Not to use any power is a sin; to omit to do anything that we can do
is a crime: to withhold a help that we can render is to participate in
the authorship of all the misery that we have failed to relieve. He
who neglects to save a life, kills. There are more murderers than
those who lift violent hands with malice aforethought against a hated
life. Rulers or communities who leave people uncared for to die, who
suffer swarming millions to live where the air is poison and the light
is murky, and first the soul and then the body, are dwarfed and die;
the incompetent men in high places, and the indolent ones in low,
whose selfishness brings, and whose blundering blindness allows to
continue, the conditions that are fatal to life--on these the guilt of
blood lies. Violence slays its thousands, but supine negligence slays
its tens of thousands.
And when we pass from these merely physical conditions to think of the
world and of the Church in the world, where shall we find words
weighty and burning enough to tell what fatal cruelty lies in the
unthinking negligence so characteristic of large portions of Christ's
professed followers? There is nothing which the ordinary type of
Christian, so called, more needs than to be aroused to a living sense
of personal responsibility for all the unalleviated misery of the
world. For every one who has laid the sorrows of humanity on his
heart, and has felt them in any measure as his own, there are a
hundred to whom these make no appeal and give no pang. Within ear-shot
of our churches and chapels there are squalid aggregations of stunted
and festering manhood, of whom it is only too true that they are
'drawn unto death' and 'ready to be slain,' and yet it would be an
exaggeration to say that the bulk of our congregations cast even a
languid eye of compassion upon those, to say nothing of stretching out
a hand to help. It needs to be dinned, far more than it is at present,
into every professing Christian that each of us has an obligation
which cannot be ignored or shuffled off, to acquaint ourselves with
the glaring facts that force themselves upon all thoughtful men, and
that the measure of our power is the measure of our obligation. The
question, Has the church done its best to deliver these? needs to be
sharpened to the point of 'Have I done my best?' And the vision of
multitudes perishing in the slums of a great city needs to be expanded
into the vision of dim millions perishing in the wide world.