Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 04

by Unknown

TEXTS: Luke iv. 17-21, Matt. xi. 2-6

Here was Christ's profession of his faith; here is the history also of his examination, to see whether he were fit to preach or not. It is remarkable that in both these instances the most significant indication that he had, both of his descent from God and of his being worthy of the Messiahship, consisted in this simple exposition of the line of his preaching,--that he took sides with the poor, neglected, and lost. He emphasized this, that his gospel was a gospel of mercy to the poor; and that word "poor," in its most comprehensive sense, looked at historically, includes in it everything that belongs to human misery, whether it be by reason of sin or depravity, or by oppression, or by any other cause. This, then, is the disclosure by Christ himself of the genius of Christianity. It is his declaration of what the gospel meant.

It is still further interpreted when you follow the life of Christ, and see how exactly in his conduct he interpreted, or rather fortified, the words of the declaration. His earliest life was that of labor and poverty, and it was labor and poverty in the poorest districts of Palestine. The dignified, educated, and aristocratic part of the nation dwelt in Judea, and the Athens of Palestine was Jerusalem. There Christ spent the least part of his life, and that in perpetual discussions. But in Galilee the most of his miracles, certainly the earlier, were performed, and the most of his discourses that are contained bodily in the gospels were uttered. He himself carried out the declaration that the gospel was for the poor. The very miracles that Christ performed were not philosophical enigmas, as we look at them. They were all of them miracles of mercy. They were miracles to those who were suffering helplessly where natural law and artificial means could not reach them. In every case the miracles of Christ were mercies, though we look at them in a spirit totally different from that in which he performed them.

In doing thus, Christ represented the best spirit of the Old Testament. The Jewish Scriptures teach mercy, the very genius of Jewish institutions was that of mercy, and especially to the poor, the weak, the helpless. The crimes against which the prophets thundered their severest denunciations were crimes upon the helpless. It was the avarice of the rich, it was the unbounded lust and cruelty of the strong, that were denounced by them. They did not preach against human nature in general. They did not preach against total depravity and the original condition of mankind. They singled out violations of the law in the magistrate, in the king, in rich men, everywhere, and especially all those wrongs committed by power either unconsciously or with purpose, cruelty upon the helpless, the defenseless, the poor and the needy. When Christ declared that this was his ministry, he took his text from the Old Testament; he spoke in its spirit. It was to preach the gospel to the poor that he was sent. He had come into the world to change the condition of mankind. Beginning at the top? No; beginning at the bottom and working up to the top from the bottom.

When this view of the gospel enters into our understanding and is fully comprehended by us, how exactly it fits in with the order of nature, and with the order of the unfolding of human life and human society! It takes sides with the poor; and so the universal tendency of Providence and of history, slowly unfolded, is on the whole going from low to high, from worse to better, and from good toward the perfect. When we consider, we see that man begins as a helpless thing, a baby zero without a figure before it; and every step in life adds a figure to it and gives it more and more worth. On the whole, the law of unfolding throughout the world is from lower to higher; and though when applied to the population of the globe it is almost inconceivable, still, with many back-sets and reactions, the tendency of the universe is thus from lower to higher. Why? Let any man consider whether there is not of necessity a benevolent intelligence somewhere that is drawing up from the crude toward the ripe, from the rough toward the smooth, from bad to good, and from good through better toward best. The tendency upward runs like a golden thread through the history of the whole world, both in the unfolding of human life and in the unfolding of the race itself. Thus the tendency of nature is in accordance with the tendency of the gospel as declared by Jesus Christ, namely, that it is a ministry of mercy to the needy.

The vast majority of mankind have been and yet are poor. There are ten thousand men poor where there is one man even comfortably provided for, body and soul, and hundreds of thousands where there is one rich, taking the whole world together. The causes of poverty are worthy a moment's consideration. Climate and soil have much to do with it. Men whose winter lasts nine or ten months in the year, and who have a summer of but one or two months, as in the extreme north,--how could they amass property, how could they enlarge their conditions of peace and of comfort? There are many parts of the earth where men live on the borders of deserts, or in mountain fastnesses, or in arctic rigors, where anything but poverty is impossible, and where it requires the whole thought, genius, industry, and foresight of men, the year round, just to feed themselves and to live. Bad government, where men are insecure in their property, has always been a very fertile source of poverty. The great valley of Esdraelon in Northern Palestine is one of the most fertile in the world, and yet famine perpetually stalks on the heels of the population; for if you sow and the harvest waves, forth come hordes of Bedouins to reap your harvest for you, and leave you, after all your labor, to poverty and starvation. When a man has lost his harvest in that way two or three times, and is deprived of the reward of his labors, he never emerges from poverty, but sinks into indolence; and that, by and by, breeds apathetic misery. So where the government over-taxes its subjects, as is the case in the Orient with perhaps nearly all of the populations there to-day, it cuts the sinews and destroys all the motives of industry; and without industry there can be neither virtue, morality, nor religion in any long period. Wars breaking out, from whatever cause, tend to absorb property, or to destroy property, or to prevent the development of property. Yet, strange as it may seem, the men who suffer from war are those whose passions generally lead it on. The king may apply the spark, but the combustion is with the common people. They furnish the army, they themselves become destroyers; and the ravages of war, in the history of the human family, have destroyed more property than it is possible to enter into the thoughts of men to conceive.

