While attesting a tendency in Christendom to recover the ground lost by the "Reformation," such institutions as we have cited are still very trivial in numbers and power; and though small appropriations of public funds have been made to them, neither they nor the principles which they represent have been officially recognized by states or cities. There is, on the contrary, a jealous opposition to admitting, even to the service of the sick poor, who are mostly Europeans and Catholics, as at Bellevue, the Sisters of Charity; and one of its most eminent surgeons, who knows by experience how precious is their aid, has declared to us with regret his conviction that this salutary measure could not pass. To obviate the prejudices that withhold the administration of charity from its own votaries, whose noble emulation would utilize the differences of sect or order for the common good; to show that the State will find in this restoration economy, at the same time with social or moral advantages, while Christ will be more worthily served; to make it felt that the burden of human sorrows will be lightened, and the redemption of our race from evil promoted, by re-allying piety with charity, is the purpose we have now in view.
"Suum cuique tribuito," "Give to each his own." Two chief orders of power exist in society—interest and sentiment. The natural sphere of interest is confined to material property or goods of the senses; that of sentiment embraces the relations of persons, that is, of beings considered as hearts and souls; so that sentiment culminates in devotion, and ranges love and consanguinity, friendship and honor, in the ministries of religion, expanding the selfhood of the individual by the consciousness of his solidarity with the race, and through Christ with our Father in heaven.
Still, practically, the functions of each power are distinct. It is admitted, in regard to the divers organizations of fire companies, for instance, that the payment of fixed salaries is an efficient or adequate motive for the protection of houses. This service was once confided to public spirit; there was no lack of heroic devotion in its exercise; but salaried firemen were found to be more amenable to discipline, and their organizations to be more permanent and reliable. Now, the contrary is true of hospital service and kindred functions, which employ in some places the religious orders of charity, in others hired assistants. Physicians, patients, and inspectors, all proclaim the superiority of the former. Visit our great secular establishments, such as Bellevue or the Charity Hospital, where the service is either hired or compulsory by convicts, and then the hospitals of religious orders, even the poorest, such as that of the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis, which is supported by begging from door to door, not to mention the more richly endowed hospitals of St. Vincent de Paul or St. Luke, all free to every needy patient: scent the air of the wards, share the food of the refectory, feel the human magnetism of these spheres, take time and mood to appreciate all their conditions, and you will find their difference amount to a contrast in many essentials of hygiene, physical as well as moral, although science is impartially represented at the secular as at the religious establishments. The former have been largely endowed by private and public benefaction; energy, ability, and good will are not wanting among their officers; yet they inspire such aversion that the decent poor will often rather perish than resort to them.
The characteristic superiority of religious charities is historical, and remounts to the earliest epochs of Christendom; although the secular interest of states in the health and contentment of their peoples has been the same in all times and all countries. If their conduct has been different, the reasons of this difference may be found in the nature of their religions and the fervor or torpor of their piety.
Conversely, just in proportion as our modern states alienate their "public charities" from the influence of religion, they become perverted by the same cruelty and heartlessness that characterized the behavior of the pagan world toward its unfortunate classes. Between the philanthropy of the English workhouse and that of Rome which sent poor slaves to perish on the "dismal island" in the Tiber, the shorter course seems preferable to us, because less degrading to the soul of the victim, and because it has the courage, at least, of its crime.
The Emperor Maximianus, who shipped a cargo of beggars out to sea and drowned them, was still more complete in this economy of suffering. Disease and misery, decrepitude and helpless infancy, have each in turn become the object of such elimination, which ignores tenderness toward the individual; but the process has never stopped where it might have been justified, in a manner, by the substitution of healthier and stronger or more perfect, for less perfect individuals among the representative types of the species. No; the same spirit that sacrificed the feeblest, revelled in the destruction of the strongest men in its gladiatorial arenas. Even in the restricted sense of patriotism, which had contributed so many devotions on the altar of the country, in the heroic days of Greece and Rome, solidarity had ceased to be matter of practical conscience in the pagan world of the great empire. The Hebrews had developed it only as a tribal and family principle. Where has it ever been a social life-truth, unless in the fold of Christ's disciples? and where has this been practically organized, except by its religious orders?
The inconsistencies of war excepted, we see life and personal liberty becoming more sacred from age to age, even amid the corruptions of advanced civilization in Christendom; whereas, on the contrary, in pagan civilizations "the springs of humane feeling in every ancient nation, like the waters of the fountain of the sun, were warm at dawn of morning, but chilled gradually as the day advanced, till at noon they became excessively cold."
When the development of intelligence in civilized communities renders them conscious of needs and of resources outlying the circles of family providence; one of their first Christian movements is to care for their disabled members, stricken by disease or wounds from the army of the working poor.
In our monster cities, the hospital acquires gigantic proportions, and political economy meets humanity in the research for a system which shall afford the greatest mitigation of inevitable suffering and the best chances of restoring the sufferers to social uses.