Here was Christ's profession of his faith; here is the history also of
his examination, to see whether he were fit to preach or not. It is
remarkable that in both these instances the most significant indication
that he had, both of his descent from God and of his being worthy of the
Messiahship, consisted in this simple exposition of the line of his
preaching,--that he took sides with the poor, neglected, and lost. He
emphasized this, that his gospel was a gospel of mercy to the poor; and
that word "poor," in its most comprehensive sense, looked at
historically, includes in it everything that belongs to human misery,
whether it be by reason of sin or depravity, or by oppression, or by any
other cause. This, then, is the disclosure by Christ himself of the
genius of Christianity. It is his declaration of what the gospel meant.
It is still further interpreted when you follow the life of Christ, and
see how exactly in his conduct he interpreted, or rather fortified, the
words of the declaration. His earliest life was that of labor and
poverty, and it was labor and poverty in the poorest districts of
Palestine. The dignified, educated, and aristocratic part of the nation
dwelt in Judea, and the Athens of Palestine was Jerusalem. There Christ
spent the least part of his life, and that in perpetual discussions. But
in Galilee the most of his miracles, certainly the earlier, were
performed, and the most of his discourses that are contained bodily in
the gospels were uttered. He himself carried out the declaration that
the gospel was for the poor. The very miracles that Christ performed
were not philosophical enigmas, as we look at them. They were all of
them miracles of mercy. They were miracles to those who were suffering
helplessly where natural law and artificial means could not reach them.
In every case the miracles of Christ were mercies, though we look at
them in a spirit totally different from that in which he performed them.
In doing thus, Christ represented the best spirit of the Old Testament.
The Jewish Scriptures teach mercy, the very genius of Jewish
institutions was that of mercy, and especially to the poor, the weak,
the helpless. The crimes against which the prophets thundered their
severest denunciations were crimes upon the helpless. It was the avarice
of the rich, it was the unbounded lust and cruelty of the strong, that
were denounced by them. They did not preach against human nature in
general. They did not preach against total depravity and the original
condition of mankind. They singled out violations of the law in the
magistrate, in the king, in rich men, everywhere, and especially all
those wrongs committed by power either unconsciously or with purpose,
cruelty upon the helpless, the defenseless, the poor and the needy. When
Christ declared that this was his ministry, he took his text from the
Old Testament; he spoke in its spirit. It was to preach the gospel to
the poor that he was sent. He had come into the world to change the
condition of mankind. Beginning at the top? No; beginning at the bottom
and working up to the top from the bottom.
When this view of the gospel enters into our understanding and is fully
comprehended by us, how exactly it fits in with the order of nature, and
with the order of the unfolding of human life and human society! It
takes sides with the poor; and so the universal tendency of Providence
and of history, slowly unfolded, is on the whole going from low to high,
from worse to better, and from good toward the perfect. When we
consider, we see that man begins as a helpless thing, a baby zero
without a figure before it; and every step in life adds a figure to it
and gives it more and more worth. On the whole, the law of unfolding
throughout the world is from lower to higher; and though when applied to
the population of the globe it is almost inconceivable, still, with many
back-sets and reactions, the tendency of the universe is thus from lower
to higher. Why? Let any man consider whether there is not of necessity a
benevolent intelligence somewhere that is drawing up from the crude
toward the ripe, from the rough toward the smooth, from bad to good, and
from good through better toward best. The tendency upward runs like a
golden thread through the history of the whole world, both in the
unfolding of human life and in the unfolding of the race itself. Thus
the tendency of nature is in accordance with the tendency of the gospel
as declared by Jesus Christ, namely, that it is a ministry of mercy to
the needy.
The vast majority of mankind have been and yet are poor. There are ten
thousand men poor where there is one man even comfortably provided for,
body and soul, and hundreds of thousands where there is one rich, taking
the whole world together. The causes of poverty are worthy a moment's
consideration. Climate and soil have much to do with it. Men whose
winter lasts nine or ten months in the year, and who have a summer of
but one or two months, as in the extreme north,--how could they amass
property, how could they enlarge their conditions of peace and of
comfort? There are many parts of the earth where men live on the borders
of deserts, or in mountain fastnesses, or in arctic rigors, where
anything but poverty is impossible, and where it requires the whole
thought, genius, industry, and foresight of men, the year round, just to
feed themselves and to live. Bad government, where men are insecure in
their property, has always been a very fertile source of poverty. The
great valley of Esdraelon in Northern Palestine is one of the most
fertile in the world, and yet famine perpetually stalks on the heels of
the population; for if you sow and the harvest waves, forth come hordes
of Bedouins to reap your harvest for you, and leave you, after all your
labor, to poverty and starvation. When a man has lost his harvest in
that way two or three times, and is deprived of the reward of his
labors, he never emerges from poverty, but sinks into indolence; and
that, by and by, breeds apathetic misery. So where the government
over-taxes its subjects, as is the case in the Orient with perhaps
nearly all of the populations there to-day, it cuts the sinews and
destroys all the motives of industry; and without industry there can be
neither virtue, morality, nor religion in any long period. Wars breaking
out, from whatever cause, tend to absorb property, or to destroy
property, or to prevent the development of property. Yet, strange as it
may seem, the men who suffer from war are those whose passions generally
lead it on. The king may apply the spark, but the combustion is with the
common people. They furnish the army, they themselves become destroyers;
and the ravages of war, in the history of the human family, have
destroyed more property than it is possible to enter into the thoughts
of men to conceive.
