“We are going to give you some light.” We cannot help it, if this liberal goodness—this gentle philanthropy—drive back thought to the first gift of light; if it call up, as with an iron tongue, the memory of the holy birth of light, word-begotten, of all men. And the nature of man, solemnised by such memories—kindled and uplifted, skies beyond expression, by the sublime inheritance—is it not a hard task to consider with composure even the compunction of a guardian of the poor, who pierces with two windows the prison-house of the pauper to let God’s light in? May not the small authority of man be sometimes as a blaspheming burlesque of Almighty Beneficence?
Let us, for a time forgetful of state philosophy—forgetful of the plausibilities of social prosperity that set the poor apart from the rich and well-to-do, as creatures somewhat different in the real drama of life, although on certain occasions, as it were for form’s sake, for Christian ceremony, allowed to be made from the clay of the same Eden as their masters—let us behold the earth in its freshness, and man, its owner, in the vigour of his new birth, the heir of an impartial Providence, and the receiver of its glories; and then consider him as the task-master of his fellow, as the grudging churl that metes out light and air to his helpless brother; and for this sole cause—this one bitter reason—he is helpless.
A miserable sight—a hideous testimony of the thankfulness of prosperous man—is the rural union, with its blank dead wall of brick; a cold, blind thing, the work of human perversity and human selfishness, amidst ten thousand thousand evidences of Eternal bounty. How beautiful is the beauty of God around it! There is not a sapling waving its green tresses of June that does not make the heart yearn with kindliness; not a field-flower that does not, with its speaking eye, tell of abundant goodness; the brook is musical with the same sweet truth; all sights and sounds declare it. The liberal loveliness of nature, turn where we will, looks upon and whispers to us. We are made the heirs of wealth inexhaustible, of pleasures deep as the sea and pure as the joys of Paradise. And our return for this, our offering to the wretchedness of our fellow-creatures, is yonder prison, with its dead wall turned upon the pleasant aspects of nature, lest the pauper captives within should behold what God has done for that world, in which, according to the world’s justice, they have nothing. Hence is the pauper treated, in his blind dungeon, as though there was a felonious purpose in his eyesight; as though, a prisoner in the union, he would commit larceny on the meads and trees, and all the rural objects that from babyhood have been familiar to him, to the exceeding injury and loss of the free folks, who, by the blessing of skill and good luck, have “land and beeves.”
We know not a more fantastic tyranny, a more wilful assertion of the arrogance of man, than this needless shutting up of his poorer brother in a gaol of poverty—barring his eyes of every comforting object, compelling him to look only upon that which at every look speaks to his soul of his miserable dependence upon his richer fellow; which denies to him the innocent, unbought glimpse of out-door nature, as though the scene was a land of promise from which his beggary had made him alien. Is human want so wicked that it should be unblessed with even a glance at the pleasant things of creation? Has the pauper—because pauper—no further claim upon the earth, save for his final bed—the grave? The rustic unions, with their forlorn blank walls, cry, yes!
If God punish man for crime, as man punishes man for poverty, woe to the sons of Adam!
THE ORDER OF POVERTY
Why should not Lazarus make to himself an order of tatters? Why should not poverty have its patch of honour? Wherefore should not the undubbed knights of evil fortune carry about them, with a gracious humility, the inevitable types of their valorous contest with the Paynim iniquities of life? Wherefore may not man wear indigence as proudly as nobility flashes its jewels? Is there not a higher heraldry than that of the college?
Not a very long time ago the King of Greece awarded to an Englishman the Order of the Redeemer. The Englishman did not reject the gift; he did not stare with wonder, or smile in meek pity at the grave mockery of the distinction; but winning the consent of our Sovereign Lady Victoria to sport the jewel, the Knight of Christ—knight by the handiwork of the King of Greece—hung about him the Order of the Redeemer.