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 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN 
 ETHICS.
 
 MODERN PROBLEMS 
 
 AND 
 
 CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 BY 
 
 W. J. HOCKING, 
 
 Vicar of All Saints, Tufnell Park, N. . 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 MORS JANUA VIT.,' 'THREE HOURS AT THE CROSS,' ETC. 
 
 ' Je me contente de ce qui peut s'ecrire, et je reve tout 
 ce qui peut se rever.' 
 
 DE SEVIGNE. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 WELLS GARDNER, BARTON & CO., 
 3, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.G. 
 
 AND 44, VICTORIA STREET, S \V.
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 To the Congregation ivorshipping in All Saints' Parish 
 Church, Titfnell Park, N., who heard these sermons, and 
 at whose urgent request I now give them to the world, I 
 dedicate them in this permanent form with sincere affection 
 and regard. 
 
 W. J. H. 
 
 1 117168
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 I HAVE consented to the publication of these twelve 
 Sermons not because I am conscious that their literary 
 merit will commend them to the world, nor because they 
 contain anything very new, striking, or original, but mainly 
 because those who heard them have repeatedly expressed a 
 wish to have them in a permanent form. 
 
 That, as literary efforts, they are very faulty no critic will- 
 say with more assurance than I do ; but the love which 
 prompted the wish to have them as they are will forgive the 
 many faults in print, as it forgave the many faults in 
 preaching. 
 
 One thing only I claim for them, and that is that they 
 are an earnest attempt to meet the many difficulties which 
 are troubling the minds of the very best of our young men 
 and women. If they help one soul to higher ideals of life 
 and conduct, then I shall have the only reward I desire. 
 
 They were preached at intervals on the first Sunday 
 evening in the month when it is my rule to deal with 
 ' popular ' topics. As some of the intervals were long, that
 
 PREFACE 
 
 must be my apology for occasional repetitions of thought 
 and expression. They contain many thoughts which, 
 doubtless, at the time of preparation were borrowed from 
 various sources, too numerous to mention here even if I 
 could remember them ; and to crowd the pages with foot- 
 notes of references would not be a source of either interest 
 or profit to the ordinary reader. The sermons are 
 addressed to ' the man in the street,' and not to the scholar 
 or the critic. 
 
 Some of them were reported at the time of preaching in 
 religious journals, both in England and America. The 
 sermon on ' Amusements ' was published in a volume of 
 sermons edited by the Rev. Prebendary Kitto, and entitled 
 'Religion in Common Life.' My thanks are due to him 
 for allowing me to reprint it. The one on 'The Animal 
 World ' was published as a pamphlet by the Society for 
 Promoting Kindness to Animals, and dedicated to her 
 Grace the Duchess of Portland ; but as the edition of 
 that pamphlet (five thousand) is now exhausted, I include 
 the sermon here by request. 
 
 W. J. HOCKING. 
 
 JANUARY, 1898.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 AMUSEMENTS IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS - I 
 
 THE THEATRE IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS - 15 
 
 POLITICS IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS - - 33 
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 49 
 
 WAR IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS - - - 65 
 
 GAMBLING IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS - - 79 
 
 LONDON PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 93 
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 105 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN 
 
 ETHICS 121 
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 135 
 THE ANIMAL WORLD IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN 
 
 ETHICS 151 
 
 FOOLS ! 165
 
 I CORINTHIANS x. 31. 
 
 'Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or 
 whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of 
 God.'
 
 AMUSEMENTS 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 NOTHING in connection with our holy religion is 
 more difficult to realize than that this and kindred 
 maxims are as binding on us as on the people to whom 
 they were primarily addressed. We have somehow got 
 into the way of thinking that the blessings of Christianity 
 are for us, but that its rules of life, as inculcated in the New 
 Testament, were for the early Christians, the believers of 
 long ago. Do we not, when we read of giving up to 
 Redeeming Love, of bearing the daily cross, of presenting 
 body and soul a living sacrifice, of being so possessed of 
 God as to be His Temple do we not imagine that these 
 words are not for us ? They are histories of appeals, the 
 records of inculcations, the accounts of demands made on 
 the peoples of a far-away past the early disciples, the first 
 martyrs, the Christians who immediately succeeded the 
 Christ. 
 
 We err : the principles of Christianity, the ethics of 
 Christianity, the spirit of Christianity, the claims of Chris- 
 tianity, are ever the same for all time and for all peoples. 
 They can never be obsolete, never be referred to some far- 
 
 I 2
 
 4 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 distant past ; they are for one long eternal PRESENT, the 
 infinite NOW, the everlasting TO-DAY. 
 
 It is here that men make such grievous mistakes, when 
 they talk of Christianity as out of date, as played out, 
 fossilized in the strata of history. If it were a theological 
 system, or a code of rules, or a stereotyped creed, or a 
 string of pious platitudes, it might become out of date ; but 
 it is spirit^ life, force, principle, passion, that may for ever 
 be appropriated by the living ego, and ever inspire the beat- 
 ing heart of man. For humanity are its ethics, for all time 
 its principles, for eternity its inspiring power. Tell me of 
 one of its cardinal principles that is behind the age ; one of 
 its essential maxims that is without application to modern 
 life and modern conditions, and I will seek some new 
 religion. The fault is, not that Christianity is played out, 
 but that men's determination to live it is played out ; not 
 that its ethics are out of date, but that men do not rise to 
 them ; not that its maxims are behind the time, but that 
 they are so far in front that men's aspirations do not reach 
 them. 
 
 They are still primal principles 
 
 ' That shine aloft like stars.' 
 
 One thing, however, that we shall do well to remember is, 
 that these principles have a general, and not a particular, 
 application; I mean by that, that they do not apply so 
 much to details as to the governing motives of life. If you 
 search the Bible through you will find no list of duties, of 
 pleasures, of contingencies to which its ethics, its maxims, 
 its principles may be applied. Why ? Not because it is 
 not adaptable to all, but because it is a spirit, a temper, a
 
 AMUSEMENTS 5 
 
 quality, a ruling principle, intended to pervade everything, 
 inspire everything, transfuse everything, rather than a code 
 of rules which may be nailed against the many doors of our 
 life's outgoings and incomings. It has nothing to say of the 
 different callings in which men are engaged ; nothing to say 
 of dignities or menialities as applied to duties. It lays 
 down no law as to callings which are compatible with high 
 ideals and heavenly aspirations. It does not distinguish 
 between the different trades and occupations and engage- 
 ments which are helpful and those which are harmful. It 
 comes in no narrow, dictatorial spirit to men, saying, ' Thou 
 shall do this,' and ' Thou shalt not do that.' All this it 
 leaves to the individual conscience and to the sanctified 
 common sense of men. But it insists on this : ' Whatso- 
 ever ye do, do all to the glory of God.' That is the deter- 
 mining principle by which all actions must be judged, and 
 approved or condemned. 
 
 Hence it comes that amusements, as such, have no place 
 in the ethical teachings of the New Testament. Not 
 because they would be out of place there, but because they 
 must be subject, with all the other phases of life, to the 
 primary principle. 
 
 And yet men have often made the mistake of supposing 
 that because the New Testament, and the Bible generally, 
 is silent on the question of amusements, it therefore dis- 
 countenances, and by that very fact condemns, amuse- 
 ments. No fallacy could be more stupid or more mis- 
 chievous than that. It were just as wise, just as sensible, 
 just as reasonable, to say that because the many phases of 
 domestic and commercial life are not mentioned in the New 
 Testament, therefore those phases of life are unchristian.
 
 6 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 The New Testament says nothing about personal cleanli- 
 ness ; does anyone conclude from that that it is unchristian 
 to be clean ? The New Testament is not concerned with 
 personal habits, personal tastes, personal exercises ; it is 
 only careful to say that all these things must be brought into 
 conformity with God's will ; that all must be done as under 
 His eye, and unto His glory. It is an abominable, a 
 blasphemous, and a wicked wrong to teach that whatever 
 is not prescribed for in the New Testament is outside 
 Christianity, and a thing with which a Christian has no 
 concern. 
 
 A fact that must be recognised is that amusements in 
 some form are necessaries of life. I do not say essential to 
 living, but certainly essential to the right development of all 
 our faculties, the right enjoyment of life's many and varied 
 scenes, the right performance of life's duties. There is, 
 therefore, nothing undignified, unmanly, unheroic, unchris- 
 tian, in amusing and in being amused. Everything that is 
 pure is compatible with ' perfecting holiness in the fear of 
 God.' 
 
 What is the grand ideal of the New Testament so far as 
 our psychical and physical natures are concerned ? Is it 
 not expressed in the old Roman motto : ' Mem sana in 
 corpore sano ' ? Yes ; the body that, according to St. Paul, 
 was meant to be the temple of the Holy Ghost, the temple 
 of God, must be kept healthy as well as holy ; in perfect 
 soundness as well as in perfect purity. In fact, healthi- 
 ness is a part of holiness, soundness is an essential of 
 purity. 
 
 Let me, then, try to give you some practical hints as to 
 the bearing of Christian ethics upon this vital question.
 
 AMUSEMENTS ^ 
 
 (a) Christianity certainly teaches that amusement is not 
 the end and aim of life. 
 
 Upon all alike every man and woman born into the 
 world it lays the abiding obligation of work. It tells us 
 plainly that idleness is the negation of the Divine Law, and 
 that in honest useful work lies the fulfilment of the Divine 
 purpose. The Master Himself not only sanctified toil, but 
 made it an essential condition of participating in the heavenly 
 kingdom. He spoke of His Heavenly Father as working 
 from all eternity, and of His own determination to follow 
 His Father's example: 'My Father worketh hitherto, and 
 I work ' ; ' I must work the works of Him that sent Me 
 while it is day.' And every commission given to His 
 disciples, every exhortation, every maxim, every moral prin- 
 ciple, implies a life of activity. The results of idleness, 
 inanity, indifference to duty, He sets forth with terrific 
 power in parable and simile, in sermon and wayside 
 speech. 
 
 His Apostles occupy the same ground : ' If a man will 
 not work, neither let him eat,' says St. Paul. 'Quit you 
 like men, be strong,' is his charge to the Corinthians. Of 
 the vagrant parasite he says : ' If any provide not for his 
 own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath 
 denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.' 
 
 It is therefore perfectly plain what the intention of 
 Christianity is as to the main aim and end of life. Every- 
 thing must be subordinate to the fulfilling of duty in that 
 sphere of life to which it has pleased God to call us. Here, 
 then, we are clear : we tread unmistakable ground a man 
 must not work in order that he may find means and oppor- 
 tunity for amusement, but he must have amusement that he
 
 8 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 may be the better fitted to work. Duty is the end of life, 
 pleasure a means to that end. 
 
 Is there not a tendency to look upon toil, labour, occu- 
 pation as a something essential because of what it will 
 procure us, rather than as the great purpose of God in us ? 
 And do not men work, when they work at all, with an eye 
 to the pleasures which the results of their labour will bring 
 them ? There are men and women with whom amusement 
 is the only pursuit, as though the world were a garden 
 planted and tended by angel-visitants, and as though the 
 end of human life consisted in sucking the sweetness out of 
 its flowers. How many men are there with no other 
 thought than that of enjoyment enjoyment of the senses, 
 of the passions, of the appetites ! How many women 
 with no greater concern than to dance at the next ball, to 
 flirt at the next party, to see the next play, to read the next 
 novel, to long for the next season ! 
 
 Great God in heaven ! and is it for this that Thou didst 
 make man in Thine own image : for this that Thou didst 
 endow him with wisdom, insight, knowledge, reason, skill ? 
 Has Thy purpose in woman been fulfilled in these low 
 aims? Is there nothing higher for man than to be a 
 constant digester of rich food ? nothing nobler for woman 
 than to be a walking illustration of the latest fashion ? 
 
