with the violated life of a man; and the answer came crying upward in a
voice of blood from the ground. "Am I my brother's keeper?" _you_ ask,
perhaps, with a tone of surprise or scorn. _You_ ask O! respectable
gentleman or lady; O! man in the thick of business; O! self-indulgent
Epicurean;--and the answer comes to you not from the ground merely, but
from the universal air--the answer of kindred pulses, of confluent
sympathies, of an inseparable humanity--though it swarms in rags, and
riots in shame, and seems far off from you in its hell of debasement and
despair. Nay, perhaps the answer comes very _near_ to you. It may come
from some one of your own household. You may ask--"Who has tempted even
my very child?" Ask _Yourself_--"Need he have gone outside this very
door to find temptation?" Ah! perhaps you are not merely an Ally of the
Tempter, but have furnished conscripts for his vast army. Your children
perhaps will rise up and call you--_not_ "blessed." And see, too, what
kind of conscripts the Tempter draws from the ranks of respectable and
especially of fashionable life. Mere striplings, so dwarfed and dwindled
by precocious dissipation that they look like feeble specimens of
wax-work; whose faculties--the evident product of a thin soil--have been
developed by bottles of wine and fast horses; whose memories are too
short to remember their parents; whose ideas are too artificial to touch
any genuine spring of nature; who are ashamed of true manliness, and
make a miserable farce of what they _call_ "manliness;" and who, as
they parade the streets, make up a sort of bombastic interlude in the
drama of "Young America."
But, whatever view we may take of this general subject, it is evident
that we cannot easily exaggerate the influence of "respectable and
fashionable" customs upon the forces of temptation. And, surely, it
becomes each of us to consider the tendencies of his own example, and
ask--"Is it toward the right or the wrong? Is it for, or against the
good?"
Again, the Tempter finds help from our _indifference_. This, indeed, may
be the qualification which should be applied to the remarks I have just
made. It is not to be supposed that the evil influences which go out
from the customs alluded to, are the results of _intention_. They spring
up in a lack of interest and of the consciousness of duty. They grow
rank and luxuriant in neglect. If we were only in earnest as to these
vices and crimes and guilty customs; if we would only wake from our
apathy, to reflection and conviction; how soon would they diminish, and
how many of them would pass away!
But, as comprehensive of this, and in fact all the rest that may be
said, I observe, finally, that the temptations of a great city are
strong because of a lack of the spirit of _Christian love_. In one
respect, especially, is it true that men in general are not _with_
Jesus, and therefore are against him. They have not his sympathies, his
spirit of self-sacrifice, his broad, deep, universal charity. Baneful
customs, and cold indifferentism grow up in a soil that is watered by no
living and unselfish love. They show the dryness and the baseness of our
social state. And it is not merely in the lack of active and practical
love that the Tempter grows strong; but in the exercise of a prevalent
_uncharitableness_. Too many of us have no disposition but scorn for the
fallen; see no blessed possibilities in them; do not detect any divine
ray glimmering in the thick darkness--do not discern the precious soul,
like a crown-jewel, in its filthy and battered casket. And if this
paralyzes and kills the springs of our own activity, need I say how the
hearts of the offending are repelled and hardened in such a hostile
atmosphere? Need I say how desperate is the Ishmaelitish conviction;
the sense of isolation and antagonism; and, on the other hand, how
powerful and healing, even for the most distant and hopeless, is the
sweet attraction of sympathy? And what are we, that we dare to cherish
this exclusive horror, this pitiless, unrelenting scorn? When we
consider our own slips, compared with our temptations; the account to
which God may hold us, not the smooth standards of human respectability;
how much higher is our own moral level, that we feel no chords of a
common humanity reaching down even to those fallen ones, and cannot
stoop to touch them? My friends, it may be, after all, that the Tempter
has no surer ally than the averted face of contempt and the word of
unsoftened rebuke, driving the barb of conscious guilt deeper and
despairingly into a brother's soul.
And, as I look upon this mass of social evil, these steaming wells of
passion, these solid fortifications of habit where the Tempter is
entrenched, I ask how is all this to pass away? And the answer is--only
by the spirit of Christian Love, sweeping these impediments of
selfishness from the heart, and animating us to effort. _With_ Christ
the work certainly can be done. In this Gospel-beating amidst the guilt
and sorrow of the world like the pulsations of a Divine heart--in the
few leaves of this Testament--there is an illimitable power, before
whose inspiration in the purposes and deeds of men no evil thing shall
stand. And the spirit and exercise of this Love _is_ Religion. It is the
up-shot of all that is preached--it is the open and tangible test of
every mystic experience that drifts through the soul--it is so deep, so
broad, and runs so far, that it comprehends all requirements; and they
who cherish it, and practice it in the low and dark and desolate places
of the world, are the true saints. Nothing else will do in its place.
