It should be a matter of man’s free will alone that determines which life he lives. Social conditions, over which as an individual he has no power, now too often determine for him, for there are forces in and around society which crush down the individual will of man and which bind his limbs so tightly that not only his course, but too often his gait, has been determined for him.
1. Great Wealth.—Can a man live the highest life whose abundance puts out of daily practice the priceless privilege of personal sacrifice—from whom effort is undemanded—whose floors are padded should he chance to fall—whose walls, golden though they be, are dividing barriers, high and strong, between him and his fellow-men?
2. Great Poverty.—Can a man live the highest life when the preservation of his stunted, unlovely body occupies all his thoughts—from whose life pleasure is crushed out by ever-wearying work—to whom thought is impossible (the brain needs food and leisure to set it going)—to whom knowledge, one of the prophets of the nineteenth century and a revealer of the Most High, is denied?
3. Unequal Laws.—Is a man wholly unfettered in his choice of life when his country’s laws have allowed him to become a victim to unsanitary dwellings—when they permit him to sin, by providing that his wrong should (on himself) be resultless—when its ministers of justice, interpreting its laws, declare in the strong tones of action that bread-stealing is more wicked than wife-beating? Or is the highest life made more possible by laws that allow so much of our great mother earth—God-blessed for the use of mankind—to be reserved for the exclusive benefit and enjoyment of the upper classes?
4. Division of Classes.—Love is the strongest force in the universe. At least the ancient teachers thought so when they renamed God, and left Him with the Christian name of Love. But love, a certain kind of love for which no other makes up, becomes impossible by the great division between classes. We cannot love what we do not know; it is as the American said, ‘Oh, Jones! I hate that fellow.’ ‘Hate him?’ asked his friend; ‘why, I did not think you knew him.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ was the reply; ‘if I did, I guess I shouldn’t hate him.’ The division between classes is a wrong to both classes. The poor lose something by their ignorance of the grace, the culture, and the wider interests of the rich; the rich lose far more by their ignorance of the patience, the meekness, the unself-consciousness, the self-sacrifice, and the great strong hopefulness of the poor.
5. Besides these conditions, others exist, forming barriers and hindering a man from leading his true life, such as want of light, space, and beauty. The sun-rising is to a large number of town livers only an intimation—and rarely an agreeable one—that they must get out of bed. It is but the lighting of a lamp, and not, as Blake said, the rising of an innumerable company of the heavenly host consecrating the day to duty by crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.’ And even if there is the space to see the sky, there is still the absence of leisure to watch its unhurried changes. We all haste and rush, we hurry and drive. The very parlance of the day adopts new words to express dispatch, and one dear old body whom I know, who is sixty years old and of appropriate proportions, constantly informs me that she ‘flew’ hither and thither—a method of locomotion which, in earlier years, I remember, she reserved strictly for future and more heavenly purposes.
But enough has been said of the ills of society. We all know them. The hearts of some of us have been very sick for many a weary year. The hands of those who have sat on the height and watched the progress of the battle have become tired, and have been upheld only by faith and prayer. But reinforcements have arrived; friends for the poor have arisen; from all sides press forward willing volunteers, who say, ‘Put us in our place. Let us do something. How can we break down these barriers—unloose the golden fetters of these imprisoned souls—or relieve the burdened shoulders of those pale dungeoned creatures? How are we to make strength out of union—to right wrongs, and give to every man the light by which to see to make his choice?’
If one is to carry heavy weights one must have trained muscles. If one is to reply one must know. The Charity Organisation Society is the watchman set on a hill, who by his very constitution has special facilities for giving an answer—and a wise one—to these questions. He has exceptional opportunities for knowing both the classes in which social reform is most needed, and knows them under the best conditions. The rich come to him with ‘minds on helpfulness bent’; the poor come at a time when their hearts are sore, when their lives are troubled, when their sorrows have made them ‘unmanfully meek,’ and they are willing to lay their lives and circumstances bare to inquiring eyes. For fifteen years the one class has been meeting the other in the thirty-nine district offices provided by the Society, and some 230,000 families have asked for succour when they have been either morally, physically, or circumstantially sick. Last year alone 14,132l. passed through the hands of this Director of Charity, and at this moment there are more than 2,000 men and women actively engaged in his work, while he records the names of nearly 3,000 subscribers whose money is an earnest of sympathy and potential working power.
But magnificent as this sounds, and is (for there can be no doubt about it that our friend is a very fine fellow), still there are flaws both in his past and present constitution and character which make his work less effective than it otherwise might be. Briefly, his heart is not large enough for his body—his circulation is slow—his movements are ponderous—and, being slightly hard of hearing, he does not take in things until some little time after other people have done so. Then, too, he is somewhat a creature of habit; his mind does not readily assimilate new ideas, and he does rather an unusual number of things because ‘he always has done so.’ His raison d’être, his whole work, is founded on the first word of his name—Charity—(which the new translators tell us we may call love, if we like), and yet he is sometimes curiously persistent in ‘thinking evil,’ and he hardly, I fear, ‘hopeth all things,’ nor yet lives up to his standard of ‘never failing’; or what does 463 cases thrown aside as ‘undeserving and ineligible’ mean in this last month’s returns of work?
Then he has an odd way of talking about his work. I have often seen ordinary, commonplace, every-day sort of people begin to listen to him with keen interest, but gradually drop eyelids and lose sympathy as he threads his way through investigations, organisations, registrations, co-operations, applications, administrations, each and all done by multiplication!