power. The man who cannot hold his passions in repose--in perfect
repose--can never employ the measure of his power. These "cold
men," as the world calls them, are the men who move and control
their race. But it is not necessary to cling to great men for the
illustration of my subject. To say that a Christian philanthropist
should not be a sympathetic man would be to say that he should not
be a man at all; but nothing is more certain than that if a man
should surrender himself to his sympathies it would kill him. In a
world where sin and its bitter fruits abound as they do in this,
where little children cry for bread, and whole races are sunk in
barbarism, and villainy preys upon virtue, and the innocent suffer
in the place of the guilty, and sickness lays its hand upon
multitudes, and pain holds its victims to a life-long bondage, and
death leads throngs daily to the grave, and leaves other throngs
wild with grief, a sensitively sympathetic man, surrendering
himself to all the influences that address him, would lose all
power to help the distressed, or even to speak a word of comfort.
We are to apprehend the woes of others through our sympathies, and
to hold those sympathies in such repose that all the power of our
natures will be held ready for, and subject to, intelligent
ministry. The woman who faints at the sight of blood is not fit
for a hospital. The man who grows pale at hearing a groan, will
not do for a surgeon. If we mean to do any thing in this world for
the good of men, we must first compel our sympathies and our
passions into repose.
That which is true of power in this matter is true of judgment. It
is a widely bruited aphorism that "all history is a lie," and this
aphorism had its birth in the fact that historians become, as it
were, magnetized by the characters with which they deal. A man who
writes the life of Napoleon finds himself either sympathizing with
him, or roused into antipathy by him. In short, he becomes the
subject of a passion, wrought upon him by the character which he
contemplates and undertakes to paint; and from the moment this
passion takes possession of him, he becomes unfitted to write an
impartial and reliable word about him. All positive historical
characters have all possible historical portraits, simply because
the writers are subjects of passion. It is because no man can
write of positive characters without being the subject of an
influence from them, that no man can be an impartial historian,
and that all history must necessarily be a lie. If ever a perfect
history shall be written, it will be written by one whose passions
are under entire control, and kept in a condition of profound
repose--who will look at a historical character as he would upon
an impaled beetle in an entomological collection. A man is no
competent judge of a character, either in history or in life, with
which he strongly sympathizes. I have known many a man utterly
unfitted to read the proofs of the villainy of one to whom he had
surrendered his sympathies. A woman in love is a very poor judge
of character. She can see nothing but excellence where others see
nothing but shallowness and rottenness.
Once more, there is no dignity without repose. A restless, uneasy
man, can never be a dignified man. There can be no dignity about a
man or a woman who fumes, and frets, and fusses, and is full of
freaks and caprices. Dignity of manners is always associated with
repose. Mrs. Flutter Budget always enters a drawing-room as if she
were a loaded doll, tossed in by the usher, and goes dodging and
tipping about to get her centre of gravity, without getting it. Her
queenly neighbor comes in as the sun rises--calmly, sweetly, steadily,
and all hearts bow to her dignified coming. What would an Archbishop
be worth for dignity, who should be continually scratching his ears,
and brushing his nose, and crossing and re-crossing his legs, and
drumming with his fingers? Who would not deem the ermine degraded
by a chief justice who should be constantly twitching about upon his
bench? It is a fact that has come under the observation of the least
observant, that the moment a man surrenders himself to his passions
he loses his dignity. A fit of anger is as fatal to dignity as a dose of
arsenic to life. A fit of mirthfulness is hardly less fatal. So it is in
repose, and particularly in the repose of the passions, that we find
the happiness, the influence, the power, and the dignity of our life.
Let us cultivate repose.
LESSON XIV.
THE WAYS OF CHARITY.
"The Holy Supper is kept indeed,
In whatso we share with another's need;
Not that which we give, but what we share.
For the gift without the giver is bare:
Who bestows himself, with his alms feeds three,--
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me."
LOWELL.
"It may not be our lot to wield
The sickle in the ripened field;
Nor ours to hear on summer eves,
The reaper's song among the sheaves;
Yet, when our duty's task is wrought,
In unison with God's great thought,
The near and future blend in one,
And whatsoe'er is willed is done."
WHITTIER.
I have come to entertain very serious doubts about my "orthodoxy"
on the subject of doing good. If I know my own motives, I
certainly have a desire to do good; but this desire is yoke fellow
with the perverse wish to do it in my own way. I do not feel
myself inclined to accept the prescriptions of those who have
taken out patents for various ingenious processes in this line of
effort. My attention has just been attracted to this subject, by
the perusal of a long story, which must be not far from the one
hundred and ninety-ninth that I have read during the past twenty
years, all tipped with the same general moral. A good-natured
lady, in easy circumstances, and of benevolent impulses, is
appealed to by a poor man in the kitchen. She feeds him, gives him
clothes, sends him away rejoicing, and feels good over it. The man
comes again and again, tells pitiful stories, excites her
benevolence of course, and secures a reasonable amount of
additional plunder. Months pass away; and being out upon a walk
one pleasant afternoon, and finding herself near the poor man's
residence, the fair benefactress calls upon him. She finds the
wife (who was reported dead) very comfortable indeed, and the
destitute family of four children reduced to a single fat and
saucy baby, and the poor liar himself smelling strongly of rum.