 In a world full of activities, full of intricate economies, 
 throbbing with interests that reach out to every hand 
 capable of work, and to every mind capable of thought, 
 who dares fritter away life in a whirl of sportive pleasure ? 
 Go forth to your lawful amusements, but make them sub- 
 servient to noble deeds. It is by thus doing your duty that 
 you will be able to extract the honey out of the world's
 
 AMUSEMENTS 9 
 
 sweetness ; by the consecration of holy deeds to holy ends 
 that you will have time to hear the music which the finger 
 of God evolves as He sweeps the chords of the universe. 
 
 (b) Another principle found in the ethics of Christianity 
 is that of judicious discernment through an enlightened 
 understanding and an educated conscience. 
 
 It states that things which may be perfectly lawful are 
 not always expedient ; it declares that while ' to the pure all 
 things are pure,' circumstances and influences have to be 
 weighed in their relation to others ; it makes much of that 
 solidarity of interest which underlies man's relationship with 
 man ; and, above all, it places man's kinship with God as 
 the potent determining power between the right and the 
 wrong, the helpful and the harmful. Here, then, we have 
 a law for our guidance. It does not follow that, because 
 amusement is lawful and good, everything that amuses is 
 lawful and good. Its influence upon ourselves, upon our 
 brother, upon society, upon the world at large, and upon 
 posterity has to be taken into the count. 
 
 These considerations at once determine the Christian 
 against all amusements that are vicious, or that lead to vice. 
 There may be a hundred things which would give pleasure 
 to the senses, the passions, the appetites, but against 
 which reason and conscience, law social, law moral, and 
 law Divine enter an edict : these, of course, the Christian 
 man abstains from. A man might find such pleasure in a 
 free use of the intoxicating cup as to lose his reason, lose 
 his self-respect, lose his love of home, lose the nobler 
 features of his manhood, and degrade himself down to a 
 level with the brute ; but Christian principle, the spirit of
 
 io MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Christ in him, restrains him : he hears an inner voice 
 saying, 'Your bodies are the temples of the Holy 
 Ghost. . . . Glorify God in your bodies.' And if he heeds 
 not that voice he is not a Christian. 
 
 And what is true of drunkenness is true also of other 
 forms of vice : things that may be pleasurable, that may 
 afford abundant amusement in the original meaning of that 
 word are yet forbidden to the Christian because they are 
 alien to that high purpose of life which God has revealed to 
 us in His Son, in our conscience and our reason. Heed 
 not the sublime ethics of the New Testament, turn a deaf 
 ear to the heavenly voices that cry from the lofty peaks of 
 holiness ' Keep thyself pure,' stifle the inner voice of 
 conscience which is the voice of God and you may have 
 amusement, but you will be like a ship with all her sails 
 spread to the wind, and with no ballast to steady her, and 
 no helm to guide her, and sooner or later must inevitably 
 be sucked into the whirlpool of destruction, or driven on to 
 the beetling rocks of ruin. 
 
 There are many of our young people giving themselves 
 up to things which, no doubt, are pleasurable from an 
 animal point of view, but yet things which are forming in 
 them habits which will be like a millstone around their 
 neck till they finally sink in the maelstrom of perdition. 
 There are others outwardly religious ; men and women 
 whose baby-brows were marked with the sign of the cross ; 
 who in youth voluntarily took it upon themselves to keep 
 God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same 
 all the days of their life; who, perchance, have knelt at the 
 altar of Sacramental grace and benediction, who yet are 
 fostering and indulging habits which the hallowed sur-
 
 AMUSEMENTS n 
 
 roundings of this sacred place forbid me to mention. 
 Where, oh, where is their Christianity ? Where is the 
 Spirit of Christ that should rule them ? They are simply 
 de-Christianizing themselves by their follies ; bolting the 
 door of the heavenly kingdom against themselves which no 
 human hand can unlock, and which perchance angels and 
 God Himself may be unable to open. There are some 
 things which even the Eternal cannot do ; one of these is 
 the undoing of the consequences of wrong. If men persist 
 in pursuing evil He cannot but let them reap the fruit of 
 their doings. 
 
 It is the business of the Christian on earth to flee that 
 which is evil, and to follow that which is good ; to prove 
 all things, and to hold fast only that which is pure, and 
 lovely, and of good report. God will help you to do it if 
 you ask Him, the example of Christ will help you, the 
 indwelling spirit of Him 'Who did no sin, neither was guile 
 found in His mouth,' will help you. Take heed that some- 
 thing helps you to that which is good ; take heed that 
 something keeps you from that which is evil. Pray more 
 and more for the spirit of discernment, and of sound know- 
 ledge. 
 
 You, perhaps, will expect that I should give you a cata- 
 logue of the things which Christianity approves, and that I 
 should warn you against those things that Christianity dis- 
 approves. I have already done the latter in spirit, at least. 
 It is in the power of no human being to do the former. I 
 am no modern Moses ; to no man to-day is it given to say, 
 ' Thou shalt do this,' and ' Thou shall not do that.' What 
 may be perfectly right for one man may be perfectly and
 
 12 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 absolutely wrong for another. ' To him who esteemeth 
 anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. . . . Happy 
 is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he 
 alloweth.' 
 
 No rule in regard to this can ever be anything but mis- 
 leading : circumstances have to be taken into account, 
 individual character has to be taken into account, influences 
 on others have to be taken into account. ' No man liveth 
 unto himself, and none of us dieth unto himself.' 
 
 I can therefore only give you a few hints for your guid- 
 ance, and not a code of laws for your observance. What- 
 ever is essentially manly, essentially womanly, that certainly 
 is Christian. Whatever amusement recreates you, soothes 
 you, invigorates you, and tends to fit you for duty, and 
 leaves no sling behind //, be assured that that is safe ; on that 
 you may ask the Divine blessing ; in that you may feel you 
 are glorifying God. 
 
 I am continually being asked if I think it right to dance, 
 right to go to the theatre, right to play cards, right to play 
 billiards. Who am I that I should determine these things ? 
 To me they might all be perfectly harmless. Every one of 
 them I might enter into with zest, and be none the worse, 
 but all the better, for it. But I will not, because I cannot, 
 decide for you. If you are in doubt, decide the matter on 
 your knees, and let it be a matter as between yourself and 
 God alone. 
 
 On the other hand, I would say, Anything that gives you 
 low motives, low aims, low desires ; anything that creates 
 lust, that arouses passion, that suggests impurity, that makes 
 you morally weak, that dissipates your energies, or makes 
 you a fornicator like Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold
 
 AMUSEMENTS 13 
 
 his birthright, that for you is absolutely and everlastingly 
 wrong. Hence it comes that, while it is right for one to 
 dance, for another it is wrong. In the thing itself there is 
 no absolute quality : it becomes right or wrong according to 
 the influence which it exercises on its votary. The same 
 may be said of the theatre, of cards, of many games and 
 sports : ' All things are lawful, but all things are not ex- 
 pedient' to all men. Again I quote St. Paul: 'Happy is 
 he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he 
 alloweth.' Where there is doubt, safety lies on the side of 
 abstention. ' Let every man be fully persuaded in his own 
 mind.' 
 
 The last principle which time will allow me to deal with 
 is that which is involved in the dual nature and capacities 
 of man. 
 
 Christianity claims attention to both sides of our natures 
 body and spirit. It tells us that we live two lives : one 
 which stands related to the world that we can see ; the other 
 to the spirit world. It teaches us that the things which we 
 can see are temporal, transitory, passing away ; that the 
 things which lie beyond the reach of the visual are abiding 
 and for ever. 
 
 In view of this, is it not strange that most of our care is 
 about the body and the things which pertain to it ? To 
 seek and serve the present the gay, the giddy, the flippant, 
 the fleeting that is our chief concern. I know that the 
 body has its claims, and no claims of the soul must suffer us 
 to ignore them. I admit, as I have stated, that the claims 
 of the body demand amusement, relaxation, recreation, 
 exercise. I admit that these, rightly used, not only con- 
 tribute to the health and purity of the body, but to the
 
 14 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 health and purity of the soul. But the body is not all of us : 
 it is but the smallest part. This life is not all : it is the 
 threshold of the eternal world. Why, then, give it all our 
 care ? Why not so use it, with its myriad pure pleasures, 
 its bright and beautiful things, as I believe we may use it, 
 as a means of preparation for the inheritance of the saints 
 in light ? But ever have before you this truth, that 
 
 ' The worst of miseries 
 Is when a nature, framed for nobler things, 
 Condemns itself in life to petty joys, 
 And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life 
 Gasping from out the shallows !'
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ROMANS xiv. 13, 14. 
 
 ' Let us not therefore judge one another 
 any more; but judge this rather, that no 
 man put a stumbling-block or an occasion 
 to fall in his brother's way. I know, and 
 am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there 
 is nothing unclean of itself ; but to him that 
 esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him 
 it is unclean.'
 
 THE THEATRE 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 THAT was a principle which St. Paul laid down in 
 regard to the Tightness or wrongness of eating certain 
 meats which had been first offered in sacrifice to some 
 heathen idol, and then sold in the shambles for food, and 
 also in regard to certain meats which Jewish ceremonialism 
 pronounced unclean. 
 
 The thing was not to be judged on its own inherent merit, 
 but on the merit of its influence on those immediately 
 affected. In the one case, he says that to eat meat which 
 had been offered in sacrifice to an idol cannot possibly be 
 in itself a wrong thing, because as an idol is nothing in the 
 world but a mass of inert matter, so anything offered in 
 sacrifice to an idol is as pure after the offering as it was 
 before. But, on the other hand, if a man thinks that contact 
 with an idol has made the meat impure, it is that man's duty 
 to abstain from the meat. Believing it to be impure makes 
 it impure to him. 
 
 Moreover, he argues, there is a light other than that of 
 self in which the question has to be considered, that is, 
 the solidarity of interest and responsibility which under-
 
 1 8 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 lies Christian life. ' For none of us liveth to himself, and 
 no man dieth to himself.' We are all members of a family, 
 each one of which is affected by the other's conduct and 
 character. So that a thing may in itself be perfectly harm- 
 less, and a man may use it and be perfectly innocent, so far 
 as he himself is concerned ; yet if the using of a thing puts 
 a stumbling-block in the way of another; if it offends him, 
 angers him, leads him to excess, or brings him into sur- 
 roundings which are dangerous, then it is harmful. ' It is 
 good,' he says, ' neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor 
 anything whereby thy brother stumbleth or is made weak.' 
 Our moral relationships make isolation impossible : Tightness 
 and wrongness, helpfulness and harmfulness are questions 
 which have to be determined by reference to the community 
 rather than the individual. 
 
 And the law which he laid down in regard to meat offered 
 to idols he also laid down in regard to all the externals of 
 religious and communal life. The observance or non-observ- 
 ance of a thing must be governed by circumstances, and by 
 the relation of individuals, as units, to society, as an aggre- 
 gate. ' To the pure all things are pure '; but there may be 
 conditions and circumstances in which even a pure action 
 had better be kept back because of its bearing upon others, 
 who, on the one hand, may misinterpret it, or, on the other 
 hand, may seek to copy it, and, from want of a clear know- 
 ledge or a well-disciplined will, stumble and fall. 
 
 That is the ethics of Christianity in regard to things 
 doubtful, and things which are not in the abstract wrong ; 
 that is the rule which, as Christians, we are bound to apply 
 to everything that affects communal life, that affects society, 
 that affects our neighbour. To us it may be perfectly
 
 THE THEATRE 19 
 
 right, perfectly innocent, perfectly harmless, but if it is 
 harmful to another, then to do it is wrong. The converse 
 is equally true the thing may be perfectly right in itself, 
 perfectly harmless, perfectly innocent, but if the doing of 
 it offends our conscience, if while we are doing it we feel 
 we are doing wrong, then to us it is wrong, though another 
 man doing the same thing may rejoice in the fact that he 
 is doing it to the glory of God. 
 
