I CHRIST AND LABOUR CHAPTER I THE ROMAN WORLD THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY PROPOSE first of all to consider the relation of the religion of Christ to the labour problems of the past, and then, proceeding from acknowledged facts, to infer what is likely to be its distinctive contribution to India in the future. I shall draw largely on material which I had collected many years ago, when I was living in the midst of the Labour Movement in England among the poor people in the slums of Birmingham, Sunderland, and London. My aim will be always to reach forward to the peculiar problems which now confront us in India; but my facts will necessarily be drawn in a great measure from the West, where the religion of Christ has been leavening the masses of the people for many centuries. When the Christian faith entered the world, the Jews were sunk in narrow bigotry, party intrigue, and national decay. Rivalries and jealousies within the Jewish community were only less bitter than the intense hatred of the foreigner which their religion itself fostered. Greek influence, in its decline after the death of Alexander the Great, had been spreading luxury and immorality with far more fatal speed than enlightenment and learning. The greed of money, which coincided with the growth of immorality, had infected the Jews themselves. The Roman provincial rule, though bestowing an outward peace, was harsh and overbearing. On the Jewish side, one of the darkest features was the fanatical religious tyranny of the rich Jews over the poor. The wealthy Pharisees neglected the duty of tender consideration for the sufferings of the poor, and insisted on the exact letter of the Law being kept by the poor, who had not the time and the means to keep it.— "This people of the earth, which keepeth not the Law, is accursed." It was in terms such as these that the Pharisees and the Sadducees spoke of the poorer people of their own race and nation. How great the oppression of the poor was, may be seen from the Epistle of St. James, "Go to now, ye rich, howl and weep for your miseries that shall come upon you. "Your riches are corrupted: your garments are moth-eaten. "Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you and shall eat into your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped up treasure together for the last days. Behold the hire of the labourers, who have reaped down your fields, which is kept back by you by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton: ye have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. "Ye have condemned and slain the Just One; and he doth not resist you." It was before this religious world of conflicting bigotries and passions and greeds that Christ had appeared with his message. He came from his own hill-village of Nazareth, where he had lived the simple life of a carpenter, to the wealthy cities on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum. These newly built cities were the direct outgrowth of the imperial system of the Roman Government, just as Calcutta and Rangoon, Bombay and Madras, are the products of British rule in India, in our own days. The Roman officials were there, with their headquarters at Capernaum, collecting the taxes and dispensing Roman justice. The Greek and Jewish capitalists were everywhere present making fortunes out of the oppression of the common people. There was immense wealth; there was unbounded luxury; but the truth all the while was this, that the countryside had become depleted in order to provide for the pleasures and vices of the rich. The village peasantry in Galilee, among whom Jesus lived, were bearing their daily burden of hunger, misery and want, while profiteering went on unabashed and unashamed; while rich men clothed themselves in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. Archaeologists have discovered in our own times the marble pillars, the tessellated pavements, and the decorated porticoes of the Graeco-Roman baths and assembly halls of these cities by the lake. They hold such buildings up before us for our admiration. But we must never forget that the whole civilisation of Rome was erected, on its main economic basis, out of the crushing poverty of the poor. And Jesus was a peasant, a villager, a poor man, who had not where to lay his head.' He was called the carpenter's son.' Jesus, in singleness of mind, sought to proclaim the love of God to rich and poor alike. He began to perform, with spiritual power, his acts of healing. He blessed, with his tender compassion, the outcast and the despised. But the rich and cultured Sadducees had no pity for the poor; and the Pharisees hated the outcast with a deep religious hate. These men thought of Christ, when they thought of him at all, as an extravagant village preacher, who might endanger their authority, if not watched and controlled. So Jesus shook the dust of these rich town centres from off his feet, and went back to the village people. As he turned away from the wealthy cities which had rejected him, he thus pronounced their impending doom, 'Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida!. And thou Capernaum, with buildings reaching up to heaven thou shalt be brought down to hell." |