The history of prophecy itself furnishes us with proofs of this. When did prophecy most flourish in Israel? When had the Spirit of God most freedom in developing the intellectual and moral nature of Israel? Not when the nation was struggling with the conquest and settlement of the land, not when it was engaged with the embarrassments and privations of the Syrian wars; but an Amos, a Hosea, an Isaiah came forth at the end of the long, peaceful and prosperous reigns of Jeroboam II. and Uzziah. The intellectual strength and liberty of the great Prophet of the Exile, his deep insight into God’s purposes and his large view of the future, had not been possible without the security and comparative prosperity of the Jews in Babylon, from among whom he wrote. In Haggai and Zechariah, on the other hand, who worked in the hunger-bitten colony of returned exiles, there was no such fulness of the Spirit. Prophecy, we saw,[1235] was then starved by the poverty and meanness of the national life from which it rose. All this is very explicable. When men are stunned by such a calamity as Joel describes, or when they are engrossed by the daily struggle with bitter enemies and a succession of bad seasons, they may feel the need of penitence and be able to speak with decision upon the practical duty of the moment, to a degree not attainable in better days, but they lack the leisure, the freedom and the resources amid which their various faculties of mind and soul can alone respond to the Spirit’s influence.
Has it been otherwise in the history of Christianity? Our Lord Himself found His first disciples, not in a hungry and ragged community, but amid the prosperity and opulence of Galilee. They left all to follow Him and achieved their ministry in poverty and persecution, but they brought to that ministry the force of minds and bodies trained in a very fertile land and by a prosperous commerce.[1236] Paul, in his apostolate, sustained himself by the labour of his hands, but he was the child of a rich civilisation and the citizen of a great empire. The Reformation was preceded by the Renaissance, and on the Continent of Europe drew its forces, not from the enslaved and impoverished populations of Italy and Southern Austria, but from the large civic and commercial centres of Germany. An acute historian, in his recent lectures on the Economic Interpretation of History,[1237] observes that every religious revival in England has happened upon a basis of comparative prosperity. He has proved “the opulence of Norfolk during the epoch of Lollardy,” and pointed out that “the Puritan movement was essentially and originally one of the middle classes, of the traders in towns and of the farmers in the country”; that the religious state of the Church of England was never so low as among the servile and beggarly clergy of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries; that the Nonconformist bodies who kept religion alive during this period were closely identified with the leading movements of trade and finance;[1238] and that even Wesley’s great revival of religion among the labouring classes of England took place at a time when prices were far lower than in the previous century, wages had slightly risen and “most labourers were small occupiers; there was therefore in the comparative plenty of the time an opening for a religious movement among the poor, and Wesley was equal to the occasion.” He might have added that the great missionary movement of the nineteenth century is contemporaneous with the enormous advance of our commerce and our empire.
On the whole, then, the witness of history is uniform. Poverty and persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and sword, put a keenness upon the spirit of religion, while luxury rots its very fibres; but a stable basis of prosperity is indispensable to every social and religious reform, and God’s Spirit finds fullest course in communities of a certain degree of civilisation and of freedom from sordidness.
We may draw from this an impressive lesson for our own day. Joel predicts that, upon the new prosperity of his land, the lowest classes of society shall be permeated by the spirit of prophecy. Is it not part of the secret of the failure of Christianity to enlist large portions of our population, that the basis of their life is so sordid and insecure? Have we not yet to learn from the Hebrew prophets, that some amount of freedom in a people and some amount of health are indispensable to a revival of religion? Lives which are strained and starved, lives which are passed in rank discomfort and under grinding poverty, without the possibility of the independence of the individual or of the sacredness of the home, cannot be religious except in the most rudimentary sense of the word. For the revival of energetic religion among such lives we must wait for a better distribution, not of wealth, but of the bare means of comfort, leisure and security. When, to our penitence and our striving, God restores the years which the locust has eaten, when the social plagues of rich men’s selfishness and the poverty of the very poor are lifted from us, then may we look for the fulfilment of Joel’s prediction—even upon all the slaves and upon the handmaidens will I pour out My Spirit in those days.
The economic problem, therefore, has also its place in the warfare for the kingdom of God.
And it shall be that after such things, I will pour out
My Spirit on all flesh;
And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions: