but from which he sought to learn whether or not Thor was satisfied with what he had done. If there was any arrière pensée, he thought he might detect it by looking on. It was a pleasant scene, Lois with her sewing, Thor with his book. The library had the characteristic of American libraries in general, of being the most cheerful room in the house.
"What I complain of in all this," Thor said, tossing the book on the table, "is the intermediary suffering. It does no good to the starving of to-day to know that in another thousand years men will have so grasped the principles of Christ that want will be abolished."
Lois smiled over her sewing. "You might as well say that it does no good to the people who have to walk to-day, or travel by trains and motors, to know that in a hundred years the common method of getting about will probably be by flying. This writer lays it down as a principle that there's a rate for human progress, and that it's no use expecting man to get on faster than he has the power to go."
"I don't expect him to get on faster than he has the power to go. I only want him to go faster than he's going."
"Haven't you seen others, who wanted the same thing, dragging people off their feet, with the result that legs or necks were broken?"
"That's absurd, of course; but between that and quickening the stride there's a difference."
"Exactly; which is what Vibart says. His whole argument is that if you want to do away with poverty you must begin at the beginning, and neither in the middle nor at the end. People used to begin at the end when they imagined the difficulty to be met by temporarily supplying wants. Now they're beginning in the middle by looking for social and economic readjustments which won't be effective for more than a few years at a time. To begin at the beginning, as I understand him to say, they must get at themselves with a new point of view, and a new line of action toward one another. They must try the Christian method which they never have tried, or put up with poverty and other inequalities. It's futile to expect to do away with them by the means they're using now; and that," she added, in defense of the author she was endeavoring to sum up, "seems to me perfectly true."