 That is the principle which I want to apply to the sub- 
 ject that is to occupy our attention now. And I want 
 to say at the very beginning that in the abstract there 
 cannot be any possible wrong in histrionic display. Drama 
 in itself may be as legitimate as poetry or painting, and the 
 theatre is not necessarily more inherently evil than the 
 concert room. Dramatic art is very near akin to some 
 methods employed even by the Deity Hirmelf to unfold 
 or teach certain aspects of Divine truth. There can be 
 little doubt that some of the early writings of the Bible 
 (such, for instance, as the Book of Job) were cast in the 
 form of a dramatic poem. The love of dramatic spectacle 
 and dramatic representation, moreover, seems to be in- 
 herent in human nature. The earliest sport of children is 
 generally associated with the personation of some character 
 other than that which they really are, and from the earliest 
 dawn of civilization acting, with its various and varying 
 arts, has appealed to the ineradicable instinct in man, 
 young and old alike. Poetry, music, and painting have 
 vied with each other in their splendid endeavours to adorn 
 it ; genius has devoted her sublimest efforts to the ennobling 
 of it ; philosophy has stooped from her high throne to 
 direct its musings and to shape its characters, and religion 
 
 2 2
 
 20 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 itself heathen and Christian alike has approved and 
 blest it. 
 
 Perhaps, therefore, I can best deal with the subject if I 
 first give you a brief sketch of the history of the drama in 
 connection with histrionic art. 
 
 Whatever may have been the crude forms that the drama 
 took in prehistoric times, there is little doubt that the 
 theatre, as it at present exists, arose in Greece, ' that 
 wonderful country whose days of glory have left such a 
 never-dying blaze of radiance behind them.' At first it 
 seems to have taken the form of a kind of fantastic orgy 
 of shepherds and peasants, who solemnized the rites of 
 Bacchus by the sacrifice of a goat, by tumultuous dances, 
 and by a sort of masquerade, in which the songs and jests 
 corresponded in coarseness to the character of the satyrs 
 and fawns which they were supposed to assume in honour 
 of their patron. Out of this rude, crude, and vulgar form 
 of entertainment, Thespis, aided by one Susarion, is said 
 to have been the first to organize a display on a stage. 
 And from the moment that he rescued it from barbarism 
 it began to move with rapid strides towards an ideal per- 
 fection. Upon ^Eschylus, one of the Athenian generals in 
 the battle of Marathon, B.C. 490, Greece conferred the title 
 of the 'Father of Tragedy.' He was the first who, avail- 
 ing himself of Thespis's invention of the stage, introduced 
 a number of actors upon the boards at the same time, and 
 converted into action and dialogue the dull monologue of 
 the Thespian orator. It was he who invented the decep- 
 tions of stage scenery, and the relief of orchestral music 
 varied by accompanying choruses. It was he who at
 
 THE THEATRE 21 
 
 Athens built the first theatre, and surrounded the drama 
 with the embellishments of Grecian art ; he who first in- 
 troduced machinery for the ascent of phantoms, the descent 
 of deities and other spectacular effects, which were as 
 common in the Grecian theatre as in the modern English 
 one. Under him Athens, the most learned and most 
 highly-civilized city of the ancient world, became wholly 
 fascinated with the splendours of this new form of enter- 
 tainment It was for her stage that Sophocles and Euripides 
 wrote their immortal dramas, and from her libraries of 
 dramatic poems that we have received thoughts that breathe 
 with the loftiest ideals, and words that burn with the noblest 
 conceptions of life. St. Paul himself did not disdain to 
 quote to an Athenian audience a passage from the Greek 
 poet A rat us. 
 
 We come next to Rome. Until the contact of Grecian 
 with Roman civilization, there is little evidence that Rome 
 had anything approaching a regular and recognised drama. 
 They were not without a sort of rude form of dramatic 
 entertainment, but it took the form of crude satirical farce, 
 and was both without beauty, and utterly devoid of literary 
 or histrionic merit. With the influx of Grecian art came 
 the gorgeousness of the Grecian stage. Livius Andronicus 
 is accredited with the work of transplanting the theatre 
 from Athens to Rome, where it flourished under the im- 
 mediate patronage of her successive emperors, and was 
 supported by the best talent of her greatest writers. So 
 popular had the stage become in the time of Nero, that 
 he commanded all the theatres to be covered with gold. 
 'Some of the buildings were so large that they enclosed 
 trees and statues, fountains and streamlets. In order to
 
 22 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 cool and refresh the multitudes assembled to witness the 
 play, a mixture of water, wine and Sicilian saffron was pre- 
 pared, and led through pipes to the highest seats, and from 
 thence it distilled in fine rain that purified and cooled the 
 air throughout the building.' One theatre (that of Marcus 
 yEmilius Scaurus) was large enough to accommodate eighty 
 thousand people. There is little doubt, too, that the theatre 
 continued its hold upon the Romans until it was buried 
 under the ruins of that mighty empire, to await resurrection 
 in another form. 
 
 Where it next made its appearance is a question of dis- 
 pute. Probably Rome saw the last of the stage as a 
 secular display for at least one thousand years. When next 
 it made its appearance it was under the guise of religion. 
 In the Eastern Empire religious exhibitions of a theatrical 
 character appear to have been instituted about 990 A D., 
 by Theophylact, Patriarch of Constantinople, with the in- 
 tention, as Warton surmises, of weaning the minds of the 
 people from the Pagan revels, by substituting Christian 
 spectacles, partaking of the same spirit of license. But 
 history only records this as a blot on the Christianity of 
 that age. Cedrenus tells us that ' it scandalized God and 
 the memory of His saints.' 
 
 But a form of theatrical display, representing Christian 
 pilgrimages, Bible scenes and stories, seems to have been 
 common to all Christian countries in mediaeval times. In 
 France we find the pilgrims, on their return from the Holy 
 Land, setting up a stage, and acting the scenes through 
 which they had passed. This form of entertainment was soon 
 followed by Scriptural plays. To make these displays more 
 effective and imposing, a special building was erected in
 
 THE THEATRE 23 
 
 which there were three scaffoldings above each other, the 
 highest so arranged as to represent heaven, the next the 
 world, the third hell. For a time it seems to have been a 
 purely religious form of entertainment, near akin to the 
 modern Passion Play of Oberammergau ; but it soon 
 became associated with such debauchery and impurity that 
 it had to be suppressed by a special enactment of the 
 Government. 
 
 In England dramatic entertainments, representing the 
 lives of the saints and the most eminent Scriptural stories, 
 were known as early as the twelfth century, and were called 
 ' miracle plays.' Chaucer tells us that in his time ' Plays of 
 Miracles were the common resort of idle gossips in Lent.' 
 Warton, in his ' History of English Poetry,' says ' these pieces 
 frequently required the introduction of allegorical characters,' 
 such as Faith, Hope, Charity, Sin, Death. But the inde- 
 cencies of the thing may be gathered from the fact that 
 Adam and Eve were personated in their primeval state of 
 nudity in the Garden of Eden ; the blasphemies of the 
 thing from the fact that the Deity Himself was personated 
 on the stage, and Satan and his imps were introduced to 
 excite the mirthfulness of the audience ; and the stupidity 
 of the thing from the facts that Moses was placed on the 
 stage arrayed in alb and cope, that David was robed in a 
 green vestment, and that Balaam, with an immense pair of 
 spurs, was made to ride on a wooden ass, in which was 
 enclosed a speaker to rebuke the foolhardy prophet. 
 
 The earliest positive mention of professional actors in 
 England, as distinct from minstrels, choristers and clergy, 
 who chiefly participated in the miracle plays, occurs about 
 the middle of the fifteenth century. The two earliest
 
 24 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 buildings erected in London exclusively for theatrical repre- 
 sentation were built in Shoreditch about the year 1570: 
 the one was called ' The Theatre,' by way of distinction, the 
 other, 'The Curtain.' To-day there are at least fifty build- 
 ings licensed in London for dramatic representations. Of 
 the history of the English stage between 1464 and this it 
 is not my purpose now to speak. 
 
 I will only say in passing that that history brings before 
 us dramatic writings which contain the noblest and purest 
 literature, the best poetry, the finest sentiment, the most 
 elevated morality, and the names of some of the purest men 
 and women that have adorned English society. I would 
 not forget to mention that the name of William Shakespeare 
 belongs to that period, and that next to the English Bible 
 his works stand as the crown and glory of our English 
 literature. 
 
 1 want now to say something of the influence of the 
 theatre on the peoples and nations that have most patron- 
 ized it, as also of its influence upon its actors. 
 
 There is no doubt that in Greece, under Thespis and 
 /Eschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, it was a great moral 
 power, and that it had a most elevating effect upon the 
 characters of its votaries. At that time both author and 
 actor were men moving in the first ranks of society, many 
 of them the makers of the best features of Grecian history. 
 .'Eschylus and Sophocles were soldiers and statesmen, and 
 yet were not above appearing on the public stage. But, alas ! 
 Greece gave her beautiful locks to the Delilah of impurity. 
 From the beauty of /Kschylus and the grandeur of Sophocles 
 she went over to the fooleries of Aristophanes and the in-
 
 THE THEATRE 25 
 
 decencies of a school of licentiousness, until not long before 
 her fall the stage that could provide the greatest excesses, 
 and depict scenes of the grossest immoralities, was the most 
 flourishing and the most honoured. Her young men were 
 corrupted, and her old men became senile roues ; the days 
 of strength and heroism suggested by Homer and ^Eschylus, 
 Salamis and Marathon, passed away like a dream, and the 
 land that had produced such an army of orators, statesmen, 
 poets, philosophers, despising the restraints of her noblest 
 teachers, went into the shadow of death. 
 
 What the theatre was to Roman life and Roman morals 
 may be gathered from an edict of one of the praetors, which 
 stigmatized as infamous all who appeared on the stage either 
 to speak or to act. St. Augustine tells us that ' the ancient * 
 Romans, accounting the art of stage-playing and the whole 
 scene infamous, ordained that this sort of men should not 
 only want the honour of other citizens, but also be dis- 
 franchised and thrust out of their tribe . . . because they 
 would not suffer their vulgar sort of people to be defamed, 
 disgraced or defiled with stage-players.' Tertullian says 
 that the temples were united to theatres in order that super- 
 stition might patronize debauchery ; and that they were 
 dedicated to Bacchus and to Venus, the confederate deities 
 of lust and intemperance. 
 
 Whatever may have been the cause, history at least 
 makes this clear, that the Roman empire was swept away 
 by a tide of impurity, and that her throne crumbled from 
 the dry-rot of uncleanness, which had its mirror, if not its 
 source, on the stage. 
 
 What the theatre has been to French life most of us know 
 too well. France has given up her Bible to a great extent
 
 26 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 given up her Christianity ; her theatre takes the place of her 
 Sabbath worship ; the stage has overthrown the pulpit ; the 
 actor has supplanted the priest. We know with what filthy 
 rubbish her dramatists seek to gorge their flippant clientele 
 stupidity that English common-sense would mock at ; 
 impurity that English modesty would spurn from the 
 stage. 
 
 Of the effects of the stage on our English life it is diffi- 
 cult to speak. I know that, as I have previously stated, it 
 has been the source of some of our best literature; that 
 connected with it have been some of our noblest characters; 
 that from its proceeds many charitable and religious institu- 
 tions have received invaluable help ; that music and art, 
 eloquence and poetry, have been mightily strengthened, 
 developed, and ennobled by it. But I cannot close my 
 eyes to the fact that it has also mightily fostered, encouraged, 
 and produced profligacy, vice and impurity ; that in the 
 past it has not been friendly to religious life, religious 
 thought, religious reverence things of the highest import- 
 ance to man, to society, to the world. 
 