But besides these external reasons of poverty, there are certain great
primary and fundamental reasons. Ignorance breeds poverty. What is
property? It is the product of intelligence, of skill, of thought
applied to material substances. All property is raw material that has
been shaped to uses by intelligent skill. Where intelligence is low, the
power of producing property is low. It is the husbandman who thinks,
foresees, plans, and calls on all natural laws to serve him, whose farm
brings forth forty, fifty, and a hundred fold. The ignorant peasant
grubs and groans, and reaps but one handful where he has sown two. It is
knowledge that is the gold mine; for although every knowing man may not
be able to be a rich man, yet out of ignorance riches do not spring
anywhere. Ignorant men may be made the factors of wealth when they are
guided and governed by superior intelligence. Slave labor produced
gigantic plantations and estates. The slave was always poor, but his
master was rich, because the master had the intelligence and the
knowledge, and the slave gave the work. All through human society, men
who represent simple ignorance will be tools, and the men who represent
intelligence will be the master mechanics, the capitalists. All society
to-day is agitated with this question of justice as between the laborer
and the thinker. Now, it is no use to kick against the pricks. A man who
can only work and not think is not the equal in any regard of the man
who can think, who can plan, who can combine, and who can live not for
to-day alone, but for to-morrow, for next month, for the next year, for
ten years. This is the man whose volume will just as surely weigh down
that of the unthinking man as a ton will weigh down a pound in the
scale. Avoirdupois is moral, industrial, as well as material, in this
respect; and the primary, most usual cause of unprosperity in industrial
callings therefore lies in the want of intelligence,--either in the
slender endowment of the man, or more likely the want of education in
his ordinary and average endowment. Any class of men who live for
to-day, and do not care whether they know anything more than they did
yesterday or last year--those men may have a temporary and transient
prosperity, but they are the children of poverty just as surely as the
decrees of God stand. Ignorance enslaves men among men; knowledge is the
creator of liberty and wealth.
As with undeveloped intelligence, so the appetites of men and their
passions are causes of poverty. Men who live from the basilar faculties
will invariably live in inferior stations. The men who represent
animalism are as a general fact at the bottom. They may say it is
government, climate, soil, want of capital, they may say what they
please, but it is the devil of laziness that is in them, or of passion,
that comes out in eating, in gluttony, in drinking and drunkenness, in
wastefulness on every side. I do not say that the laboring classes in
modern society are poor because they are self-indulgent, but I say that
it unquestionably would be wise for all men who feel irritated that they
are so unprosperous, if they would take heed to the moral condition in
which they are living, to self-denial in their passions and appetites,
and to increasing the amount of their knowledge and fidelity. Although
moral conditions are not the sole causes, they are principal causes, of
the poverty of the working classes throughout the world. It is their
misfortune as well as their fault; but it is the reason why they do not
rise. Weakness does not rise; strength does.
All these causes indicate that the poor need moral and intellectual
culture. "I was sent to preach the gospel to the poor:" not to
distribute provisions, not to relieve their wants; that will be
included, but that was not Christ's primary idea. It was not to bring in
a golden period of fruitfulness when men would not be required to work.
