EFFECT ON CHARACTER.
The greatest factor in life in all ages is not material wealth, nor
social position, nor genius, nor education, but character. Since man
is above things, the highest purpose is not the gathering of that
beneath him, but the developing of the best and noblest that is in
him.
The highest possible purpose and work is the developing of virtuous
manhood.
This was the thought of our fathers when they came to these shores and
built their homes and established the free institutions which we now
enjoy. They sacrificed material advantages that they might be free men
and secure for themselves and for their children the opportunity to
reach in faith and practice the ideal manhood.
No material advantage can be regarded with favor that is detrimental
to the characters of men. Position, wealth, education, are worse than
worthless when associated with a corrupted manhood.
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay."
The test of truth is its developing of the virtues and graces.
Falsehood is detected by its quickening the vices that degrade and
destroy. "By their fruits shall ye know them."
Virtues are linked together so that the promoting of one gives
strength to the others. All vices are also so linked that the
stimulating of one quickens other vices.
Virtues and vices are opposite, so that the encouraging of a vice or
fault discourages the opposing virtue. When you discourage a virtue,
you encourage a vice.
The old-fashioned virtues which our fathers prized, and which they
regarded essential elements of worthy manhood, were industry, and
honesty, and self-reliance, and brotherly sympathy, and the devout
recognition of God's divine sovereignty.
1. Usury discourages industry and encourages idleness. The laborer is
stirred to diligence when he gets good wages. When his wages are
meager he becomes discouraged, relaxes his efforts and may abandon his
work altogether. When he knows that he is receiving less than he is
earning, and that a part of his earnings are appropriated by another,
he is embittered and becomes indifferent. When he receives all he
earns, and the more diligent he is in his work the more he receives,
he is stimulated to the utmost.
This will be especially true if it is made impossible to secure a gain
without earning it. The benefit of full wages may be largely lost by
the knowledge of persons who, without productive effort, are
appropriating the earnings of others. The influence of their easy,
indolent lives may destroy or counteract the beneficent influence of
good wages. The laborer may be led to despise his well-paid tasks and
yearn for their ease, and thus become indolent.
One is encouraged to idleness when he discovers that he can secure his
bread by the sweat of another's face. He is likely to relax his
efforts if he does not forsake all personal productive occupations. He
may give great care and the closest attention to the management of his
wealth, loaning to others and collecting the increase, but not to
productive industry.
There are activities that look like virtues, but they are perverted
efforts. The slave-driver may work as hard as the slave in his efforts
to appropriate the earnings of others. The thief may work in the night
and endure more hardness to secure the property of another than would
be necessary to honestly earn it. The usurer may give his thought,
night and day, to the placing of his wealth the most securely and at
the best rates of interest, and at the same time abandon all effort in
the direct management of useful productive enterprises.
The complete result of usury upon the habit of industry can be
realized in those who have grown up under its influence; those who
have an income secure from invested funds. When there is no need,
present nor prospective, there is no motive to active industry, and
the love of ease and pleasure grows and drives out all heart for
productive effort.
The industrious habit coupled with economy is called thrift. It is not
parsimony or unwillingness to give, but a disposition to save. Our
Lord, who was the prince of givers and inculcated unlimited giving
among his followers, gave a lesson in thrift when he said after his
miracle, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost."
Enforced industry and economy is not thrift. When by low wages or
grinding conditions the necessities of life are with difficulty
secured, the very opposite disposition may be cultivated. When the
external restraints are removed, the wildest extravagance may be
indulged in. This is sometimes given as an excuse for low, grinding
wages; that "the workmen and their wives have no idea of saving;" that
higher wages would be wasted in foolish extravagance.
No one in normal conditions will be wasteful of that which has cost
him hard labor. His care for it will naturally be in proportion to the
effort that was necessary to secure it. Those who waste the wealth of
the world are not those who by the sweat of their faces have produced
it. The habit of thrift comes from the knowledge of the value of a
thing, learned by earning it. Only that which comes without effort
will be spent without thought. Those who have livings secured from the
increase or interest of "productive" capital, having no need of
industry, are wholly occupied with the spending; but in spending only,
the value of the thing spent is not appreciated, the habit of
extravagance grows and they become the idlers and the spendthrifts of
the world.
2. It prevents open and frank honesty. When the thought is turned to
an endeavor to secure a dollar that is not earned, there is
secretiveness of purpose and inward guile. No person doing business on
borrowed capital advertises the number and amount of his loans nor
does he welcome inquiry by others. In a column of advertisements by
money lenders in a newspaper lying on this table every one promises
"privacy" or "no publicity." No one can be so open and frank as the
one who earns every dollar that he receives or seeks.