 One sad fact connected with the history of the stage is, 
 that, whatever may have been the merits or demerits of the 
 drama, the actors for the most part have been men and 
 women of most undesirable character. 
 
 Writing in 1775, Josiah Quincey says: 'The stage is the 
 nursery of vice, and disseminates the seeds far and wide.' 
 Rousseau, whose leanings were certainly not towards prudish- 
 ness, remarks : ' I observe in general that the situation of 
 an actor is a state of licentiousness and bad morals ; that 
 the men are abandoned to low practices ; that the women 
 lead a scandalous life.'
 
 THE THEATRE 27 
 
 Mrs. Siddons, writing of her sister's marriage, says : ' I 
 have lost one of the sweetest companions in the world . . . 
 but I thank God she is off the stage.' What does this 
 reveal, but that one of the purest women that has adorned 
 the English stage was conscious of the fact that the sur- 
 roundings of the stage were not congenial to the living of 
 an ideal life? 
 
 Fanny Kemble, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, 
 describing her first appearance on the stage, which was 
 made for the purpose of retrieving the decaying fortunes of 
 her family, says : ' So my life was determined, and I devoted 
 myself to a calling which I never liked or honoured, and 
 about the very nature of which I have never been able to 
 come to any decided opinion. It is in vain that the un- 
 doubted specific gifts of great actors and actresses are 
 given for rightful exercise ; in vain that Shakespeare's plays 
 urge their imperative claim to the most perfect illustration 
 they can receive from histrionic interpretation ; a business 
 which is incessant excitement and factitious emotion seems 
 to me unworthy of a man ; a business which is public exhi- 
 bition unworthy of a woman. . . . But though I have 
 never, I trust, been ungrateful for the powers of thus help- 
 ing myself and others, or forgetful of the obligations I was 
 under to do my appointed work conscientiously in every 
 respect, or unmindful of the precious good regard of so 
 many kind hearts it has won for me ; though I have never 
 lost one iota of my own intense delight in the act of render- 
 ing Shakespeare's creations, yet neither have I ever pre- 
 sented myself before an audience without a shrinking 
 feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from their presence 
 without thinking the excitement I had undergone unhealthy
 
 28 
 
 and the personal exhibition odious.' Further, she says : 
 ' The vapid vacuity of my Aunt Siddons' life had made a 
 profound impression upon me : her apparent deadness and 
 indifference to everything, which I attributed (unjustly per- 
 haps) less to her advanced age than to what I supposed the 
 withering and drying influence of the over-stimulating 
 atmosphere of emotion, excitement, and admiration in 
 which she had passed her life. Certain it is that such was 
 my dread of the effect of my profession upon me that I 
 added an earnest petition to my daily prayers that I might 
 be defended from the evil influence I feared it might exercise 
 upon me.' 
 
 That is a remarkable testimony of a remarkable woman, 
 who was morally strong enough to resist the temptations of 
 the stage, and I think it throws a flood of light upon the 
 conditions and surroundings in which an actor's life is 
 passed, and the temptations to which they are subject. 
 How easy must the road to ruin be to a life lived in that 
 atmosphere ! 
 
 Joseph Hatton, in his ' Reminiscences of John L. 
 Toole' (published 1888), speaking of comedians off the 
 boards, says : ' Hypochondriacal and gloomy creatures 
 occasionally, whose fun and animal spirits leave them with 
 their stage dress ; or dissolute profligates, whose irregu- 
 larities are a proverb, and whose homes are a disgrace ' 
 (vol. i., p. 88). 
 
 One thanks God that he is able to present Mr. Toole as 
 a noble exception. So far as I know, the vilest breath of 
 slander has never been breathed on his stainless name. 
 Doubtless, too, the same might be said of many illustrious 
 souls who have adorned the stage, adorned society, and
 
 THE THEATRE 29 
 
 adorned humanity, not alone by their abilities, but by their 
 nobility of character. But that this is not so generally any- 
 one knows who has taken the trouble to look and think for 
 himself. Why ? Is it because persons who take to the 
 stage are naturally worse than others ? Have they more of 
 the brute and less of the human in them than their fellow- 
 mortals ? No ; in my opinion it may be accounted for by 
 the influence which their profession sheds upon them, and 
 by the surroundings, physical and moral, in which theatrical 
 life is necessarily passed under existing conditions. That 
 those conditions are necessary conditions ; that they are 
 inseparable from histrionic interpretation and histrionic art, 
 I do not for one moment believe. It cannot be necessary 
 that the ' green-room ' should be the door to vice ; it cannot 
 be necessary that an atmosphere of immorality should 
 pervade theatrical surroundings. I see no reason why 
 public-houses and dram-shops should attach themselves 
 to the theatre : I see no absolute reason why loose 
 characters should hang around the theatre any more than 
 around a lecture-hall or a concert-room. That these things 
 prevail is the disgrace of our modern civilization an ulcer 
 on the fair face of our national life. That much is being 
 done in the way of reform I cheerfully admit, and am 
 profoundly grateful for ; that much more will be done I 
 have a sure and well-grounded hope. 
 
 It only remains now for me to deal with the question 
 which I am being constantly asked : ' Ought a Christian 
 man, a Christian woman, to go to the theatre ?' I will base 
 my answer upon the principle laid down by St. Paul. I 
 will say first that if a man's conscience tells him it is wrong,
 
 30 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 then for that man it is wrong. ' To him that esteemeth 
 anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.' If it gives 
 you impure thoughts, low ideals, unholy desires, your 
 bounden duty is to shun the place as though it were a lazar- 
 house. If, too, your going would be a source of pain to 
 your noble-minded wife, your modest sister, your sainted 
 mother, as a Christian man you are bound to abstain from 
 going. If it will lower your influence with your children, 
 your employers, or those in any way committed to your 
 trust, I would say your duty is abstention. But if, on 
 the other hand, it is a pure source of pleasure to you ; if it 
 gives you lofty ideals ; if it educates your taste for art ; if it 
 improves your musical culture ; if it softens the hard places 
 in life; if it soothes the jaded brain ; if it interprets to you 
 any of the mysteries of life, or makes you look thoughtfully 
 at the solemnities of death, and no one is thereby offended 
 or made weak, then, who but your Master dares judge 
 you in that which you do? I, at least, will not be your 
 judge. Tens of thousands of pure-minded, sweet-souled, 
 Christ-loving men and women go, and know that they 
 are none the worse for so doing. Who dares condemn 
 them ? 
 
 But there is a duty that, to the Christian, extends beyond 
 self, self-interest, and personal relationships : the duty of 
 the Christian extends to the wide circle of society, and to 
 the yet wider circle of the whole community. That duty 
 should compel every Christian to demand pure plays. I 
 know that the State exercises a kind of censorship over the 
 stage, as over the press ; but much of that which passes the 
 coarse meshed sieve of State regulation ought not to pass 
 the finer sentiment of Christian feeling. Against much of
 
 THE THEATRE 3, 
 
 the ' up-to-date ' nonsense that is put on the boards ; against 
 the immoralities that are veiled under a thin gauze of 
 doubtful modesty ; against the dramas that demand for 
 their interpretation unwomanly exhibitions, unmanly fooleries, 
 it is the duty of the Christian Church and the Christian 
 world to lift up its voice and to protest. And I say to 
 ' strong-minded, pure souled men and women that, instead of 
 allowing bad plays to be acted before bad people, making 
 actor and spectator ten times worse than they otherwise 
 would be, it were better that you should go to these 
 theatres, hiss down the actors, cry ' Shame !' at their im- 
 modesties, and agitate against them until they reform or 
 perish. The Church is strong enough to blot out the worst 
 plays that were ever written. 
 
 Further, this Christian principle should compel us to 
 discountenance in others that which we would not tolerate 
 in ourselves. 
 
 In the name of all that is true and beautiful I object to 
 much of the garb of the stage. I am no prude ; I am no 
 Philistine ; but for decency's sake I am bound to protest 
 against the shameless displays and the immodest representa- 
 tions of semi-nudity so often to be seen. No man would 
 tolerate it in his home, and we ought not to tolerate it in 
 the theatre. How many of you parents would like to see 
 your daughters go on the stage in a fashionable ballet ? To 
 manage the feet in such an unobtrusive manner, to revolve 
 so gracefully, and poise so artistically, is doubtless clever, 
 and those who do it may be refined and pure souls, but 
 would you like your child or your wife to do it ? If not, 
 you have no right to countenance it. You need not judge 
 others, but you yourself are bound to stay away. That
 
 32 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 which is ignoble for the actor is ignoble for the spectator. 
 That which is wrong on the stage is wrong in the stalls. 
 
 If Christian men and women would act on these prin- 
 ciples we might soon have a pure drama, a modest stage, 
 noble actors and actresses, and pure surroundings ; and, 
 instead of the complaint that the theatre is the nursery of 
 vice, the source of evil, and the well-spring of licentiousness, 
 we should soon hear of it as the minister to a legitimate 
 want, the centre of a pure and pleasurable influence, the 
 creator of lofty ideals, the friend of philanthropy, and the 
 handmaid of religion. 
 
 ' The drama's laws the drama's patrons give ; 
 For those who live to please must please to live.' 
 
 The Church, therefore, holds the key of the situation. 
 God help us to do our duty !
 
 $of if ice 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ST. JOHN xviii. 36. 
 1 My kingdom is not of this world.' 
 
 REVELATION xi. 15. 
 
 ' The kingdoms of this world are become 
 the kingdoms of our LORD, and of His 
 CHRIST ; and HE shall reign for ever and 
 ever.'
 
 POLITICS 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 T INCALCULABLE mischief has been done by the 
 J- supposition that the first of these texts is an emphatic 
 declaration on the part of our Lord that His religion was to 
 have nothing to do with earthly, worldly, and material things. 
 And the men who have held this mischievous doctrine have 
 bolstered up their mischief by an appeal to the fact that 
 Christ Himself took no part in the public life of His time, 
 and that His disciples and apostles held themselves sternly 
 aloof from all the political movements and activities of their 
 time. In regard to my text, let me say that, when our Lord 
 asserted that His kingdom was not of this world, He did 
 not mean that His religion was not to touch the many- 
 sidedness of the world's life. He was in the presence 
 of Pilate, who was trying to draw from Him some state- 
 ment of His authority to act as He had been acting, some 
 defence of His extraordinary conduct, some excuse for 
 His revolutionary teaching. 'What hast Thou done?' 
 asks the representative of Rome's imperial power. My 
 kingdom that is, My authority to do as I have done is 
 not of this world. That is a very different thing from 
 
 32
 
 36 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 saying that His kingdom was not meant to rule over this 
 world. 
 
 In regard to the fact that neither He nor His Apostles 
 took any part in the public life of their time, I would say 
 that it was impossible for them to do so, not because it 
 would have been alien to their purpose, but because there 
 was no opportunity for such a line of action. ' The whole of 
 Europe and Asia, under the Roman Empire, was governed 
 despotically, and there was no room for individual citizen 
 activity.' 
 
 Those who were accounted rulers in Palestine the 
 Herods and their sanhedrim were only puppets, tools of 
 that mighty engine of power Imperial Rome. 
 
 There is, on the other hand, every evidence that the 
 Christ intended His kingdom to embrace all interests, and 
 to transfuse and transform every dominant power of the 
 world. 
 