It was not that men should lie down on their backs under the trees, and
that the boughs should bend over and drop the ripe fruit into their
mouths. No such conception of equality and abundance entered into the
mind of the Creator or of Him who represented the Creator. To preach the
gospel to the poor was to awaken the mind of the poor. It was to teach
the poor--"Take up your cross, deny yourselves, and follow me. Restrain
all those sinful appetites and passions, and hold them back by the power
of knowledge and by the power of conscience; grow, because you are the
sons of God, into the likeness of your Father." So he preached to the
poor. That was preaching prosperity to them. That was teaching them how
to develop their outward condition by developing their inward forces. To
develop that in men which should make them wiser, purer, and stronger,
is the aim of the gospel. Men have supposed that the whole end of the
gospel was reconciliation between God and men who had fallen--though
they were born sinners in their fathers and grandfathers and ancestors;
to reconcile them with God--as if an abstract disagreement had been the
cause of all this world's trouble! But the plain facts of history are
simply that men, if they have not come from animals, have yet dwelt in
animalism, and that that which should raise them out of it was some such
moral influence as should give them the power of ascension into
intelligence, into virtue, and into true godliness. That is what the
gospel was sent for; good news, a new power that is kindled under men,
that will lift them from their low ignorances and degradations and
passions, and lift them into a higher realm; a power that will take away
all the poverty that needs to be taken away. Men may be doctrinally
depraved; they are much more depraved practically. Men may need to be
brought into the knowledge of God speculatively; but what they do need
is to be brought into the knowledge of themselves practically. I do not
say that the gospel has nothing in it of this kind of spiritual
knowledge; it is full of it, but its aim and the reason why it should be
preached is to wake up in men the capacity for good things, industries,
frugalities, purities, moralities, kindnesses one toward another: and
when men are brought into that state they are reconciled. When men are
reconciled with the law of creation and the law of their being, they are
reconciled with God. Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of
knowledge, he is reconciled with the God of knowledge, so far. Whenever
a man is reconciled with the law of purity he is so far reconciled with
a God of purity. When men have lifted themselves to that point that
they recognize that they are the children of God, the kingdom of God has
begun within them.
Although the spirit and practice of the gospel will develop charities,
will develop physical comfort, will feed men, will heal men, will
provide for their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result
of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want
on an occasion. It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely
the first letter of the alphabet. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and
his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be
added unto you." The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he
will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the character of the
help that he demands.
In testing Christianity, then, I remark first that it is to be tested
not by creeds, but by conduct. The evidence of the gospel, the reality
of the gospel that is preached in schools or churches, is to be found in
the spirit that is developed by it, not in the technical creeds that men
have constructed out of it. The biography of men who have died might be
hung up in their sepulchres; but you could not tell what kind of a man
this one had been, just by reading his life there--while he lay dead in
dust before you. There are thousands of churches that have a creed of
Christianity hung up in them, but the church itself is a sepulchre full
of dead men's bones; and indeed, many churches in modern times are
gnawing the bones of their ancestors, and doing almost nothing else.
The gospel, changed from a spirit of humanity into a philosophical
system of doctrine, is perverted. It is not the gospel. The great heresy
in the world of religion is a cold heart, not a luminous head. It is not
that intelligence is of no use in religion. By no means. Neither would
we wage a crusade against philosophical systems of moral truth. But
where the active sympathy and humanity of loving hearts for living men,
and for men in the ratio in which they are low, is laid aside or
diminished to a minimum, and in its place is a well-elaborated
philosophical system of moral truths, hewn and jointed,--the gospel is
gone. If you go along the sea-shores, you will often find the shells of
fish--the fish dead and gone, the shells left. And if you go along the
shores of ecclesiastical organization, you will find multitudes of
shells of the gospel, out of which the living substance has gone long
ago. Organized Christianity--that is, the institutions of Christianity
have been in the first instance its power, and in the second instance
its damnation. The moment you substitute the machinery of education for
education itself, the moment you build schools and do not educate, build
colleges that do not increase knowledge in the pupils, you have
sacrificed the aim for the instrument by which you were to gain that
aim. In churches, the moment it is more important to maintain buildings,
rituals, ministers, chanters, and all the paraphernalia of moral
education than the spirit of personal sympathy, the moment these are
more sacred to men than is the welfare of the population round about
which they were set to take care of, that very moment Christ is dead in
that place; that very moment religion in the midst of all its
institutions has perished. I am bound to say that in the history of the
world, while religious institutions have been valuable and have done a
great deal of good, they have perhaps done as much harm as good. There
is scarcely one single perversion of civil government, there is scarcely
one single persecution of men, there is scarcely a single one of the
great wars that have depopulated the globe, there is scarcely one great
heresy developed out of the tyranny of the church, that has not been the
fruit of institutional religion; while that spirit of humanity which was
to give the institution its motive power has to a certain extent died
out of it.