But besides these external reasons of poverty, there are certain great primary and fundamental reasons. Ignorance breeds poverty. What is property? It is the product of intelligence, of skill, of thought applied to material substances. All property is raw material that has been shaped to uses by intelligent skill. Where intelligence is low, the power of producing property is low. It is the husbandman who thinks, foresees, plans, and calls on all natural laws to serve him, whose farm brings forth forty, fifty, and a hundred fold. The ignorant peasant grubs and groans, and reaps but one handful where he has sown two. It is knowledge that is the gold mine; for although every knowing man may not be able to be a rich man, yet out of ignorance riches do not spring anywhere. Ignorant men may be made the factors of wealth when they are guided and governed by superior intelligence. Slave labor produced gigantic plantations and estates. The slave was always poor, but his master was rich, because the master had the intelligence and the knowledge, and the slave gave the work. All through human society, men who represent simple ignorance will be tools, and the men who represent intelligence will be the master mechanics, the capitalists. All society to-day is agitated with this question of justice as between the laborer and the thinker. Now, it is no use to kick against the pricks. A man who can only work and not think is not the equal in any regard of the man who can think, who can plan, who can combine, and who can live not for to-day alone, but for to-morrow, for next month, for the next year, for ten years. This is the man whose volume will just as surely weigh down that of the unthinking man as a ton will weigh down a pound in the scale. Avoirdupois is moral, industrial, as well as material, in this respect; and the primary, most usual cause of unprosperity in industrial callings therefore lies in the want of intelligence,--either in the slender endowment of the man, or more likely the want of education in his ordinary and average endowment. Any class of men who live for to-day, and do not care whether they know anything more than they did yesterday or last year--those men may have a temporary and transient prosperity, but they are the children of poverty just as surely as the decrees of God stand. Ignorance enslaves men among men; knowledge is the creator of liberty and wealth.

As with undeveloped intelligence, so the appetites of men and their passions are causes of poverty. Men who live from the basilar faculties will invariably live in inferior stations. The men who represent animalism are as a general fact at the bottom. They may say it is government, climate, soil, want of capital, they may say what they please, but it is the devil of laziness that is in them, or of passion, that comes out in eating, in gluttony, in drinking and drunkenness, in wastefulness on every side. I do not say that the laboring classes in modern society are poor because they are self-indulgent, but I say that it unquestionably would be wise for all men who feel irritated that they are so unprosperous, if they would take heed to the moral condition in which they are living, to self-denial in their passions and appetites, and to increasing the amount of their knowledge and fidelity. Although moral conditions are not the sole causes, they are principal causes, of the poverty of the working classes throughout the world. It is their misfortune as well as their fault; but it is the reason why they do not rise. Weakness does not rise; strength does.

All these causes indicate that the poor need moral and intellectual culture. "I was sent to preach the gospel to the poor:" not to distribute provisions, not to relieve their wants; that will be included, but that was not Christ's primary idea. It was not to bring in a golden period of fruitfulness when men would not be required to work. It was not that men should lie down on their backs under the trees, and that the boughs should bend over and drop the ripe fruit into their mouths. No such conception of equality and abundance entered into the mind of the Creator or of Him who represented the Creator. To preach the gospel to the poor was to awaken the mind of the poor. It was to teach the poor--"Take up your cross, deny yourselves, and follow me. Restrain all those sinful appetites and passions, and hold them back by the power of knowledge and by the power of conscience; grow, because you are the sons of God, into the likeness of your Father." So he preached to the poor. That was preaching prosperity to them. That was teaching them how to develop their outward condition by developing their inward forces. To develop that in men which should make them wiser, purer, and stronger, is the aim of the gospel. Men have supposed that the whole end of the gospel was reconciliation between God and men who had fallen--though they were born sinners in their fathers and grandfathers and ancestors; to reconcile them with God--as if an abstract disagreement had been the cause of all this world's trouble! But the plain facts of history are simply that men, if they have not come from animals, have yet dwelt in animalism, and that that which should raise them out of it was some such moral influence as should give them the power of ascension into intelligence, into virtue, and into true godliness. That is what the gospel was sent for; good news, a new power that is kindled under men, that will lift them from their low ignorances and degradations and passions, and lift them into a higher realm; a power that will take away all the poverty that needs to be taken away. Men may be doctrinally depraved; they are much more depraved practically. Men may need to be brought into the knowledge of God speculatively; but what they do need is to be brought into the knowledge of themselves practically. I do not say that the gospel has nothing in it of this kind of spiritual knowledge; it is full of it, but its aim and the reason why it should be preached is to wake up in men the capacity for good things, industries, frugalities, purities, moralities, kindnesses one toward another: and when men are brought into that state they are reconciled. When men are reconciled with the law of creation and the law of their being, they are reconciled with God. Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of knowledge, he is reconciled with the God of knowledge, so far. Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of purity he is so far reconciled with a God of purity. When men have lifted themselves to that point that they recognize that they are the children of God, the kingdom of God has begun within them.

Although the spirit and practice of the gospel will develop charities, will develop physical comfort, will feed men, will heal men, will provide for their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want on an occasion. It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely the first letter of the alphabet. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be added unto you." The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the character of the help that he demands.