 He began His ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth by 
 connecting Himself with that prophetic statement of 
 Isaiah's which told of that coming King who should be 
 the means of setting right the wrongs of earth, and turning 
 the wayward feet of men into paths which should lead them 
 to higher destinies and nobler conditions of life. 'He hath 
 sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance 
 to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set 
 at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable 
 year of the Lord.' That is one of the most striking political 
 statements ever made. It was a political programme 
 mapped out by the great evangelical prophet ; and He who 
 came to fulfil the prophets took it up as His own work : 
 the whole of His life and teaching was the carrying out of
 
 POLITICS 37 
 
 this programme. And, ' though He had nothing to do with 
 the despotic government of His day ; though He left the 
 Herods and the Caesars alone, to perish as they deserved to 
 perish, He yet infused into every soul that believed in Him 
 a power which was meant to literally take possession of all 
 the reins of government upon earth, and administer this 
 world in the Name of the King to Whom it belonged.' 
 
 ' Think not,' He said, ' that I am come to send peace on 
 the earth ' to acquiesce in things as they are, to treat the 
 world as though it were beyond My notice ' I came not to 
 send peace, but a sword ;' came to be a revolutionist, a 
 reformer, a political creator, a breaker down, and a 
 builder up. 
 
 There is every evidence that His apostles who succeeded 
 Him took the same view of His mission, and the ultimate 
 object of His kingdom. Their writings are not only im- 
 pregnated with maxims and principles that apply to the 
 community, and through the community to the common- 
 wealth and the body politic, but they contemplate the 
 triumph of the Christ over every power, temporal and 
 spiritual alike. They not only speak of their Lord as King, 
 but they ascribe Kingly functions, Kingly powers, and 
 Kingly rule to Him. St. Paul says, ' He must reign till He 
 hath put all enemies under His feet.' And in that apoca- 
 lyptic vision in which the sainted Seer saw the final 
 consummation of all rule, and all authority and power, he 
 says, ' There were voices in heaven saying : The kingdoms 
 of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of 
 His Christ ; and He shall reign for ever and ever.' 
 
 The Roman Church rushed into the extreme of supposing 
 that this was meant to be a literal prophecy of a personal
 
 38 
 
 temporal reign on earth, and that, as the person of the 
 Sovereign King is in heaven, His vicegerent must take His 
 place on earth. And hence for centuries the Bishop of 
 Rome was regarded and revered as Christ's representative 
 on the thrones of the world ' King of kings and Lord of 
 lords.' The Roman Church is still hoping and still labour- 
 ing that that power may be regained. That is, I think, 
 prostituting a magnificent ttuth into an egregious falsehood: 
 replacing a Divine reality by a human fictitious absurdity. 
 
 Christ's rule over temporal things is precisely what it is 
 over spiritual things, not the suppression of individuality, 
 but the suffusion of all faculties, functions, and powers with 
 His Spirit, His life, His elements of character, His grace, 
 and His beauty. He is to rule in the earth, not by deposing 
 the powers that be, and placing on their thrones men with 
 delegated powers from Him ; but by filling the powers that 
 be with His Spirit, and moulding them after His image. 
 By possessing human hearts He will become humanity's 
 King. 
 
 He may thus be the great political Leader of the world ; 
 over monarchical and republican governments alike He 
 may preside ; through all forms of political economies He 
 may lead the generations on to nobler destinies and more 
 perfect conditions of life. That, I take it, is His mission 
 in the world to-day : that is the mission of Christianity, so 
 far as it applies to mundane and temporal things. You 
 will, therefore, readily see that the Christian man, far from 
 being out of place in the political world, is really promoting 
 his Master's kingdom, if he carries into that world the 
 spirit of his Master, and seeks to apply His Divine ethics 
 to the exigencies of political life. It is through the Christ-
 
 POLITICS 39 
 
 spirit in the individual, manifested in every phase of life, 
 that the universal triumph of Christianity is to be assured. 
 All the economics, therefore, of the body politic ought to 
 be in the hands of Christian men, determined to deal with 
 them in the spirit of Christ, and in the light of His Divine 
 revelation. 
 
 It is one of the curses of our modern life that politics, 
 like most other mundane matters, have been divorced from 
 Christian living and Christian life. So much is this the 
 case that men have got to look upon an ardent politician as 
 a man almost opposed to religion, almost necessarily with- 
 out religion : to dabble in politics is to forswear Christianity. 
 Such a conception is as stupid as it is erroneous. The 
 world of politics may be as sacred as the world of art, of 
 science, or even of religion. Governmental affairs are as 
 Divine as Theological affairs, and the righteous politician 
 may be as much a servant of God as the deacon or the 
 priest ; the Premier of a nation's Parliament may be the 
 promoter of Christ's kingdom as much as the Primate of a 
 nation's Church. 
 
 Men make a vital mistake when they concern themselves 
 with matters religious, and neglect matters political ; they 
 wholly mistake the purpose of God when they pronounce 
 the Church sacred and the forum profane ; they have not 
 learnt the spirit of Christ when they think that religion and 
 politics have nothing in common. Everything that affects 
 humanity's well-being, that is elevating, that tends to im- 
 prove human conditions, to prevent suffering, to secure the 
 greatest good to the greatest number, is certainly religious, 
 is truly Christian. Government under existing conditions 
 is an absolute necessity ; he, therefore, most serves his
 
 40 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Master who helps to make government righteous, and seeks 
 to apply the maxims of Christianity to the economics of 
 legislation. 
 
 The ban of our modern political life is that men enter 
 it, and support it, from every motive but the right one. 
 The forum is full of place-seekers, tuft-hunters ; men who 
 care nothing for principles, but everything for power ; 
 nothing for measures, but everything for party. The wretched 
 divisions of political life make righteous legislation almost 
 an impossibility. What James Russell Lowell wrote of 
 Party Politics in America in 1846, in those wonderful and 
 inimitable papers called the ' Biglow Papers,' he might 
 write of many English politicians to-day : 
 
 ' Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man : 
 
 He's ben on all sides thet gives places or pelf; 
 But consistency still wuz a part of his plan, 
 He's ben true to one party an' thet is himself; 
 So John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez he shall vote for Gineral C. 
 
 ' Gineral C. he goes in fer the war ; 
 
 He don't vally principle more'n an old cud ; 
 What did God make us raytional creeters fer, 
 But glory an' gunpowder, plunder an' blood? 
 So John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez he shall vote for Gineral C. 
 
 ' We were gittin' on nicely up here to our village, 
 
 With good old idees o' wut's right and wut aint, 
 We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage, 
 An' that eppyletts worn't the best mark of a saint ; 
 But John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez this kind o' thing's an exploded idee.'
 
 POLITICS 41 
 
 Yes ; everything's ' an exploded idee ' that doesn't suit 
 party politics. A good proportion of our politicians might, 
 to quote Lowell again, thank Heaven that 
 
 ' A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler 
 O' purpose thet we might our principles s waller.' 
 
 That ought not so to be. A politician ought to be as 
 reliable, as straightforward, as honourable, as charitable, as 
 pure-minded, as a priest. And where he is not so, the man 
 is by that very fact disqualified for his high calling. I do 
 not say that the Christian spirit will make all men think 
 alike, or see alike, or devise alike the same measures for 
 the government of the commonwealth ; but it will secure 
 that charity that thinketh no evil, that rejoiceth not in 
 iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth the charity that suffereth 
 long and is kind. 
 
 A little more of it in the world would have prevented 
 the pitiable sight of a stupid mob of fashionable gentility, 
 at a royal reception, hissing a fellow-guest, an octogenarian 
 statesman, who, whatever his faults, has done noble work 
 for the English nation. Such abominable snobbism is a 
 direct negation of the Christ-spirit and of Christianity. 
 And yet that is but a fair sample of the intolerance, the 
 conceit, the stupidity of party politics in the present day, 
 and of all parties alike. I call upon the Church to do its 
 utmost to eradicate this un-Christian element in our political 
 life. 
 
 Competition will never be put down ; it is one of the 
 means whereby men arrive at the highest methods of pro- 
 gress, of usefulness, and of beneficence. But competition 
 supported by lying, by meaningless promises, by vilifica-
 
 4 2 
 
 tion, and by ribaldry, must be put down. And if those 
 avowing Christianity would set their faces against it, as it 
 is their bounden duty to do, it would be put down in a 
 decade. 
 
 I call upon all citizens to give to the politics of their 
 time their most serious consideration ; it is your duty, as 
 citizens of that great empire in which God has placed you, 
 to take your part in that wonderful economy which has 
 made England one of the greatest nations of the earth. If 
 you neglect this duty you will be as culpable as if you 
 neglected your prayers, your worship in the House of God, 
 your participation in those duties which you have always 
 regarded as sacred. It is not enough to say, ' But politics 
 are not in my line ' : that may be only an excuse for your 
 selfishness. The father of a family might just as well say, 
 ' The duties of a father are not in my line.' The fact of 
 his fatherhood enforces those duties ; the fact of your 
 citizenship enforcts yours. You cannot escape them, and 
 if you neglect them, you sin. It is no use saying, ' Politics 
 are rotten.' Politics are not rotten ; the men who dabble 
 in them may be, and it is your duty as a Christian man to 
 see that the tuft-hunter, the place-seeker, the office-monger 
 are supplanted by men of principle, men of honesty, men of 
 true patriotism, men of sterling integrity. You may not 
 agree with them, but their influence will tend to the 
 ennobling of the nation, to the march of human progress, 
 and to the dawn of the day when there shall be voices in 
 heaven, and perchance on earth, saying, ' The kingdoms of 
 this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of 
 His Christ.' 
 
 But I am to speak of the ethics of Christianity as applic-
 
 POLITICS 43 
 
 able to the problems of modern politics. And in doing 
 this I must state at the very onset that these ethics have a 
 general rather than a particular application. You will find 
 no specific rules for legislation, any more than for business, 
 in the New Testament ; but there are principles inculcated 
 which were intended for the guidance and direction of 
 both, as, indeed, for every phase of our common life. 
 Take, for example, the great problem that is exercising 
 men's minds as to whether it is right, equitable, fair, to 
 disestablish and disendow the Anglican Church in this 
 country and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. The 
 New Testament offers no manner of counsel on the ques- 
 tion, but it does lay down general principles which we are 
 bound to observe. Our Lord Himself, when appealed to 
 in regard to a tribute paid to an alien king, and an alien 
 government, laid down this universal principle : ' Render 
 unto Csesar the things that be Csesar's, and unto God the 
 things that be God's.' The matter of the tribute-money 
 was nothing compared with the principle of justice and 
 righteousness. That will have to be the foundation prin- 
 ciple which must determine the Tightness or wrongness of 
 the question at issue. Whether it is expedient or not must 
 be determined by the voice of the nation ; whether it is 
 right or not must be determined by the ethical maxims of 
 the religion of Christ. 
 
 The great question of Home Rule for Ireland is a matter 
 to which you can only apply the most general religious 
 principles. There is not a single maxim to which you can 
 point which makes it either right or wrong to grant Home 
 Rule. Its Tightness must be determined by its manifest 
 expediency or inexpediency, and by its apparent effect upon
 
 44 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 the community. You have to weigh probabilities ; to take 
 into account the tendencies of human nature, the con- 
 tingencies that may promote internecine strife ; to consider 
 well the fitness of a people for autonomy, and the possi- 
 bilities of their ruling in righteousness. And having settled 
 this, you have no appeal to Scripture, or to any law, human 
 or Divine. The question must be wholly determined by 
 the balance of human opinion ; only it is your duty to see 
 that that opinion be impregnated with the Christ-spirit, 
 and expressed in brotherly charity. 
 
 All international questions must be settled upon the 
 broad principles of justice, and upon the Christian prin- 
 ciple, ' Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself.' From 
 that there is no appeal. You dare not do to another nation 
 that which you would not another nation should do to you. 
 