Secondly, churches organized upon elective affinities of men are
contrary to the spirit of the gospel. We may associate with men who are
of like taste with ours. We have that privilege. If men are
knowledgeable and intellectual, there is no sin in their choosing for
intimate companions and associates men of like pursuits and like
intellectual qualities. That is right. If men are rich, there is no
reason why men who hold like property should not confer with each other,
and form interests and friendships together. If men are refined, if they
have become æsthetic, there is no reason why they should not associate
in the realm of beauty, artists with artists, nor why the great enjoyers
of beauty should not be in sympathy. Exit all these are not to be
allowed to do it at the price of abandoning common humanity; you have no
right to make your nest in the boughs of knowledge, and let all the rest
of the world go as it will. You have no right to make your home among
those who are polished and exquisite and fastidious in their tastes,
whose garments are beauty, whose house is a temple of art, and all whose
associations are of like kind, and neglect common humanity. You have no
right to shut yourself up in a limited company of those who are like you
in these directions, and let all the rest of men go without sympathy and
without care. It is a right thing for a man to salute his neighbor who
salutes him; but if you salute those who salute you, says Christ, what
thank have ye--do not even the publicans so? It is no sin that a man,
being intellectual in his nature, should like intellectual people, and
gratify that which is divine and God-like in him; but if, because he
likes intellectual people, he loses all interest in ignorant people, it
convicts him of depravity and of moral perversion. When this is carried
out to such an extent that churches are organized upon sharp
classification, upon elective affinities, they not only cease to be
Christian churches, but they are heretical; not perhaps in doctrine, but
worse than that, heretical in heart.
The fact is that a church needs poor men and wicked men as much as it
does pure men and virtuous men and pious men. What man needs is
familiarity with universal human nature. He needs never to separate
himself from men in daily life. It is not necessary that in our houses
we should bring pestilential diseases or pestilential examples, but
somehow we must hold on to men if they are wicked; somehow the
circulation between the top and the bottom must be carried on; somehow
there must be an atoning power in the heart of every true believer of
the Lord Jesus Christ who shall say, looking out and seeing that the
world is lost, and is living in sin and misery, "I belong to it, and it
belongs to me." When you take the loaf of society and cut off the upper
crust, slicing it horizontally, you get an elect church. Yes, it is the
peculiarly elect church of selfishness. But you should cut the loaf of
society from the top down to the bottom, and take in something of
everything. True, every church would be very much edified and advantaged
if it had in it scholarly men, knowledgeable men; but the church is
strong in proportion as it has in it something of everything, from the
very top to the very bottom.
Now, I do not disown creeds--provided they are my own! Well, you smile;
but that is the way it has been since the world began. No denomination
believes in any creed except its own. I do not say that men's knowledge
on moral subjects may not be formulated. I criticize the formulation of
beliefs from time to time, in this: that they are very partial; that
they are formed upon the knowledge of a past age, and that that
knowledge perishes while higher and nobler knowledge comes in; that
there ought to be higher and better forms; and that while their power is
relatively small, the power of the spirit of humanity is relatively
great. When I examine a church, I do not so much care whether its
worship is to the one God or to the triune God. I do not chiefly care
for the catechism, nor for the confession of faith, although they are
both interesting. I do not even look to see whether it is a synagogue or
a Christian church--I do not care whether it has a cross over the top of
it or is Quaker plain. I do not care whether it is Protestant, Catholic,
or anything else. Let me read the living--- the living book! What is the
spirit of the people? How do they feel among each other? How do they
feel toward the community? What is their life and conduct in regard to
the great prime moral duty of man, "Love the Lord thy God and thy
neighbor as thyself," whether he be obscure or whether he be smiling in
the very plenitude of wealth and refinement? Have you a heart for
humanity? Have you a soul that goes out for men? Are you Christ-like?
Will you spend yourself for the sake of elevating men who need to be
lifted up? That is orthodox. I do not care what the creed is. If a
church has a good creed, that is all the more felicitous; and if it has
a bad creed, a good life cures the bad creed.
One of the dangers of our civilization may be seen in the light of these
considerations. We are developing so much strength founded on popular
intelligence, and this intelligence and the incitements to it are
developing such large property interests, that if the principle of
elective affinity shall sort men out and classify them, we are steering
to the not very remote danger of the disintegration of human society. I
can tell you that the classes of men who by their knowledge, refinement,
and wealth think they are justified in separating themselves, and in
making a great void between them and the myriads of men below them, are
courting their own destruction. I look with very great interest on the
process of change going on in Great Britain, where the top of society
had all the "blood," but the circulation is growing larger and larger,
and a change is gradually taking place in their institutions. The old
nobility of Great Britain is the lordliest of aristocracies existing in
the world. Happily, on the whole, a very noble class of men occupy the
high positions: but the spirit of suffrage, this angel of God that so
many hate, is coming in on them; and when every man in Great Britain can
vote, no matter whether he is poor or rich, whether he has knowledge or
no knowledge, there must be a very great change. Before the great day of
the Lord shall come, the valleys are to go up and the mountains are to
come down; and the mountains have started already in Great Britain and
must come down. There may be an aristocracy in any nation,--that is to
say, there may be "best men"; there ought to be an aristocracy in every
community,--that is, an aristocracy of men who speak the truth, who are
just, who are intelligent: but that aristocracy will be like a wave of
the sea; it has to be reconstituted in every generation, and the men who
are the best in the State become the aristocracy of that State. But
where rank is hereditary, if political suffrage becomes free and
universal, aristocracy cannot live. The spirit of the gospel is
democratic. The tendency of the gospel is leveling; leveling up, not
down. It is carrying the poor and the multitude onward and upward.
