66 "The virgin heart in work and will; The strength which is as the strength of ten all the nobleness of nature, all the sympathy with human distress, all the gentle courtesy of disposition, which ever graced a knight of old. The young knight in Mr. Lowell's poem, with sunshine in his heart," rides forth on his holy quest. As he leaves his castle gate a poor leper calls to him for alms. The knight shrinks from the foul and loathsome sight, "Which seemed the one blot on the summer morn, As he tossed him a piece of gold in scorn.” He wanders far: he fights in many wars and many lands: he helps many, he endures much,-but finds not the Holy Grail. At last, disheartened, and in despair of ever gazing on the sacred vision, he turns his steps once more towards home. At the gate of his castle the same poor leper calls to him, "For Christ's sweet sake I beg an alms." The knight hastens to his help, and gives him to eat and drink. "'Twas mouldy crust of coarse brown bread, Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed, * * * III. PROGRESS AND POVERTY.* "Be ye fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth."-GEN. i. 28. WOULD begin by asking one question: Does this command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth "the first Divine decree recorded in the Biblemean for the human race a destiny of progress or of poverty? The necessity for answering the question is urgent. It is being pressed upon us at the present day from many directions. It is being asked not only by theologians and economists as a nice point of academic discussion, but as a vital question of daily bread by English labourers and workmen. In a democratic state of society, like that which we have to-day in England, in which, with the widest distribution of political power, we have also the greatest inequality of social condition, such questions, in fact, cannot long be kept in the background of any Christian teaching. It is true that, hitherto, from a variety of causes, England has been spared any very serious manifestation of the revolutionary spirit in social questions. But any one who has of late watched at all carefully the drift of English democratic thought cannot fail, I think, to perceive how very little it would require, under modern conditions, to change the social problem into a socialistic one. We have all, I suppose, been reading lately a remarkable book by an American writer, in which, with considerable power of sympathetic rhetoric and much ingenuity of reasoning, he endeavours to support the thesis that, under existing economic conditions, poverty is a persistent and essential factor of progress. * Preached before the University of Oxford. 66 It is not only we, however, who have been reading Mr. George's book. Progress and Poverty" has attracted wide popular attention. A cheap edition, circulating by thousands, has during the last few months sown its doctrines broadcast among the workshops and factories of England. The amazing popular success of the book is no less significant than it is remarkable. There are those who can only regard this success as significant of danger. I cannot agree with them. It seems to me quite as much significant of hope. And for this reason: Because I do not believe the success of the book has been made so much by the economic fallacies, of which, so our orthodox teachers tell us, it is full, as by the fact that in its pages economic truth has clearly seemed to be subordinated to moral considerations. Those who have had much intercourse with the leaders of thought among the workmen of England have long felt that their almost universal repulsion to the current doctrines of political economy is to be traced, not only to their belief that such doctrines are, so to say, almost entirely on the side of capital rather than of labour, but also to their firm persuasion that the so-called inevitable laws, regulating economic relations, are laws whose inevitability is based on the supposition that moral truth may safely be left out of consideration. By habitually regarding labour from the abstract point of view, and overlooking the personality of the labourer, the economist has seemed sometimes to be entirely callous to the fact that for the labourer, as for all of us, moral and social ideas are by far the most important with which we have to deal. I confess it has never seemed to me very surprising that the untrained intellect of English workmen should not always have been able to discriminate between that self-interest, of which the political economist was accustomed to speak to him, as the master-motive of human conduct, and that selfishness, against which the Christian moralist had so often warned him, as the very root of all sin. And, therefore, also, I am not surprised when I find him welcoming a book in which he may continually read passages such as these:-"Short-sighted is the philosophy which counts on selfishness as the mastermotive of human action. It is blind to facts of which the world is full. It sees not the present and reads not the past aright. If you would move men to action, to what shall you appeal? Not to their pockets, but to their patriotism; not to selfishness, but to sympathy. Call it religion, patriotism, sympathy, the enthusiasm for humanity, or the love of God-give it what name you will; there is yet a force which overcomes and drives out selfishness; a force which is the electricity of the moral universe; a force beside which all others are weak. . . . Political economy and social science cannot teach any lessons that are not embraced in the simple truths that were taught to poor fishermen and Jewish peasants by One who eighteen hundred years ago was crucified-the simple truths which beneath the warpings of selfishness, and the distortions of superstition, seem to underlie every religion that has ever striven to formulate the spiritual yearnings of man ("Progress and Poverty," pp. 415, 416, 473). How strong an attraction this idea of a radical affinity existing between Christianity and all questions of social reform has for the minds of English workmen, no one who has lived and worked much among them can fail to have observed. And in making this assertion, I am not at all forgetful of the common burden of lament among all schools of churchmen, that the people care for none of these things. As English Christians, we may, I think, rightly be thankful for the truth, that no great social movement among the labour-classes of England. would have the slightest possibility of success which was antagonistic to Christianity or relied on atheistic elements for its propaganda. The most important labour movement of late years in England— that among the agricultural labourers-was, remember, notoriously led by men who had for the most part made special public profession of their Christian faith. Not only Joseph Arch, but a large number of the officers of the Labourers' Union, were local preachers of the Methodist Church. Scant reverence may have been shown sometimes to the dignity of the village parson, especially when he showed himself, as in too many instances unhappily he did, too palpably a partisan-never, I venture to say, knowingly to the cause of Christianity and true religion. The power of the English Bible, as a moral and social force, over the mass of our fellow-countrymen, is still a reality. Much as there may be to regret in English public life, we are still many a long year, thank God, from the time when, as in the France of to-day, the destruction of the religion and the Church of Christ is regarded as necessary to the attainment of political liberty and social progress. The Christian origin of the democratic watchword has long been not only forgotten, but disowned by the French workman. In England I trust we may never forget the truth so finely expressed by Mr. Maurice :"There is no fraternity without a common father. . . . No man can say sincerely 'Our brothers who are on earth,' who has not said previously, 'Our Father which art in heaven."" But if English Christians would not lose the lesson which democratic opinion both in our own country and on the Continent would seem to teach, they must not refuse to recognise the hint which it so plainly gives, that in the power to bring social questions within the range of common religious teaching is to be found in these days the true "note" of a standing or a falling Church. Believing as we do, that Christianity still holds the key to all the unsolved problems, both of society and of the individual, it is for the Church of the present to grasp if she can and set forth, whether by word or deed, the bearing which Christianity has upon the larger social life of man. It is in this direction that she may best find new channels for the exercise of the Divine wisdom of her inherited experience and the Divine strength of her comprehensive communion. Of those unsolved problems none perhaps are more perplexing to the mind of the consistent Christian than those in which the teaching of the religion of Christ seems to come into direct antagonism with economic doctrines. Evidently, it is only possible, in the space at our disposal, to touch the mere fringe of such a subject. Take two questions, therefore, only, for consideration, out of thesebut two, concerning which, to my mind in their right answer must our whole moral attitude to the social problem be involved. First Is poverty a perpetual ordinance of God, to be accepted as an essential part of the providential scheme of government? Second: How are we to explain Christ's apparent exaltation of poverty and disparagement of the principles of individual advancement and well-being, to which our modern institutions of private property, and industrial freedom, seem necessarily to appeal? There are some people, I know, who would find no difficulty in answering that first question positively, and would maintain that poverty is the perpetual ordinance of God, considering it quite sufficient proof of that, to quote |