 When we come to the great problems connected with 
 capital and labour, we have unmistakable Christian teach- 
 ing for our guidance. It is the bounden duty of the legis- 
 lature to see that justice is done to the toiler as well as to 
 the employer; it is the bounden duty of the Christian 
 community to see that our legislators recognise this solemn 
 responsibility. The awful revelations made a short time 
 ago in regard to the abominable sweating system ought to 
 have been impossible in a Christian country. That the 
 Church has not risen as with one voice to demand, through 
 the legislature, the redress of these awful wrongs, will, in 
 my opinion, ever remain as a bloodstain upon the robes in 
 which she ministers to the people. 
 
 The Christianity of the New Testament is the champion 
 of the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, 
 the oppressed against the oppressor. ' Behold, the hire of
 
 POLITICS 45 
 
 the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is 
 of you kept back by fraud, crieth : and the cries of them 
 which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of 
 Sabaoth.' That cry to-day is going up from the sweater's 
 den, and it must be silenced by the championing voice of 
 Christianity, expressed through the constituencies of this 
 wealthy nation. Come what may, the hireling must not be 
 oppressed, the labourer must not be turned into a machine 
 for the burnishing of gold to gild the couch of slumber for 
 the rich. 
 
 One other matter which a Christian legislature ought to 
 make a primary question is the health and common decency 
 of the community. Nine-tenths of the working men and 
 women of this country are housed under conditions which 
 make modesty and decency impossible, and health pre- 
 carious. In London and our greater cities especially the 
 prevailing state of things is a disgrace to our civilization. 
 Men, women and children are herded together in rooms in 
 the vilest conditions conditions such as any gentleman 
 would be ashamed to house his cattle under and nobody 
 cares. 
 
 If any man in the world has a right to a decent, com- 
 modious, comfortable, healthy home, it is the working man 
 the man who produces for us the necessaries as well as 
 the luxuries of life, and one of the duties of a Christian 
 community is to see that her toilers are cared for. The whole 
 of our land wants rousing on this great question, and it is 
 the duty of the Church to sound the trumpet-call ; the duty 
 of every Christian man to lift up his voice in demand that 
 these wrongs may be redressed to send to Parliament, to 
 our County Councils, and our public administrative bodies
 
 46 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 generally, men pledged to work out these reforms. If we 
 fail in that duty, if we appoint or reappoint men ' simply on 
 the principle of idle party contests, or, still worse, on prin- 
 ciples of pecuniary interest,' the Lord of Sabaoth, the God 
 who careth for the poor, will visit His judgments upon us, 
 and scathe us with rods of our own making. 
 
 I come now to the question which is occupying our 
 thoughts to-day the question of hospitals. 
 
 Here, of course, I leave the domain of practical politics. 
 Alas ! our charity has been as unworthy of us, as a nation, 
 as have been our politics. We have avowedly made Christi- 
 anity the basis of our national life ; in name, at least, we are 
 a Christian people. With that basis and that name we have 
 grown to be the greatest nation in the world, with larger 
 territory and greater influence, probably, than any people 
 that ever lived. But while we have been thus growing, 
 expanding, amassing, under the guise of Christianity, we 
 have failed to keep the commandments of Christ ; we have 
 neglected the causes, the institutions that are most essenti- 
 ally allied with Christian life and with Christian endeavour. 
 What a comment upon our faith that we can carry on the 
 ocean trade of all nations ; can equip and send out an 
 army on the shortest notice, and defend the honour of our 
 country in the remotest corner of the globe ; can supply 
 the whole world with manufactured goods, and money, too, 
 if they want it, but that we cannot find room for the suffer- 
 ing poor of our country ; that we cannot prevent men dying 
 of want, and in conditions of the most loathsome suffering, 
 under the very shadow of our churches ! 
 
 Of what use is it to boast that the wealth of the nation
 
 POLITICS 47 
 
 is at the present moment about hvo hundred and fifty pounds 
 per head ; that during the past fifty years we have increased 
 the value of our railway property by nearly one thousand 
 million pounds, and our shipping by more than one thousand 
 million pounds, when we cannot maintain the institutions 
 which philanthropy has established for the alleviation of 
 those ills, and the amelioration of those woes that oppress 
 our brother-men ? 
 
 What a tale it tells of our selfishness that every year, 
 at the Derby, a million of money changes hands, and that 
 in all the churches and chapels of London we can only 
 collect the beggarly sum of forty thousand pounds for our 
 hospitals ! What a pitiable thought that this nation can 
 spend one hundred and thirty million pounds in drink, and 
 that it yet has to close many of the wards in our hospitals 
 because it cannot afford to keep them open ! 
 
 I appeal to you to do your duty. I ask that you will 
 send such an offering to the hospitals of London as shall 
 give the lie to the statement that Christianity, as an operant 
 influence on the world's selfishness, is played out. I ask in 
 the name of Him who gave His life for you that you will do 
 your utmost for those institutions which are not only houses 
 of healing for the sick poor, but are, by every influence 
 which they are shedding upon the world, tending more and 
 more to bind together the sons of men and to bring in the 
 universal reign of Christ.
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 GALATIANS v. 13. 
 ' By love serve one another.' 
 
 ROMANS xiv. 7. 
 
 ' For none of us liveth to himself, and no 
 man dieth to himself.'
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 THESE two texts reveal to us St. Paul's conception of 
 the solidarity of life. Not only had God made of one 
 blood all the nations of men to dwell on all the face of the 
 earth, as he told his hearers at Athens, but had in that 
 one blood made them a concrete whole, with a unity of 
 interest, unity of force for helpfulness, with the law of 
 interdependence stamped upon the whole constitution of 
 the race into societies, nations and kingdoms. ' None of 
 us liveth to himself, and no man dieth unto himself.' 
 
 I want you to accept that as the underlying principle of 
 life, and to have it in mind while I speak to you of the 
 wastes of our modern social life. You cannot speak of 
 human society except as embracing the concrete whole of 
 human life. In the economy of life, as God ordained it, 
 there are no classes and masses, no caste and distinction of 
 high or low. I do not say that these things are opposed to 
 the purposes of God, but only that they are not of His 
 ordaining. He gave the race a solidarity so perfect that if 
 one member suffer all the members suffer with it : we have 
 elected to divide the race into classes, but that has not 
 
 42
 
 52 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 undone the solidarity. We cannot get away from the fact 
 that every man is connected with every other man, and in 
 that connection all bound to God. 
 
 Human society, in its broad sense, is 'that method 
 under which men live together in all their interests, in their 
 social relations, in their businesses, in their very conditions 
 of poverty, or riches, or industry.' It ought, therefore, to be 
 a common axiom that every member contribute something 
 to every other member's good. That, if you will take the 
 trouble to think, you will readily detect lies at the very 
 basis of society, organized as it is, and as it is bound to be, 
 on the principle of solidarity. A man's intrinsic value 
 consists in the amount of his good-producing qualities ; not 
 only in what he is in himself as a moral being, but in what 
 he is capable of doing for others for the common weal. 
 
 It seems, too, that God has so regulated the varied and 
 complex machinery of human society, so ordained the many 
 economies of life, so distributed its forces, that, for the well- 
 being of the whole, each must take his part in the things 
 that contribute to the general good. And so plainly is this 
 so that our estimate of a man ought to be determined, not 
 by what he possesses, but by what he does ; not by what he 
 hoards, but by what he produces ; not by his ancestry, but 
 by his fulfilment of his high calling in the world's work. 
 With this view of the economy of life and I maintain it is 
 the Bible view, the New Testament view, a rational view, 
 and the only practical view let us think 
 
 i. Of those wastes that arise out of false conceptions 
 of life's duties. 
 
 I refer here especially to that ever-increasing class whose
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 53 
 
 only conception of living at all is living at the expense of 
 others. You will find this conception at the two extremes 
 of society at its top and at its base. And if it is more 
 reprehensible in one than in another, it is certainly in that 
 at the top, because those at the top ought to have clearer 
 vision, a more definite and accurate conception, of the 
 duties of life than those at the bottom, many of whom are 
 born mentally and morally blind, and never will rise above 
 the conception of their own wants, and how to meet them 
 with the least possible energy and trouble. 
 
 What are the facts ? Why, that those who are born at the 
 top, born with the fabled silver spoon in their mouth, born 
 with every want of their animal nature supplied before the 
 want existed, go through life for the most part as a cater- 
 pillar goes over a leaf to get all it can out of it. They 
 create nothing ; they produce nothing; they add nothing to 
 the sum of human comfort : they are simply the eaters, the 
 appropriators, the users, the consumers of that which others 
 create. It is not enough to say that they buy what they eat 
 and drink and use ; money is not the highest thing in life : 
 it ought only to be a token of exchange between one form 
 of good and another. No man can live on money, he can 
 only hand it over as a token of value for the things which 
 are the necessaries of life. And yet, sad as it is to recognise, 
 there are thousands of men and women among what are 
 called the upper classes who are thus so many parasites on 
 the world's fruitful energies. 
 
 I thoroughly endorse the statement of one of the purest 
 minds this century has produced that ' every healthy man 
 competent to work, but unwilling, who lives upon society 
 without giving it an equivalent is a parasite.' I need hardly
 
 54 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 tell you what a parasite is : it is an animal organized to get 
 its living out of somebody or something else it does not 
 work, it sucks for a living. The ant is a much nobler 
 insect than the aphis. And every honest workman, doing 
 honest work for honest wage, is a much nobler being than 
 the idle aristocrat whose highest occupation is club-lounging, 
 and whose noblest ambition is a carouse or a night of 
 dissipation. The parasite of society calls the smock-frocked 
 workman ' Hodge' and 'Chawbacon,' but, in the name of 
 high Heaven, he is a nobler being than the yawning fop who 
 sees no good in the world other than that which was made 
 for his special delectation. Poor, white-handed, soft boned, 
 perfumed soul, he could not get in his own coals, or reap 
 the corn for his own bread, if his life depended on it, and 
 yet he dares call the man who does these things for him 
 ' Chawbacon ' and ' Hodge ' ! 
 
 I know that amongst the upper classes there are hundreds 
 of brilliant exceptions to those I have been describing : 
 men and women noble in act as well as in birth, and I 
 would fain think that their numbers increase with the 
 years ; but I know what I am talking about when I say that 
 society, at the top, is full of these parasites, the worst 
 feature being that, though parasites, they have the capacity 
 for honest, useful, and noble endeavour. 
 
 Then, if we turn to the lower class, what do we find 
 there ? Why this : that every loafer in high life has a 
 hundred imitators in low life. It is estimated that in Great 
 Britain there are at least three millions belonging to what we 
 should call the working-class, who yet are nothing more or 
 less than human parasites, living on the food which other 
 hands prepare for them. This mighty host, under the name
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 55 
 
 of pauper, vagrant, criminal, idle and vicious, are scattered 
 over the length and breadth of the land, living on the toil 
 of those who produce, procure, or provide the necessaries 
 of life. Like the London sewage, which, ' feculent and 
 festering, swings heavily up and down the basin of the 
 Thames with the ebb and flow of the tide," these miserable 
 beings flow through the springs and tides of our industries, 
 making them foul with putrid uncleanness both a waste 
 and a burden in the economy of our national life. 
 
 I do not wonder that men are clamouring for some kind 
 of reform ; that, appalled at the awful inequalities that 
 exist, they are saying that wrongs must be righted. In this 
 who can fail to agree with them ? But where I, for one, 
 fail to agree is with the thousand and one theories that men 
 are putting forth for the remedy of all these ills. They say 
 that society is wrongly constituted ; perhaps it is. They 
 say that it may be made much better; probably. But 
 when some great Panjandrum steps forth and says, ' I'm 
 the man to do it,' I turn away with disgust. It is only the 
 evolution of life and character, based upon the principle of 
 the solidarity of interest that underlies all society, that will 
 do it. Socialism will fail, politics will fail, education will 
 fail, but the Christ principle ' Thou shall love thy neigh- 
 bour as thyself,' and ' Whatsoever ye would that men should 
 do to you, do ye even so to them ' when woven into the 
 warp and woof of all our economic life, that will succeed, 
 and human society shall become fair and beautiful as the 
 garden of the Lord. 
 