It is said that democracies have no great men, no heroic men. Why is it
so? When you raise the average of intelligence and power in the
community it is very hard to be a great man. That is to say, when the
great mass of citizens are only ankle-high, when among the Lilliputians
a Brobdingnagian walks, he is a great man. But when the Lilliputians
grow until they get up to his shoulder, he is not so great a man as he
was by the whole length of his body. So, make the common people grow,
and there is nobody tall enough to be much higher.
* * * * *
The remarkable people of this world are useful in their way; but the
common people, after all, represent the nation, the age, and the
civilization. Go into any town or city: do not ask who lives in that
splendid house; do not say, This is a fine town, here are streets of
houses with gardens and yards, and everything that is beautiful the
whole way through. Go into the lanes, go into the back streets, go where
the mechanic lives; go where the day-laborer lives. See what is the
condition of the streets there. See what they do with the poor, with the
helpless, and the mean. If the top of society bends perpetually over the
bottom with tenderness, if the rich and strong are the best friends of
the poor and needy, that is a civilized and a Christian community; but
if the rich and the wise are the cream and the great bulk of the
population skim-milk, that is not a prosperous community.
There is a great deal of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of
wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true
that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the
community. If there is one thing that stood out more strongly than any
other in the ministry of our Lord, it is the severity with which he
treated the exclusiveness of men with knowledge, position, and a certain
sort of religion, a religion of particularity and carefulness; if there
is one class of the community against which he hurled his thunderbolts
without mercy and predicted woes, it was the scribes, Pharisees,
scholars, and priests of the temples. He told them in so many words,
"The publican and the harlot will enter the kingdom of God before you."
The worst dissipation in this world is the dry-rot of morality, and of
the so-called piety that separates men of prosperity and of power from
the poor and ignoble. They are our wards....
I am not a socialist. I do not preach riot. I do not preach the
destruction of property. I regard property as one of the sacred things.
The real property established by a man's own intelligence and labor is
the crystallized man himself. It is the fruit of what his life-work has
done; and not in vain, society makes crime against it amongst the most
punishable. But nevertheless, I warn these men in a country like ours,
where every man votes, whether he came from Hungary, or from Russia, or
from Germany, or from France or Italy, or Spain or Portugal, or from the
Orient,--from Japan and China, because they too are going to vote! On
the Niagara River, logs come floating down and strike an island, and
there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won't go over.
But the rains come, the snows melt, the river rises, and the logs are
lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls. The stream of
suffrage of free men, having all the privileges of the State, is this
great stream. The figure is defective in this, that the log goes over
the Niagara Falls, but that is not the way the country is going or will
go.... There is a certain river of political life, and everything has to
go into it first or last; and if, in days to come, a man separates
himself from his fellows without sympathy, if his wealth and power make
poverty feel itself more poor and men's misery more miserable, and set
against him the whole stream of popular feeling, that man is in danger.
He may not know who dynamites him, but there is danger; and let him take
heed who is in peril. There is nothing easier in the world than for rich
men to ingratiate themselves with the whole community in which they
live, and so secure themselves. It is not selfishness that will do it;
it is not by increasing the load of misfortune, it is not by wasting
substance in riotous living upon appetites and passions. It is by
recognizing that every man is a brother. It is by recognizing the
essential spirit of the gospel, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It is by
using some of their vast power and riches so as to diffuse joy in every
section of the community.
Here then I close this discourse. How much it enrolls! How very simple
it is! It is the whole gospel. When you make an application of it to all
the phases of organization and classification of human interests and
developments, it seems as though it were as big as the universe. Yet
when you condense it, it all comes back to the one simple creed: "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as
thyself." Who is my neighbor? A certain man went down to Jericho, and so
on. That tells you who your neighbor is. Whosoever has been attacked by
robbers, has been beaten, has been thrown down--by liquor, by gambling,
or by any form of wickedness; whosoever has been cast into distress, and
you are called on to raise him up--that is your neighbor. Love your
neighbor as yourself. That is the gospel.