Not Churches, nor creeds, nor rituals, nor respectabilities. Without it
we are not friends of Christ, nor co-workers with God. Without it we
deepen the channels of human woe, and prop the strong-holds of
wickedness. Without it, whatever we may not be, we are Allies of the
Tempter. The Saviour says to each of us to-day, placed amidst these
antagonistic forces of Life--"He that is not with me is against me."
THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR.
DISCOURSE VII.
THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR.
The young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto
them.--LAMENTATIONS iv., 4.
The writer of these words bewailed a state of War and Captivity--a state
of things in which the great relations of human life are broken up and
desecrated. But it is strange to find that the most flourishing forms of
civilization involve conditions very similar to this. For, if any man
will push beyond the circle of his daily associations, and enter the
regions of the abject poor, he will see how the hostile forces of
privation, and hunger, and unguided impulse, have laid waste the
sanctities of existence in the abodes and in the breasts of thousands as
with sword and with fire. There is no essential difference in
starvation, whether it ensues from the ravages of an invading host or
from the lack of means. Temptation is a fierce legion; and death looks
no more terrible under a Babylonian helmet, than it does upon the gaunt
faces of men who die upon the bare floor or wallow in rags. The worst
calamity _in_ a calamity--if I may use such an expression--the most
deplorable thing in any of the great evils of life, occurs when the
selfish instinct within us is aroused, by want or terror, to such a
degree that it overwhelms all social limitations, absorbs every
sympathy, and leaves nothing but an intense individualism. This is the
result in a sudden shock of danger, when the alarmed instinct is the
first that starts to the summons. Sometimes, in protracted peril, it
grows into an actual delirium of selfishness, and drowns even the sense
of fear--as men amidst the horrors of a shipwreck will commit the most
brutal excesses, and even rob the dying. And thus, in the desolation of
Jerusalem as described by Jeremiah, the very yearnings of maternity were
swallowed up by this fierce instinct.
"The hands of tender-hearted women cooked their own children;
They were their food, in the destruction of the daughter of my people."
And results as bad as this appear in the conditions of poverty,
suffering, and social degradation. Every fine chord of human nature is
seared, sodden, torn from its sockets, in the darkness of the moral
faculties and by the pressure of animal wants. The poor man is conscious
of nothing but privation and suffering. He gazes at the power and
discipline and pomp of society all about him, not as an ally but as a
captive, or as a savage foe. The whole wears the aspect of a besieging
army, and the Ishmaelitish feeling predominates. In the midst of the
City he becomes an Arab of the desert, a robber of the rock. Now, it
makes little difference whether the circle is wider or narrower, whether
the siege is a moral or a literal one, whether the agent is the sword or
the condition of society. The essential results will be the same. The
civilization of New York may and does hem in a desolation as fearful in
kind as that of Jerusalem, and involves sufferings as keen, and wakes
up instincts as fiercely selfish. And one whose sympathies with the wide
humanity are as fresh and clear as the Prophet's were with the woes of
his people, might draw closer within these various circles of prosperity
and refinement and activity, that lend such attractiveness to the great
city--this magnificent girdle of commerce, embossed with the symbols of
all nations--these arteries of traffic, filled with circulating wealth
and power--these groups of fashion and of beauty, whose cheapest jewels
would open the kingdom of heaven to ten thousand souls; he might pass
within all these bands of "civilization," and in some alley, or "Five
Points," sit down and weep for the calamity of his brethren. He would
behold there War and Captivity enough to fill an entire volume of
Lamentations. Captivity! were men ever bound by a darker chain, or
trampled by a harder heel, than those victims of destitution and of
their own passions? War! did the Jew behold any hosts more terrible
pressing into Jerusalem, than you and I might see if we looked about us?