 2. The next waste of which I will speak is that arising 
 out of the misappropriation and misapplication of energies,
 
 56 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 One thing is certain, that no man can fill his proper place 
 in creation, in society, until he finds out what that place 
 is ; he cannot do the best kind of work possible to him 
 until he has ascertained for what his functions and faculties, 
 his capacities and abilities are most fitted. Every man is 
 gifted with a capacity for something, with ability to do some- 
 thing that shall specially contribute to the world's needs, 
 and his first business is to find out just what those capaci- 
 ties and abilities are, and then to apply himself to their 
 exercise. All his education and tuition should be along the 
 line of developing, training, enlarging and perfecting those 
 capacities, that when he finds his sphere he may go to it 
 accomplished. Every man, too, should seek to devote his 
 energies to that kind of work which will be, not only as 
 meal to the barrel, and oil to the cruse, but a source of 
 unceasing satisfaction all along the pilgrimage of life, till he 
 reaches the city which hath foundations. 
 
 If you accept these as common-sense statements, think 
 how terribly perverted and mistaken are the systems of edu- 
 cation that prevail, and the motives that are directing men's 
 application to their callings. 
 
 When children get away from ' the three R's,' how terribly 
 mischievous is the course into which they are goaded by 
 foolish parents and guardians ! A girl, for instance, is 
 compelled to learn music, and to apply herself to it with 
 earnestness, while she has no more natural capacity for 
 music, and no more desire for music, than for 
 learning Chinese. Because foolish society expects it, she 
 is doomed to endure it, and when her education is 
 completed she has just music enough in her to mad- 
 den those who have to listen to it. And yet the father
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 57 
 
 glories in the fact that she ' studied under the best masters,' 
 and that her music cost him so many pounds sterling ! 
 Poor deluded soul ! if he had found out the natural bent of 
 the child's mind, he would perhaps, at half the expense, 
 have had her taught housekeeping and cooking, and she 
 would have been turned into society fit at least for one 
 thing : the making of a comfortable home for some domestic 
 man ! But now with her smattering of music, and botany, 
 and Latin, and French, and history, and drawing, with no 
 real knowledge of any of them, she is just a helpless toy- 
 baby, who can make neither herself nor anyone else happy. 
 The world is flooded with such poor useless creatures, who 
 might have made something out in life, if they had been 
 trained for one thing, and that thing the pursuit or ac- 
 quirement for which natural capacities fitted them. 
 
 I have known boys compelled to learn drawing at school 
 who after years of teaching could never draw a bull's foot 
 or a goose's feather ; whereas if the money spent on the 
 drawing had been spent on teaching them mathematics, or 
 chemistry, they might have excelled. It is a waste of God- 
 given energy to compel the faculties to exercise themselves 
 in matters for which they are not naturally fitted. You 
 fathers, find out your boys' bent, and educate them accord- 
 ingly- 
 Then, too, think of the mistaken notions that determine 
 men's choice of their callings and professions. A man has 
 three sons. He himself has climbed up out of life's low 
 places. As a maker of soap, or a vendor of cheese, he has 
 been successful. He buys himself luxuries and takes his 
 place in society. Having done this, he thinks it would be 
 a lowering for his sons to go into his business, to start
 
 58 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 where he started, and climb as he climbed. No ; they 
 must go into one of the gentlemanly professions. 
 
 'That fellow,' he says, 'is a bold, daring chap ; I shall 
 put him into the army. 
 
 ' His brother is an argumentative fellow, never happy 
 unless he is disputing and quarrelling about odds ; he shall 
 go in for the law. 
 
 'Teddie, poor Teddie, good, conscientious, delicate boy; 
 always says his prayers, you know ; hasn't the head of the 
 other two ; isn't in it when they are about. I shall make a 
 parson of him.' 
 
 And so poor Teddie, because he is good and says his 
 prayers, is thrust into that sphere where more strength, more 
 courage, more nerve-power, more brain force, more genius 
 is needed than in any other calling on earth. Because he 
 looks sickly, misguided women say he looks heavenly, and 
 strong-minded men say, as they discuss his sermons, ' Did 
 you ever hear such twaddle ?' The one place on earth that 
 ought to be graced with the finest qualities, the noblest 
 souls, has been for generations almost monopolized by the 
 weak, delicate, ungifted sons of the rich. They are not 
 wolves in sheep's clothing, they are not false prophets, they 
 are not hirelings, as noisy-voiced shouters would have us 
 believe ; they are only round men in square holes, pushed 
 into a false position by the stupidity of their parents. And 
 the Church has to suffer, society has to suffer, and the 
 kingdom of God on the earth is hindered. 
 
 What is true of misapplication in the Church is true in a 
 greater or lesser degree in all the professions. Some men 
 are pushed into spheres that are above their capacity, others 
 into spheres that not a single faculty in their nature fits
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 59 
 
 them for, whereas if they had been put, at starting, in the 
 right avenues, and under the right inspirations, they would 
 not only have been useful, but their lives would have been 
 like the outpouring of music. 
 
 Think of the briefless barristers, the practiceless doctors, 
 the cureless clergy, the idle lawyers with which society is 
 swarming ! It isn't that they are lazy, or incapable, or weak- 
 minded : it is because they have been thrust into a false 
 position. As blacksmiths, farmers, navvies, tailors, they 
 would have been brilliant successes. As they are they are 
 abject failures flotsam and jetsam on the tide of human 
 society. 
 
 What is true of the higher grades is becoming daily more 
 true of the lower grades. Young men brought up in villages 
 and small towns, the children of men who have earned their 
 living by hard and honest toil, are migrating by thousands 
 to the metropolis, and to other cities, with one ambition 
 dominant : namely, to earn a living and to wear a black 
 coat in the earning of it. Their supreme idea is not, What 
 am I fitted for ? where can I be useful ? how can I conse- 
 crate my faculties to the service of my fellows, my country, 
 and my God ? No ; but, Where can I work and keep my 
 hands white, wear patent-leather boots, and a silk hat ? And 
 hence our common industries industries that once were the 
 backbone of our country are being pushed into foreign 
 lands, and our cities and towns are crowded with out at- 
 elbow, seedy, cadaverous-looking men, who call themselves 
 clerks out of work. London teems with them. There has 
 to be a great light thrown on this question of the mis- 
 direction of energy. In the meantime we have to bear it 
 as a waste and a burden.
 
 6o MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 3. The third waste of which I will speak is that arising 
 from preventible sickness and untimely death. 
 
 We are only just waking up to the fact that the purpose 
 of God in the creation is wholeness and health, soundness 
 and perfectness in all those functions that pertain to the 
 preservation of life ; and that where these things are not 
 there is a direct violation of the laws and the purposes of 
 God. 
 
 It was said very recently, by a man who knew what he 
 was saying, that the proper duration of human life is any- 
 where from eighty to one hundred years ; that men are so 
 organized and constructed that they have a right to expect 
 that. And yet the average duration of human life is only 
 about thirty-three years. Not long since it was only thirty 
 years. Consider what a waste that is, when you take into 
 account the fact that the first fifteen years of life are useless, 
 so far as conducing to the universal good is concerned. The 
 average life therefore has eighteen years of usefulness, when 
 God meant it to have seventy years. All the labour and 
 burden of tuition, all the disciplinary forces that have to be 
 exercised during the period of infancy, adolescence, and 
 youth, are put forth for the sake of eighteen years, when 
 they might result in four times that number. Thus, one- 
 fourth of the human race is bound to produce, to create, to 
 provide the necessaries of life for the other three-fourths. 
 
 Why is this so ? If it be not in the purpose and provi- 
 dence of God, whence is it ? It is due to the prejudice and 
 ignorance and indolence of society in regard to those laws 
 that conduce to health and longevity ; due to vice, due to 
 carelessness, due to wilful neglect of the laws of existence. 
 
 The hospitals and infirmaries of the world, the lunatic
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 61 
 
 asylums of the world, are full of men, women, and children 
 who ought not to be there, and would not be there if the 
 laws of God had been observed, either in themselves or in 
 their progenitors. For if you want to see the practical work- 
 ing of the moral law, ' I will visit the sins of the fathers upon 
 the children unto the third and fourth generation of them 
 that hate Me,' you have only to go to the hospitals and 
 asylums. There you may see it writ large. And all is a 
 waste that the goodwill of God never contemplated. The 
 factors of sickness and premature death are not of His 
 making, but man's. 
 
 A man goes to live in a badly-built, badly-drained house. 
 He doesn't know that it is badly constructed ; he only knows 
 that he thinks it cheap. By-and-by his wife is smitten down 
 with typhoid, and, after days of agony, dies. The clergyman 
 comes in to condole with the man. He talks to him very 
 piously about the mysterious providence of God, and charges 
 him to submit, and to say, 'Thy will be done.' Why, 
 merciful heavens ! the providence of God had nothing what- 
 ever to do with it, and it wasn't the will of God at all. It is 
 worse than pious folly to say it is the hand of God : it is 
 foul sewer-gas, against which every man ought to protect 
 himself. 
 
 And so three fourths of the sickness and ailments and 
 weaknesses of the world are wastes and burdens wastes 
 and burdens to the sufferers, wastes and burdens to society, 
 and wastes and burdens that need not be. I quote the 
 words of one of our great medical authorities, Sir Joseph 
 Fayrer, who said in my hearing, not long since : 
 
 ' If the people could be taught to believe in the efficacy 
 of pure air, pure water, cleanly dwellings, temperate habits,
 
 62 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 proper food, and clothing, and could be induced to make 
 efforts to secure them; and if they could be taught to regard 
 infective diseases as the scourge of uncleanliness, and of 
 their own disregard of the simple laws of health ... the 
 result would be, not only greater usefulness and happiness, 
 but better health and the saving of money.' Then he goes 
 on to say : ' Preventible diseases, the result of insanitary 
 conditions, still kill many thousands yearly at least one 
 hundred and forty thousand ; and, considering the large 
 number of cases of illness for each death, it has been calcu- 
 lated that seventy-eight million five hundred thousand of 
 days of labour are lost in this country annually, which re- 
 presents a loss in money of seven million seven hundred 
 and seventy-five thousand pounds per year.' 
 
 Sir Benjamin W. Richardson, who followed Sir Joseph 
 Fayrer, said he thought the estimate a very moderate one. 
 
 I want to say that it is the duty of the State, the duty of 
 society, and the duty of the Church in particular to make 
 these things known. Nay, more to protest against the 
 conditions that are producing these things, and to remedy 
 them. It is the duty of every governing body, from the 
 Imperial Parliament to that latest of our creations, the Parish 
 Council, to see that all our citizens, noble and simple alike, 
 are protected against every preventible cause of sickness, 
 weakness, and wasting decay. The suffering that flows from 
 vice will only be alleviated and prevented by moral and 
 spiritual forces. There the work of the Church begins ; there 
 is the sphere of the on-coming kingdom of God that will 
 accrue on the reign of righteousness. And in the hastening 
 of its coming you and I must each take our part by being 
 righteous and pure and clean ; by passing on pure influences,
 
 SOCIETY'S WASTES 63 
 
 pure laws to our children, and to those who succeed us ; by 
 sweetening the flowing streams of life ; by charity, devotion, 
 and piety ; by serving one another in love, and by ever re- 
 membering that ' none of us livelh to himself, and no man 
 dieth to himself.' 
 