The possibility of speculation is ruinous. The first step in the wreck
of integrity in a young man's character is when he becomes absorbed in
some scheme by which he can secure gain without honestly earning it.
Lotteries are outlaws not only because they defraud but they undermine
integrity and honest industry.
When property earns property, and the gain is secured with no struggle
on his part, the temptation is presented and the disintegration of his
character has begun. When there is no gain except by production, the
whole thought and energy of the man is directed to that end, and his
desire to secure that earned by another is restrained. The frank,
open disposition is preserved. Honest productive toil drives out the
spirit of speculation. Under usury, both lender and borrower are in
the attitude of expectants of unearned gain.
3. It discourages the spirit of self-reliance.
Usury causes a broad separation between a man of property and the man
of mere muscle or brain. It makes such large combinations of capital
possible in immense shops and department stores and other enterprises,
that the individual workman is belittled. Under the principle of
usury, property can produce as well as brain or muscle. One having
property can control both.
His property places him in a position as a superior. He comes to
forget the relations he bears to men as equals, and requires that
those who have only their natural gifts shall be cringing supplicants
before him or be denied his favor. The borrower or the laborer who
asserts his rights is endangered by the man controlling property, who
has him in his power.
That independent, self-reliant spirit, that looks every man in the
face as an equal yet lingers in the country among the hills and
mountains, but is fast disappearing from the city. There has come to
the laborer in the town or city a feeling of dependence upon others
and a desire to secure their favor. They almost feel that they must
apologize for being laborers, and beg for an opportunity to earn a
living in some one's employ. One of the saddest facts, and most
threatening of disaster in these present commercial conditions, is the
common desire to be employed, to get a job, dependent on the whim of
another, instead of a determination to direct one's own labor and be
the manager of one's own business. The sound educational development
is wanting in the daily occupation of the hired laborer, and there is
a loss of manhood that has no compensation.
The independent spirit slips away so gradually that its going is
scarcely noticed, but when once gone the degradation is complete.
A family of free Hebrews went down into Egypt, and for a long time was
in favor with the rulers, but they gradually lost their independence
and became more and more servile and cringing until the Egyptian
masters dared to go into their homes and pick up their boy babies and
take them out and drown them as if they were worthless puppies.
The hopelessness of the Ottoman Empire today is more in the cringing
subordination and broken spirit of the people than in the oppression
of the Sultan. His government might be overthrown in a day, but it
would take ages to lift up that empire of prostrate slaves and to
cultivate in them the self-assertion and self-reliance necessary to a
free people.
Every man who loves his country and his race must view with alarm this
growing feeling of subordination and cringing disposition. It is the
very reverse of that democratic spirit or consciousness of equality
that must prevail to secure the permanency of our republican
institutions.
4. It destroys fraternal sympathy. Two classes are found in every
modern community. The one is the laborers with muscle or brain, the
other class, those whose property produces for them. Between these
classes there is a great wall fixed. It cannot be expected that they
will mingle harmoniously and be in sympathy in civil and social
relations. Producing and non-producing classes can never be
congenially associated.
The question is frequently discussed in church circles, "How can the
laboring man be attracted to the churches?" The discussion often
presumes that the non-laboring man does find the church congenial. If
he does, all efforts to win the other class will be in vain. The
church itself needs to correct its teachings and reform its spirit.
The moral law commands "Six days shalt thou work," and there is no
release because a man has property. So long as a man has brain or
brawn he is bound by that law. If he is not, he is not a moral man,
and has no rightful place in the church of God. Honest, upright,
industrious Christian men, engaged in all lines of production for
human needs, may be congenial and co-operate most harmoniously, but
they never can be made comfortable in association with those who are
unproductive and idle, yet living in luxury.
5. Usury promotes that "Covetousness which is idolatry."
"As heathens place their confidence in idols, so doth the avaricious
man place his confidence in silver and gold. The covetous person,
though he doth not indeed believe his riches or his money to be God,
yet by so loving and trusting in them, as God alone ought to be loved
and trusted in, he is as truly guilty of idolatry as if he so
believed."
Idolatry is the act of ascribing to things or persons properties that
are peculiar to God. The principal objects of worship are those things
which bring to men the greatest good.
