Wherever the church has nobly filled her part as the social conscience of Christendom, (a function for which the confessional so well adapts her,) she has been the intelligent mediator between those who need to give or to serve, and those who are really in need; she has maintained a social equilibrium while averting the jealousies and hatreds of classes, and by her enlightened and judicious distribution has prevented charity from ministering to vices and imposture.
"The poor ye shall have always with you." The worst prejudices only will interpret this saying of our Lord so as to discourage our efforts to eliminate, from the condition of the poor, its actual vices, disgraces, and miseries. This once effected by means, the success of which experience has verified, there remains an honorable poverty due to the disinterested devotions of science, art, and social affections, in which the love of our neighbor, under divers forms, absorbs cupidity and the cares of self-preservation. The church has always encouraged vows of voluntary poverty, and directed the zeal which animated them to Christian uses. She has permitted the rich to expiate their crimes by sharing their fortunes with the poor, even by soliciting alms for them; and we are told that Roman nobles have been seen, during this very year, thus begging in the streets of Rome. To a noble poverty belong the first years, and often the whole life, of the inventor, of the true artist, of all whose originality of conception or fidelity to the ideal transcends prudential economy. We may glance but in passing at that "Bohemia," where floating wrecks mingle in disorder with germinal forces of the social future. In proportion as the constitution of societies shall be perfected in kind and useful labors, those in whose characters friendship predominates, whether attached to holy orders like the Trappists and Sisters of Charity, or simply members of the church of Christ, will content themselves with the common minimum, and work in their elected spheres without care for any other material compensation. To such has Christ said: "Take no care what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed," etc. "Consider the lilies," etc. We shall not confound these noble poor with paupers, a term which comprehends indifferently the victims of misfortune, of vice, and of disease; deficient in faculties either corporeal or mental, or in consistency of purpose, principle, and will. Pauperism is not to be regarded as a state of suffering to which the Christian should be resigned; far from being an expiation of sin, it is not only humiliation, but degradation and perversion, and owes its parasite existence to the absence or decline of Christian life.
The Catholic Church commenced an exterminating war on pauperism in those fraternal associations which sprang from the breath of the Saviour, and which its religious orders have never intermitted. Disbanded by the persecutions of the Roman empire, they rallied to works of charity; and, gradually obtaining spiritual ascendency over Europe, organized agriculture and the arts of peace. In the sixth century, the Benedictines and Columbans reclaimed the soils of Europe from their wilderness, and their peoples from the worst of barbarism.
The monasteries and convents, considered from the point of view of political and social economy, were agricultural, scientific, and domestic associations, with fields, gardens, and orchards, libraries, laboratories, and workshops, provided with all the means and facilities known in their age and country for the subjection of nature's resources to the progressive evolution of humanity. Fusing the nobles and the people, absorbing, in the sentiment of our common fatherhood in God and brotherhood in Christ, the invidious distinctions of caste, reconciling again in their administration the behests of spiritual culture with the exigencies of material existence and refinement of taste in letters and the arts, the monastic orders were for Christendom a most benign providence. Their charities never have been limited to the necessities of mere subsistence, like the secular dolings out of so-called modern charity. Hearts must respond to the needs of hearts, and brains to those of brains; in other words, the organization of Christian charity essentially embraces social life and education, intellectual and moral culture, as well as the conditions of labor, of remuneration, of lodging, of clothing, and nourishment, comprised in the guarantee of access to the soil. By separating the material from the spiritual elements of charity, Christendom retrogrades into paganism; less brutal, less ferocious, the economic (?) workhouse system is colder and still more inhuman than those methods of summary destruction by which Greece removed her supernumerary helots, or Rome her infirm poor.
"It is not without a mingled shame and fear," says Mrs. Jameson, of the English workhouse, "that I approach this subject. Whatever their arrangement and condition, in one thing I found all alike—the want of a proper moral supervision.
"The most vulgar of human beings are set to rule over the most vulgar; the pauper is set to manage the pauper; the ignorant govern the ignorant; every softening or elevating influence is absent or of rare occurrence, and every hardening and depraving influence continuous or ever at hand. Never did I visit any dungeon, any abode of crime or misery, in any country, which left me the same crushing sense of sorrow, indignation, and compassion—almost despair—as some of our English workhouses. Never did I see more clearly what must be the inevitable consequences where the feminine and religious influences are ignored; where what we call charity is worked by a stern, hard machinery; where what we mean for good is not bestowed but inflicted on others in a spirit not pitiful, nor merciful, but reluctant and adverse, if not cruel. Perhaps those who hear me may not all be aware of the origin of our parish workhouses. They were not designed as penitentiaries, although they have really become such. They were intended to be religious and charitable institutions, to supply the place of those conventual hospitals and charities which, with their revenues, were suppressed by Henry VIII.
"The epithet 'charitable' could never be applied to any parish workhouse I have seen. Our machine-charity is as much charity, in the Christian sense, as the praying-machines of the Tartars are piety.
"These institutions are supported by a variable tax, paid so reluctantly, with so little sympathy in its purpose, that the wretched paupers seem to be regarded as a sort of parish locusts, sent to devour the substance of the rate-payers; as the natural enemies of those who are taxed for their subsistence, almost as criminals; and I have no hesitation in saying that the convicts in some of our jails have more charitable and more respectful treatment than the poor in our workhouses. Hence, a notion prevails among the working-classes that it is better to be a criminal than a pauper—better to go to a jail than to a workhouse.
"Between the poor and their so-called guardians, the bond is anything but charity.