In one of his allegorical poems, James Russell Lowell depicted the
antagonism of sentiment to which I am referring as existing between
Christ and his conventional worshippers. The poem is a slight thing:
although strict in metre and perfect in rhyme, it is too flowing and
fantastic to be classed high in literature. But if we view it as a
scientific essay in dynamic sociology, it is admirable beyond
criticism. As its meaning is quite separable from its form and sensuous
contents, I therefore ask you not to think of it as poetry or Christian
mythology, but to regard it only as a compact treatise in ethical
economics. Because this poem is familiar to you all, it will serve my
object the better. It represents Christ as coming back to earth after
eighteen hundred years, and all the grandees as rendering Him elaborate
homage. Nor do they omit to direct His attention to His own image set
up in the places of highest honor. But still, according to our dynamic
sociologist:--
... wherever his steps they led,
The Lord in sorrow bent down His head,
And from under the heavy foundation stones
The Son of Mary heard bitter groans.
And in church and palace and judgment-hall,
He marked great fissures that rent the wall,
And opened wider and still more wide
As the living foundations heaved and sighed.
"Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,
On the bodies and souls of living men?
And think ye that building shall endure
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?"
* * * * *
Then Christ sought out an artisan--
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly Want and Sin.
These set He in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said He,
"The images ye have made of Me!"
To-day no one denies that the foundations are alive and that they heave
and sigh. In our age one need not be of the order of Christ to have
ears to hear the bitter groans. Everybody hears them, if one may judge
from the universal reports of the daily papers. Indeed, how to suppress
the groans or to prevent them from becoming more articulate and
coherent is the most vexing problem of the government of the most
civilized state in the world. At least Prince von Buelow so represents
the case in his book entitled _Imperial Germany_. And the party leaders
of the United States have all been alert for two decades to discover
how to render impossible an upheaval of the living foundations of
America. There is, as I say, no denying the fact that the foundations
are alive, and that they not only groan bitterly, but--what is more
serious--heave threateningly. Whether any one person, however, is on
the side of the living foundations, as according to Lowell Jesus Christ
was, or on the side of the thrones and altars, as his conventional
worshippers are depicted to be by Lowell and many another American
writer since, depends upon what the special person's innate taste is.
The thrones and altars have become more and more magnificent in beauty,
costliness, and splendor, with the progress of civilization; but not so
the mob, the rabble, the "underworld," whose stirrings have rent the
walls. Christ's taste, it would seem, was not primarily aesthetic. But
then not every one is a son of Mary, and not every carpenter's son
sides with the class to which his father belonged.