Then come the denouement, and a grand tableau: lady very much
grieved and astonished--wife, who has known nothing of her
husband's tricks, exceedingly bewildered--fuddled husband, blind
with rum and remorse, owns up to his meanness and duplicity. He
found (as he confessed) that he could work upon the lady's
sympathies, got to lying and couldn't stop, and, finally, felt so
badly over the whole operation, that he took to drink to drown his
conscience! _Moral:_ Women should not help poor people without
going to see them, and finding out whether they lie.
Now that woman did exactly as I should have done, under the same
circumstances. In the first place, I should never have had the
heart to doubt a man who carried an honest face, and was cold,
hungry, and ragged. I should have regarded his condition as a
claim upon my charity. In the second place, I should have had no
time to call upon his family, and satisfy myself with regard to
their circumstances; and in the third place, I should have felt
very delicate about putting direct questions to them if I had. The
same story tells incidentally of one of these men who do good in
the proper way. He visited a house which presented all the signs
of poverty; but the angel of mercy was too 'cute' to be taken in;
so he walked up stairs. Every thing presenting there the same
aspect of abject poverty that prevailed below, the angel of mercy
looked around him, and discovered a ladder leading to the garret.
The angel of mercy "smelt a rat," and mounted the ladder. In the
garret he found half a cord of wood, and any quantity of goodies
for the table. Another denouement and tableau. _Moral:_ as
before. If the story has taught me any thing, it is that it is my
duty to question every beggar that comes to my door, visit his
house, explore it from cellar to garret, and satisfy myself of
the truth or falsehood of his representations. Otherwise, my
charity goes for nothing, and I do my beggar an absolute
unkindness. In other words, while the law holds every man innocent
until he is proved to be guilty, charity holds every man guilty
until he is proved to be innocent.
It has become the fashion in certain circles to decry that
benevolence which sits at home in slippers, and gives its money
without seeing where it goes; but it is forgotten that the money
dispensed in slippers was earned in boots, and that the man who
has money to give, has usually so much business on hand that he
can make no adequate personal examination of the cases which are
referred to his charity. I can never forget Mr. Dickens' Cheeryble
Brothers, who were so very much obliged to a friend for calling
upon them, and telling them of the circumstances of a poor family.
It was taken as a great personal kindness when they were informed
how and where they could relieve want and distress. They had no
genius for going about and looking up cases of charity, but their
hearts leaped at the opportunity to do good. They did their work
in their counting-room, and had no time and no talent for visiting
those whom they benefited; but who would question either the
genuineness or the judiciousness of their benevolence? The
applications for aid made at the doors of our dwellings come
oftener to the mistresses of those dwellings than to the masters;
and these mistresses, four times in five, are women with the care
of children on their hands, or household duties which demand
almost constant attention. If a beggar come to the door, they are
grateful for the opportunity to afford relief; but they have no
time to visit another quarter of the town, to learn whether their
charities have been well bestowed, nor do they withhold their
charities through fear of being imposed upon.
In my judgment, the character and circumstances of a man determine
his office in the work of charitable relief. I know there are some
persons who have a peculiar natural adaptation to the work of
visiting the subjects of sickness and of need. Their presence and
their sympathy are grateful to those to whom they delight to
minister. They are masters and mistresses of all those thrifty
economies which enable them to manage for the poor. They have
genuine administrative talent in this particular department. They
are cheerful and active, and sympathetic and ingenious; and they
can do more for a poor, discouraged family with ten dollars than
others can do with fifty. I do not suppose that these people are
one whit more benevolent than those whose purses are always open
to the poor, and who at the same time would feel very awkward upon
a visit of charity, and would make the family visited feel as
awkward as themselves. The poor we have always with us; and every
man and woman who possesses means for their relief owes a duty to
them which is to be discharged in the most efficient way. If I
have money, and do not feel that I am the proper person to look
after the details of its dispensation, I will put it into the
hands of one more competent to the business, and I will rationally
conclude that I have done my duty. In the mean time, if a man come
to my door, and ask for the supply of his immediate necessities,
he shall not be turned empty away because I do not happen to have
the means at hand for verifying his story.
