The late Chief Justice Chase once startled the writer of this by saying: “The wicked men are not in the penitentiary, they are in the churches. The criminals we convict are not wicked, they are simply weak—weak in character and weak in intellect. The men from whom society suffers are the cold, selfish, calculating creatures who not only keep clear of the courts but seek the churches, and deceive others as they deceive themselves and hope to deceive the Almighty.”
Sin is never so dangerous as when it gets to be respectable. The sanction of law, whether it gets to be such through custom or legal enactment, so nearly resembles the order of God that we accept it as such, and if it furthers our selfish greed we take it gladly.
The moral code, like that of municipal law, is made up of a few simple rules, easily understood, and the trouble comes in on the practice of the one and the application of the other. That church is divine which subordinates the rule to the practice, and has works as well as faith to testify to its commission. That is the true religion which leaves the sanctuary with the believer, and is with him at all hours, eats at his table, sleeps in his bed, and accompanies him to his labor. It never leaves him alone.
How we have separated the two, the precept from practice, this pulpit cult bears evidence. The high-toned infidel and lofty agnostic sneer at the humble Catholic who, in deepest contrition, confesses his sins to his spiritual adviser and goes forth relieved, probably to fall again. How much better it is to attend divine worship one day in seven, put on a grave countenance, and listen to eloquent discourses, more eloquent prayers, and heavenly music, and then go out with no thought of religion until the next Sunday returns for a like performance!
Two thirds of what comes under the head of moral conduct in one is pure selfishness. A man may be honest in his dealing, honorable in his conduct, a good citizen, a loving husband, and an affectionate father, and yet be without kindness, charity, faith, hope—in a word, all that brought Christ upon earth in His mission of peace.
One summer and autumn we lived at a mountain resort on the line of a great railroad. We saw, day after day, long lines of cattle-cars crowded with their living freight in a three-hundred-mile pull of intensest agony. The poor beasts were jammed against each other, unable to lie down,—to get under the hoofs of the others was death,—fighting, hungry, in the last stages of thirst, panting with tongues protruded, and their beautiful eyes staring with that expression of wild despair which the scent of blood brings to them, they rolled on to their far-off slaughter-houses with moans that were heart-breaking.
It was our fortune that same autumn to meet one of the cattle-merchants at church. He was there with his family. A stout, middle-aged man of eminent respectability, he was a church-member, and looked up to as a model citizen. We saw him listening to the eloquent sermon, and wondered if there were not a low, deep undertone of agony running through 238 the discourse. When the prayers were offered up he knelt humbly, and covered his face with his hands. Did they shut out the wild, despairing eyes of those suffering beasts?
Yet how amazed would that estimable citizen have been had his minister said to him: “You are railroading your soul to hell. Every moan of those tortured animals goes up to God for record. You are freighting disease to great cities, and the fevers and death are yet to be answered for by you—wretched sinner!”
There is not a fashionable church in any city of our land that has not within gunshot of its door great masses of starving, sinful, poverty-stricken humanity. Crowded into tenement-houses, from the damp cellars to the hot garrets, they make one wonder, not that they die, but that they live. No eloquent discourse on the righteousness of right and the sinfulness of sin; no well-balanced sentences of prayers, sent up on perfumed air to our heavenly Father; no deep-toned thunder set to music in hymns, ever reach their ears, or could, if they did, carry consolation to the sorrowful, or curing to the sick. And yet, from marble pulpits to velvet-cushioned pews, the work goes on.