The entrenched filth that all day long sends its steaming rot through
lane and dwelling, through bone and marrow, and saps away the life. Cold
that encamps itself in the empty fire-place, and blows through the
broken door, and paralyzes the naked limbs. Hunger that takes the strong
man by the throat, and kills the infant in its mother's arms. And still
another traitorous legion that, equipped with the fascinations of the
bottle and the shamelessness of harlotry, appeals to the passions of the
brutal and proffers comfort to the hearts of the sad. War and Captivity
in the midst of peace and refinement--is it not, my friends? And, with
all this, may we not expect that fierce instinct of selfishness which
overwhelms every other impulse, and breaks out in crime? Ah! and do we
not discover a counterpart to that saddest feature of all in such
circumstances--a desecration even of the parental instinct? Fathers,
beating their sons into the career of guilt; and mothers--worse than
those who made horrid food of their own children--offering their
daughters to the Moloch of lust in the shape of some "gentlemanly"
devil with a portable hell in his own breast!
And it seems to me that if one with a prophet vision and a prophet
heart, widened to the compass of humanity, should thus go into these
waste places, nothing would affect him more; nothing would strike a
deeper and tenderer chord in his bosom; than the condition of these
little ones amidst the siege and terror. And, comprehending all their
need--their moral as well as their physical destitution--he might
exclaim, as describing the most pitiable spectacle of all--"The young
children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them."
And I think that every one of you who has reflected at all upon this
subject, must feel that, of all the conditions of Humanity in the darker
regions of the City, there is none more sorrowful, more momentous, and
at the same time more hopeful, than the condition of the Children of the
Poor. And I do not call your attention to this subject to-night with the
expectation of proclaiming any fresh doctrine, or offering any novel
suggestion, but because in a series of discourses like the present I
cannot consistently pass by such a prominent phase; and more especially
because I wish to push the old truth from your heads into your hearts,
so that you may be excited to immediate and practical action.
I purpose then, in regard to the Children of the Poor, to maintain one
or two _principles_, to state a few _facts_, and to consider some
_remedies_; and these will constitute the divisions of my discourse.
In the first place then, I lay down a general principle which divides
itself into two specific principles. I maintain that we are under
peculiar obligations in regard to children. Of all our duties, except
those which we owe directly to God--of all the ways in which we are
required to _show_ our duty to God--I know of none more peremptory than
this. It is the obligation of an instinct that appears everywhere; that
swells in the breasts of the rudest people; that mingles with the most
tender and beautiful and sacred associations of human life.
Childhood and Children! is there any heart so sheathed in worldliness,
or benumbed by sorrow, or hardened in its very nature, as to feel no
gentle thrill responding to these terms? Surely, in some way these
little ones have "touched the finer issues" of our being, and given us
an unconscious benediction. Some of you are Mothers, and have acquired
the holiest laws of duty, the sweetest solicitudes, the noblest
inspirations, in the orbit of a child's life. And, however wide the
circle of its wandering, you have held it still, by some tether of the
heart, bound to the centre of a fathomless and unforgetting love. Some
of you are Fathers, and in the opening promise of your sons have built
fresh plans and enjoyed young hopes, and even in the decline of life
have walked its morning paths anew. Many of us have felt our first great
sorrow, and the breaking up of the spiritual deep within us, by the
couch of a dead child. Clasping the little lifeless hand, we have
comprehended, as never before, the _reality_ of death, and through the
gloom, covering all the world about us, have caught sudden glimpses of
the immortal fields. And, all of us, I trust, are thankful that God has
not created merely men and women, crimped into artificial patterns, with
selfish speculation in their eyes, with sadness and weariness and
trouble about many things carving the wrinkles and stealing away the
bloom; but pours in upon us a fresh stream of being that overflows our
rigid conventionalisms with the buoyancy of nature, plays into this
dusty and angular life like the jets of a fountain, like floods of
sunshine, upsets our miserable dignity, meets us with a love that
contains no deceit, a frankness that rebukes our quibbling compliments,
nourishes the poetry of the soul, and, perpetually descending from the
threshold of the Infinite, keeps open an arch-way of mystery and heaven.
And now, just consider what a child _is_--this being thus fresh from the
unknown realm, tender, plastic, dependent; a bud enfolding the boundless
possibilities of humanity, and growing rank, running to waste, or
opening in beauty, as you turn, neglect, or support it--just consider
what a child is; and he must be far gone in indifference or depravity,
who does not recognize the specific duty growing out of a general
obligation which is forced upon us by the intrinsic claims of that
child's nature. If we were appealed to by nothing else but its drooping
reliance and natural wants, there would be enough to draw our attention
to every phase of childhood that comes within our sphere.