It is the more extraordinary to me that this relic should still be venerated, since history also makes it clear that teachers, prophets and law-givers of all ages have testified to their sense of the cruelty and injustice of the law which thrusts a man into prison because he does not pay his neighbour what he owes him. I propose, therefore, before I set down exactly what we are doing to-day, to trace the pedigree of our present system of dealing with debtors and show you historically and cinematographically, as it were, how the world has treated its debtors in the past and what the saner men of different ages thought about it at the time. In this way the man in the street of to-day will have the material for forming a sound judgment on the question of what we should do with the poor debtor.
And to begin with the Old Testament. Let us remember with gratitude the remarkable action of Elisha in the matter. Elisha went the length of performing a miracle to pay the bailiffs out. There are many poor widows in the mean streets of our own cities looking down the road for the Elisha of to-day who cometh not. Miracles do not happen nowadays; people don’t do such things. Still it is interesting to know that there was imprisonment for debt in Elisha’s day, just as there is now—for the poor and only for the poor—and it is encouraging to know what Elisha thought about it.
What happened was this:—
The County Court bailiffs of the County Court of Israel, holden at Samaria, went with a body-warrant to seize the two sons of a poor widow on behalf of a creditor of her late husband, just as they might do to-day.
Fortunately, the deceased had been a servant that did fear the Lord, and Elisha, hearing of the trouble, went down to the house, and in that simple, kindly way that the dear old prophets had of putting little troubles straight for members of their congregations and also no doubt to show the contempt he had for the proceedings of the County Court of Samaria, sent the widow out to borrow empty vessels of her neighbours. These he miraculously filled with oil of the best, and the only pity of it was that there were no more vessels to fill, for Elisha was in form that morning, and was sorry to stop. When it was over he said to the widow: “Go sell the oil and pay thy debt and live thou and thy children of the rest.”
I am very fond of that story. I like to believe it really happened. I wish it could happen to-day, for there are many poor women in much the same straits as that poor widow. I have never heard the text referred to in churches and chapels, and I am not surprised. A minister who preached about it would have to explain that he could not do miracles of that kind himself, and if he were to do the next best thing and preach about the iniquity of imprisonment for debt straight from the shoulder—as I am sure Elisha would have done—the respectable credit draper, the pious grocer, and all the noble army of tally-men would get up in their pews and walk out of his church or chapel in disgust.
The days of miracles are past, but if it was worth while for a holy man like Elisha to show what he thought about imprisonment for debt, by means of a miracle, surely, after all these ages, we might have improved that particular piece of barbarism off the face of the earth.
But no. The poor are worse off now than they were then. The bailiffs come for their bodies on behalf of their creditors still. And they look down the road in vain. There is no Elisha.
And when you come to the New Testament the matter is laid down even more clearly. Matthew vi. 12 has the actual words of Our Lord’s Prayer to be, “And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” If the forgiveness of our debtors is a condition precedent to our own forgiveness, most of us are in a parlous state. But is it too much in this Christian country of ours to suggest that, even if the highest ideals of the Master are beyond our attainment, we need not insult our belief by continuing a barbaric pagan system of cruelty which has been singled out for special disapprobation by the Word that we cannot shut our ears to?
You remember the parable of the king that took account of his servants which Matthew sets out in his eighteenth chapter. How a servant owed the king ten thousand talents and, as he had not wherewith to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. Note that in those days the wife and children were actually sold into slavery. We do not do that: we remove the bread-winner, only, to gaol and care for his wife and children in the workhouse. It is encouraging to find this much reform after nineteen Christian centuries.