The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in
children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by
them, He did not consider them superfluous. "Of such is the
Kingdom of Heaven", He said; and His Church is the inheritor of
this tradition--"feed my lambs". There were children in Great
Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may
see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin's "Industrial
History of England":
Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands,
who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily
capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American
markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of
their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere
slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to
feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their
places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the
parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one
idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane
children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than
that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been
disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings
from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and
cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by
exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly
applied to force continued work. Children were often worked
sixteen hours a day, by day and by night.
In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the
labor of children nine years of age to four-teen hours a day.
This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to
have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently
opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It
was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the
will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church,
whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.
C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing
economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted
prince, worshipper of the gods".... so begins the oldest legal
code which has come down to us, from 2250 B. C.; and the
coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the
same thesis. The duty of submission, not merely to divinely
chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen
Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and
explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people petition
for increase of grace to hear meekly "Thy Word"; and here is this
"Word," as little children are made to learn it by heart. If
there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics,
I do not know where to find it.
My duty towards my neighbour is.....
To honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority
under him;
To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual
pastors, and masters:
To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters ....
Not to covet nor desire other men's goods;
But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do
my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to
call me.
A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers
was Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the
coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the
starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in
which they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly
known as "Little Hell." In this place two hundred people were
crowded into nineteen houses. "There is not one creature in it
that can give a cup of broth if it would save a life." In one
winter eighteen perished of "a putrid fever", and the clergyman
"could not raise a sixpence to save a life."
And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to
cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social
protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a
day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a
proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular
woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be
sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had
asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a
famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like
flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them
her pious self. "In suffering by the scarcity, you have but
shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the
advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered
no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place she
explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
be grateful to the rich!
Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite all
ranks of people together, to show the poor how immediately they
are dependent upon the rich, and to show both rich and poor that
they are all dependent upon Himself. It has also enabled you to
see more clearly the advantages you derive from the government
and constitution of this country--to observe the benefits flowing
from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the
high to so liberally assist the low.
It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by this
pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night and burned
an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic
consequence, for one of the "common people," known as Robert,
"was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear at Sunday
School next day. This fall from grace occasioned intense remorse
in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his mind for many months,"
records Martha More, "and despair seemed at length to take
possession of him." Hannah had some conversation with him, and
read him some suitable passages from "The Rise and Progress". "At
length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give
him comfort."
Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in any way
unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the letters of
Shelley how his father tormented him with Archdeacon Paley's
"Evidences" as a cure for atheism. This eminent churchman wrote a
book, which he himself ranked first among his writings, called
"Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Labouring Classes of
the British Public." In this book he not merely proved that
religion "smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a prospect
which makes all earthly distinctions nothing"; he went so far as
to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters
were less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a
day.
Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of the
labouring part of mankind must be so called) imposes, are not
hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a pleasure. It is
an exercise of attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is
successful, produces satisfaction..... This is lost among
abundance.
And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as
Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies
and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement,
and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to
British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot.
Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of
Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican
establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the
basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion
is to remind the poor:
That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand
of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties,
and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects
about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the
contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers
indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction
than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man's
reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if
their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also
exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are
happily extempted; that, "having food and raiment, they should be
therewith content," since their situation in life, with all its
evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and
finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and
the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same
Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly
inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the
temporal well-being of political communities.