Samuel A. Barnett.
X.
WHAT HAS THE CHARITY ORGANISATION
SOCIETY TO DO WITH SOCIAL REFORM?[1]
[1] A Paper read at a meeting of members of the Charity Organisation Society, held at the Kensington Vestry Hall on February 28, 1884.
I feel not a little shy at speaking to so large and thoughtful a body of workers; and I should not have ventured to accede to Mr. Loch’s proposal had I not felt myself to be an old friend of the Charity Organisation Society. I cannot say that I have ever seen its founder, neither was I present at its birth, but I was at its christening, when some long names were given; and later, at its confirmation, I heard the duty undertaken, and indeed the declaration made, that the main object of its existence was ‘to improve the condition of the poor.’
I am very proud of our friend; but, being a Charity Organiser, I can see his faults, of which, to my mind, one of the chief is that he has forgotten his baptism! I do not mean his name, but some of the promises then made for him. Far from forgetting his name, he thinks rather too much of it, having fallen into the aristocratic fault of believing a name more important than a character; and inasmuch as ‘on what we dwell that we become,’ he has run the danger—and we will not say wholly escaped it—of sacrificing the one to the other. He has, in short, unkindly ignored the thoughts and wishes of some of his god-parents. Have not his friends a right to be aggrieved?
We hear nowadays much about Social Reform, which, being interpreted, means, I suppose, the removal of certain conditions in and around society which stand in the way of man’s progress towards perfection.
Every human being, surely, ought to be able to make a free choice for good or evil. It is, no doubt, possible for each of us to choose the higher or the lower life ‘in that state of life in which it has pleased God to call us’; but the condition of some states keeps the higher life very low.
The moralists may tell about the educating influence of resistance to temptations; but are not temptations strong enough in themselves without being buttressed by conditions? Even the most ingenious of Eve’s apologists has never ventured to advance the view that she was hungry.