The sun has been the most general object of idolatrous worship in all
the ages. It is the most conspicuous object, and is the source of
light and heat, and rules the seasons. Its worship was so general that
the Hebrew people, when they lapsed from the worship of God, turned to
the worship of the sun or Baal. No natural object is more worthy of
worship. Job declaring his integrity and freedom from idolatry, said
that he had not kissed his hand in salute of the sun in his rising.
The river Nile was an object of idolatrous worship for ages. Its
source was a mystery, and its annual rise in its rainless valley was
so beneficent, that it was given the worship which belonged to the
Divine alone. All the hope of the harvest depended on its annual
overflow. It moistened and fertilized and prepared the ground, and
then receded until the harvest was grown and gathered. Moses showed
the Egyptians the impotence of their idols by making this chief idol,
and the things that came out of it, a curse. The cow was worshiped
because it was the most useful and necessary of their animals. A real
or supposed power to give or withhold favors has been from the
beginning the source and spring of idolatry.
Riches, property, as the means of supplying our needs, is an object
more coveted than any other. The principle of usury greatly aggravates
this tendency. The principle of usury makes it imperishable; it can be
perpetuated, unimpaired from year to year and from age to age; it is a
constant source of benefit; it is productive of all that is necessary
to supply human needs.
It supplies, too, without effort on the part of the recipient. The
sun, with his light and heat, makes the labor of the farmer
successful. The rising Nile moistening and fertilizing the land,
prepares the way for the sower. The cow draws the plow and the harrow,
and threshes the grain, but usury makes property bring all needed
material good without effort on the part of the owner. It brings him
the matured fruits of the farm, though he neither plows or sows nor
reaps. No labor on his part is needed. His property clothes and feeds
him, and yet does not grow less, but is endowed with perpetual youth,
ever giving yet never exhausted or diminished. He may die, but his
idol knows no decay, and may continue to bless his children through
the generations. This quality of riches makes them a greater source of
blessing than the sun or any other object of idolatrous worship. This
leads to unlimited self-denial and sacrifice to gain and retain
property. The devotees subordinate their own ease and physical
comfort, their own intellectual development, to secure it, they will
themselves shrivel in body and soul; like other idolaters they will
even yield the highest interests of their children, when this idol
demands their sacrifice.
6. It destroys spirituality. Property is matter and not spirit. With
the thought and heart and effort directed to a material thing, the
spirit is neglected. The heathen Greek artist directed his whole
attention to the material part of man. The symmetry of the human
physical form was his study. The perfect man was the most
symmetrically developed specimen of physical form. His thought of man
was matter. The Christian directs his thought to the spirit, his mind
and heart, his noble purposes, and all the qualities of true manhood.
The material part is subordinated to the spiritual.
The tendency now is to appreciate a man for what he has rather than
for what he is, to ignore both symmetry of form and the graces of the
noble character, and to worship what he holds in his hands. The truly
spiritual loves true manhood and is indifferent to the possessions.
If a noble soul is found in a Lazarus, the true child of Abraham will
take him to his bosom. A perverted manhood will receive no favor
though clothed and surrounded with all material splendor.
It destroys spirituality, too, because it holds the mind to a material
thing as the source of all good. The spiritual man rises to the true
source of our blessings, the author of all temporal good, from whose
hand every living thing is fed.
This, as all idolatry, leads to a breaking away from the restraints of
the moral law. The devotion to the material leads, logically and
practically, to a neglect of the restraints of the spiritual, and a
preponderance of subserviency to the material. Practices that will
promote the material are indulged though the moral law may be broken.
The material is not held subject to the needs of the higher nature,
nor subject to the promotion of the kingdom of God, but man's noblest
gifts and the worship of God are all made, if possible, to minister to
the material interests.
To break this idol's power, the true nature of property must be shown.
It is not immortal, but perishable. It can not preserve itself, but
must be carefully preserved by man's own effort. It can not protect
him, but he must protect it. It is but a thing which man has himself
made. It must be shown absurd, as Isaiah ridiculed it, "They worship
the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made."
Other forms of gross external idolatry are exposed by the advancing
light of these progressive years, but this musty old form has taken
new life and now receives the service of the race. The whole world is
running pell-mell after this idol. It stands in the market places, it
is not a stranger in the courts of justice, and is in high favor in
legislative halls. Solon is relegated and Croesus is elected.
It is given a high place in the temple of God. Pious Lazarus is
neglected but Dives is promoted.
"What agreement hath the temple of God with idols?"
Until this idol is cast out the church will and must languish.
Spiritual life will be low and fervor impossible.