I know that there are multitudes of tender-hearted women--women of
abounding benevolence and sensitive conscience--who are troubled
upon this subject. They have a desire to do good, and to do it in
the right way; but, somehow, they find if impossible to do it
according to the views of the story-writers. They are any thing
but rugged in health, perhaps, or they have a dependent family of
young children around them, or the care of their dwellings absorbs
their time. They fail to find the opportunity to visit the poor,
or they do not feel themselves adapted to the office; and still
they carry about with them the uncomfortable suspicion that they
are meanly shrinking from duty. My thought upon this point is that
my duties never conflict with one another, and that if I can do
good in one way better than another, then that is my way to do
good. I shall not permit the story-writers to prescribe for me,
nor shall I allow them to make me uncomfortable.
There is a class of men and women in all Protestant communities
who think it a very neat thing to do good at random. They sow
broadcast of cheap seed, content to reap nothing at all, and
pleasantly disappointed if they find here and there a stalk of
corn to reward their sowing. They do not prepare their ground,
they do not cultivate it at all, but they sow, hoping that in some
open place a seed may fall and germinate. Some of these people
regard this method of doing good as a kind of holy stratagem--a
Christian trick--which takes the devil at a disadvantage. I once
knew a kind old gentleman who did a business that brought him
considerably into contact with rough and profane persons; and as
he wished to do something for them, he kept his pockets filled
with little printed cards entitled "The Swearer's Prayer;" and
whenever an oath came out, the utterer was immediately presented
with this card with a little story on it, and a statement that "to
swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise." I very well remember
hearing the old gentleman say that, though he had given away
hundreds of these cards, he had never learned that one of them had
done any good. I do not wonder at it. It was a sneaking way of
doing good, or of trying to. If the old man had remonstrated
personally with these swearing fellows, and told them that their
habit was both vulgar and wicked, does any one suppose that the
result would have been so unsatisfactory? He had not pluck enough
to do this; so he gave them a card, and they either threw it in
his face or threw it away. But then, the cards didn't cost much!
I have been much interested in watching a car-load of passengers,
while receiving each from the hands of a professional distributor
a religious tract. All have received the gift politely, in
deference to the motive which prompted, or was supposed to prompt,
its bestowal; yet I have never failed to perceive that politeness
was really taxed in the matter. Now let me be candid, and confess
that I was never pleasantly impressed by being presented with a
tract in a railroad car. This fact cannot be attributed to any
lack of disposition to contemplate religious subjects; but there
is something which tells me that it is improper and indelicate for
any man to come into a public vehicle, and thrust upon me and upon
my fellow-passengers a set of motives and opinions on religion
which may or may not accord with my own and theirs--just as it
happens. I think the natural action of the mind is to brace itself
against influences sought to be sprung upon it in this manner;
and I am yet to be convinced that this indiscriminate and
wholesale distribution of religious tracts in railroad stations
and public conveyances is not doing, and has not done, more harm
than good. I know that multitudes of men--not vicious--are
disgusted with it, and offended by it, and that there is
something--call it what you may--in the emotions excited by the
presentation of a tract under such ill-chosen circumstances, which
counteracts any good influence it was intended to produce. A
gentleman will receive a tract politely, and read it or not
according to his whim; but it will be very apt to disgust him with
the style of Christianity which it represents.
I am aware that the secretary and the agents of the tract
societies make very encouraging reports of the results of their
operations. I am always interested in these details, and do not
discredit at all the statements which they make. Nay, I am
convinced that in certain departments of their effort they are
successful in doing much good. I believe that their noble army of
colporteurs, going from lonely neighborhood to neighborhood, and
carrying with them an unselfish, devoted life, and the living
voice of prayer, exhortation, and counsel, win many souls to
Christian virtue. I am willing to acknowledge, further, that here
and there a tract, chance-sown, may fall into ground ready to
receive it; but I have a right to question whether the same
outlay of effort and money, applied directly in other fields,
would not bring very much larger returns. My point is that in all
efforts to do good, in this way, appropriateness of time and place
is always to be consulted. I once took my seat in a dentist's
chair to have an operation performed upon my teeth. If I remember
correctly, an ugly fang was to be removed,--at any rate, pain was
involved in the matter; but no sooner was the dentist's arm around
my head, and his instrument in my mouth, than the well-meaning and
zealous operator began to question me upon the subject of personal
religion. Now it seemed quite as bad to undertake to propagate
Christianity at the point of a surgical instrument, as it would be
to win proselytes by the sword; and the utter incongruity of the
two operations disgusted me. At any rate, _I changed my dentist_.
I felt like the man who found upon his landlady's table an article
of butter that was inconveniently encumbered with hair, and who
informed her that he had no objection to hair, but would prefer to
have it served upon a separate dish.
A good many years ago, I read a Sunday-school book entitled, if I
remember correctly, "Walks of Usefulness." It represented a man
going out into the street, and "pitching into" every person he met
with, upon the subject of religion, or starting a conversation and
immediately giving it a spiritual twist. I thought then that he
was a remarkably ingenious man--a wonderful story-teller, to say
the least of him. I am inclined to think now that he romanced a
little. Every operation was so neatly done, and turned out so
well, that I really suspect it was pure fiction. I have this to
say, at any rate, that if he did and said what he professed to
have done and said, under the circumstances which he described, he
owed it to the politeness of those whom he addressed that he was
not dismissed with a decided rebuff, and told to go about his
business. "A word fitly spoken, how good it is!" Ah yes! how very
good it is! Christian zeal is no excuse for bad taste, nor is
Christian effort exempt from the laws of fitness and propriety
which attach to human effort of other aims in other fields. If I
wish to reach a man's mind upon any important subject, and
circumstances do not favor me, I wait for circumstances to change,
or I pave my way to his mind by a series of carefully-adjusted
efforts. Abrupt transitions of thought and feeling, and violent
interruptions of the currents of mental life and action, are never
favorable to reflection. If I wish to cheer a man who is bowed to
the earth in grief for the loss of a companion, I will not break
in upon his mourning with a lively tune upon a fiddle. If I wish
to attract him to a religious life, I will not interrupt the flow
of his innocently social hours by some terrible threat or warning.
In truth, I know of nothing that calls for more care, or nicer
discrimination, or choicer address, than a personal attempt to
move an irreligious mind in a religious direction. The word of
gold should always have a setting of silver.
There seems to be a prevalent disposition in the religious world
to do good by indirection and stratagem. If a man can reach one
mind by scattering ten thousand tracts, the result is more
grateful than it would be if that mind were reached by direct
personal effort without any tracts; and it makes a larger and more
interesting show in the reports. This disposition is manifest in
the matter of charitable fairs. The women of a religious society
will make up a batch of little-or-nothings, freeze a few cans of
ice cream, hire a hall, and advertise a sale. We all go, and buy
things that we do not want, with a good-natured and gallant
disregard of prices, and the footings of receipts are published in
the newspapers. The charitable women feel pleasantly about it, and
think that they have done a great deal of good at a small cost,
without remembering that all the money they have made has cost
somebody the amount of the declared figures. It seems to be a
great deal pleasanter to get possession of the money in this way,
than it would be to obtain it by a general subscription. They
forget that all they have done is to obtain a subscription by a
graceful and attractive stratagem, and that the motives which they
have pocketed with the money would not stand the test of a
scrupulous analysis. The main point seems to be to get the money,
and do the good with the least possible sense of sacrifice; as a
man goes to a charitable ball, and pays two dollars for the
privilege of dancing all night, in order to give a shilling of
profits to the widow and fatherless without feeling the burden of
the charity.
Of all the means of doing good, I know of none so repulsive as
that which is purely professional. I think we do not have so much
of this in these days as our fathers had. Our pastors are more
thoroughly our companions and friends than they used to be. They
do not assume to be our dictators and censors as they did in the
earlier days of Puritanism. The idea of the regular parochial
visit is essentially changed. But I know clergymen, even now, who
visit the house of mourning professionally, and give their
professional consolation in a professional way, and depart feeling
that they have faithfully performed their professional duty. I
know clergymen who go round from house to house with their
professional inquiries, and do up any quantity of professional
work in a day. The family come in, (those who do not run away,)
and take seats around the room, and answer questions, and listen
to a prayer, and then they bid their pastor a good afternoon with
a sense of relief, and go about their business again, while he
pushes on to his next parishioner, and repeats the professional
task. It is all a dry and unfruitful formality on the part of the
families visited, and a professionally-discharged duty on the
part of the pastor, and a pitifully-ridiculous caricature of the
visit of a religious teacher to his disciples every way. What
shall be said of an interview of which the pastor's part consisted
of these words: "Very late spring--Hem!" (looking out of the
window)--"who is building that barn?--potatoes seem to be getting
along very well;" (turning to a member of the family)--"Jane, how
do you enjoy your mind?" A spiritual frame that could stand such a
transition as that, without taking a fatal cold, must be based
upon a very sound constitution, and toughened by frequent
repetition of the process.
I suppose there will always be obtuse men in the pastoral office--
men who know no way of getting into a sensitive soul except by
knocking in the door and walking in with their boots on; but all
such men are out of their place. The souls of an average people--
tied to the tasks of life, burdened by care, oppressed by
routine, and depressed in many instances by bodily weakness--need
sympathy more than counsel, and encouragement and inspiration more
than a solemn, professional catechetical probing of their
religious state. But I think, as I have already said, that the
world is improving in this matter. Our pastors are more social,
more facile, more appreciative of the fact that, in all their
personal intercourse with their people, they must win love and
give sympathy if they would do good in the line of their
profession.