 I think the light is breaking, and that a fairer morn is 
 dawning. I think I see on the horizon signs that the day is 
 coming in which man shall be emancipated from those con- 
 ditions that enslave, and burden, and oppress him. In that 
 day shall the glory of the race be revealed, and all flesh shall 
 see it together.
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ST. LUKE ii. 14. 
 
 ' Glory to God in the highest ; and on 
 earth peace.' 
 
 ST. MATTHEW x. 34. 
 
 ' Think not that I am come to send peace 
 on earth : I came not to send peace, but a 
 sword.'
 
 WAR 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 AT first sight it would seem as if the key-note of the 
 angels' song was not in accord with the purpose of 
 Jesus in regard to His kingdom ; but it will only be at first 
 sight, if you will trouble to read with the seeking mind and 
 the understanding heart. The superficial student of the 
 Gospel message sees only in the advent of Jesus the dawn 
 of a kingdom opposed to conflict and aggression and war ; 
 the open-minded and open-hearted student sees that kingdom 
 as directly making for all these things. Jesus did not come 
 into the world to produce peace at any price, but to estab- 
 lish peace as the result of righteousness. It was not peace 
 instead of conflict that He came to bring, but peace born 
 out of conflict. And of Him it is said : ' In righteousness 
 He doth judge, and make war.' 
 
 It is a stupid mistake to suppose that the song of the 
 angels was a promise of universal, unconditional peace : it 
 was only a promise of peace on earth as a result of certain 
 conditions. It must not be read, as it is erroneously trans- 
 lated in the Authorized Version, ' Peace on earth, and good- 
 will toward men.' No, but ' peace on earth to men of 
 
 52
 
 good-will.' That is its proper rendering. That is the only 
 peace possible to righteousness. 
 
 Read the first public utterance of Jesus in the synagogue 
 at Nazareth, if you would learn what was His own concep- 
 tion of the object of His mission to earth. Reading from 
 the Prophet Isaiah that God's Messiah was to proclaim 
 release to the captives, and to set at liberty them that are 
 bruised, He claimed the prophecy as referring to His own 
 work in the world. ' To-day,' He said, ' hath this Scripture 
 been fulfilled in your ears.' He knew only too well what 
 was implied in that mission. He could but foresee that it 
 meant conflict ; that before His banner should float over the 
 nations, before the captive prisoners should be released, and 
 the bruised by false systems set at liberty, much tumult and 
 war and bloodshed must accrue. But, at whatever price, 
 the mission must be accomplished. ' Think not that I am 
 come to send peace on earth ; I came not to send peace, 
 but a sword.' Not that the sword was His mission, but that 
 the sword would have to be employed in the fulfilling of His 
 mission ; not that war was a thing desirable in itself, but 
 that war might be a necessity before righteous peace could 
 be established righteousness at all costs, even of war. 
 
 It may be contended that against this the teaching of the 
 Sermon on the Mount stands as an abiding protest ; that 
 with its heavenly maxims : ' Love your enemies, bless them 
 that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for 
 them which despitefully use you and persecute you ' and 
 its holy benedictions : ' Blessed are the peacemakers, for 
 they shall be called the children of God ' it interprets to 
 us more fully and perfectly the genius of the heavenly 
 kingdom. My answer to that is, that the maxims and bene-
 
 W A R 69 
 
 dictions of the Sermon on the Mount were not intended to 
 apply to national, international, and inter-racial economics ; 
 they were intended for the governing and inspiring of conduct 
 between man and man, as members of the new brotherhood 
 of the heavenly kingdom. It is legislation for a family of 
 equal rights, equal aspirations, and a common interest, 
 rather than for an aggregate of nations, with nothing in 
 common save the fact that they are human. 
 
 Christianity, as it comes from the lips of Christ, is the 
 champion of right against wrong, of liberty as opposed to 
 slavery, of justice as opposed to tyranny, of beneficent 
 legislation as opposed to despotic misrule, even at the hazard 
 of life itself. There is a tremendous lot of nonsense talked 
 by pious platitudinarians about the sacredness of human life. 
 There is one thing that is more sacred than life, and that is 
 duty. The cause of right, Tightness, and righteousness first ; 
 human life second. So it was with the Master, who laid 
 down His life for His brethren ; so was it with the early 
 Christians, who loved not their lives unto death. There 
 have been worse things in the history of mankind since the 
 birth of Christ than some of the wars which have stained 
 the earth with blood ; and they are the hatred and op- 
 pression and tyranny which have made the wars a 
 necessity. 
 
 I know, too, that it seems like a strange comment on the 
 influence of Christianity that the nation of all others which 
 calls itself Christian, and which, perhaps, more than any 
 other nation has the right to call itself Christian, should 
 be contemplating the possibility of war in almost every 
 quarter of the globe. The war-spirit is in the very air ; the 
 clouds that hang over us seem to march as in battalions.
 
 70 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Any moment may find us plunged into the fiercest conflict 
 that the nation was ever engaged in. 
 
 Let us see how far the maxims and ethics of Christianity 
 would warrant our engaging in any of these wars. And to 
 do this we must ascertain on what condition war is in any 
 case viewed in the light of the teachings of Jesus defen 
 sible. When is man justified in going to war with his 
 fellows ? 
 
 One thing in my mind is indubitably clear, and that is 
 that it can never be right to make war from causes of 
 jealousy. 
 
 People and races of equal civilization and resources stand 
 in the same relation to each other, morally, as brothers in a 
 family ; and to make war when one is jealous of the other's 
 power, when that power is exercised humanely and righteously, 
 were like two brothers fighting to the death because one was 
 more prosperous than the other. If one of the brothers in 
 the family turned bully, or tyrant, or oppressor of his family, 
 or of any connected with them, then the silencing of the 
 bully and the correction of the oppressor becomes a 
 duty, even at the cost of blood. But war from motives of 
 jealousy is nothing short of fratricide, and the nation which 
 provokes it and incurs it, and strews the earth with the 
 corpses of its own children, is guilty of the blood of its 
 brother. 
 
 I was literally amazed, a short time since, at the cool 
 manner in which the President of the United States of 
 America spoke of the possibility of war with this country, 
 as though it were a game of football, or a billiard match. 
 I am in no position to judge as to the rights or wrongs 
 of the question at issue. Whether England had placed
 
 WAR 71 
 
 covetous hands upon Venezuelan boundaries or not, I am 
 not prepared to say. This much I must say, if I would 
 be true to my convictions that nothing but the defence 
 of our most sacred possessions will ever justify us in draw- 
 ing a sword or pointing a gun at our brethren across the 
 sea ; but if they insist on fighting, then, in my opinion, 
 they forfeit every right to be called Christian, and de- 
 liberately violate the foundation elements of that holy 
 religion which we profess to hold in common. All terri- 
 torial adjustment of boundary lines ought to be made a 
 matter of arbitration ; and the sooner the great powers of 
 the world determine that only in that way shall they be 
 settled, the better it will be for the whole of mankind. 
 
 Again, I think the spirit and genius of Christianity are 
 opposed to war waged for the sake of dominion. 
 
 Of all the wars which have scourged the earth, the 
 wickedest have probably been those carried on solely in the 
 interests of despotism. Imperial ambition has cursed the 
 earth with cruelties, and dyed it deep with uncleansable 
 blood. Precipitate and needless conflicts incited by the 
 proud instincts of despotic rulers have robbed the world of 
 some of its noblest sons, and filled the air with wailing 
 from the widow and the orphan who would not be com- 
 forted. Passing by the wars of pre-Christian times, many 
 of the wars of the Middle Ages were perpetrated in the 
 spirit of the vilest barbarity, and, though, alas ! often bap- 
 tixed with a Christian name, were in the interest of the 
 most ignoble of the passions of mankind the lust for 
 power. Nothing can be clearer than that the boastfulness, 
 the violence, the insolent self assertions, of the monarchs of 
 the world who made war upon weaker races and nations
 
 72 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 were entirely alien to the spirit of Christ, and to the kingdom 
 of Christ, even though they marched to battle with the 
 Cross emblazoned on their banner. 
 
 The wars of the first Napoleon were designed, planned, 
 and carried out solely with the greed of glory and the lust 
 of empire which were characteristic of the whole life of that 
 proud tyrant. 
 
 It is to be feared that our own hands are not wholly clean 
 in this matter. We, as a nation, have been at times guilty 
 of carnage and devastation in the interests of empire rather 
 than in the interests of humanity. Our battalions have put 
 their strong heels upon the weak necks of down-trodden 
 races, that we might add another jewel to the imperial 
 crown. And as often as we have done this we have stained 
 our throne with blood, and taken the sparkle from the 
 jewels that were already in the crown. Whatever our guilt 
 in the past, we must be careful not to add to it in the 
 present and in the future. The glory of power and the 
 lust for dominance must never send an English soldier to 
 shed the blood of an inferior race. 
 
 But all this granted and I take it that it will be granted 
 by the common-sense, and the reasonable religiousness of 
 the nation as a whole what are we to say of other pretexts 
 for war, and other reasons for sending our armies into 
 battle? Are we justified in maintaining our Army and 
 Navy at the expense of the millions of money devoted to it 
 every year? Are we warranted in inventing and making 
 instruments of war that practically mean instruments of 
 annihilation : in arming ourselves to the teeth, in building 
 huge vessels that are simply floating mines of devastation, 
 and then calling ourselves a Christian country ?
 
 WAR 73 
 
 My answer to that is an unqualified 'Yes,' provided we 
 do not use these things in the causes which I have just now 
 suggested, namely, jealousy and aggression The first duty 
 of a nation is to defend itself, its children, and its treasure. 
 Either in the providence of God, or by the might of our 
 own battalions, we have become heir to the richest parts of 
 the surface of the earth. The empire of our Queen is the 
 mightiest empire in the world. If we are doing our best to 
 rule the races and peoples within that empire righteously, 
 justly, humanely, and with a view to their progress, shall we 
 not seek to guard our own ? Shall we say to the first 
 bellicose monarch who menaces us, ' I was mistaken in 
 thinking I ruled by the providence of God ; take thou the 
 rule and do better ? Or if some aspirant to the throne of 
 England invaded our shores, should we welcome him with 
 hurrahs, or with the shot and shell of our mighty guns ? 
 My answer would be and I think I should give it in the 
 spirit of that religion which I profess ' Withdraw, or I 
 fire.' The only sure guarantee of peace is perfect readiness 
 for war. 
 
 I know that there are a great many who think otherwise ; 
 who say that we ought to rely upon the progress of civiliza- 
 tion and the advance of Christianity to prevent war, and 
 that it is wicked waste to devote so much money, and 
 energy, and skill to preparation for war. ' Peace at any 
 price ' is the motto of these peace-ites. To be consistent 
 they ought not to have a single bolt or lock on their doors : 
 they ought to do nothing to prevent the access of the robber 
 and the assassin to their homes : they ought to seek no 
 protection in the law, or in the police, or in any of the 
 many institutions which society has devised for its own
 
 74 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 defence. The army and navy are the bolts and bars, the 
 doors and barriers, the police, and the law, for protecting 
 our homeland, and its treasures otherwhere. And we 
 should not hesitate to use them if our homes were in 
 danger, or our treasures threatened. God expects us to 
 defend ourselves. And we should be cowards and poltroons 
 if we neglected so to do. 
 
 But there is another duty equally sacred, equally 
 binding and that is the protection of the weak against the 
 injustice of the strong. The spirit in man which does not 
 allow him to see a woman ill-treated, or a child tortured, or 
 a blind man turned out of his way, without interfering, that 
 spirit when gathered into the aggregate of the national 
 feeling says, ' Hands off the weak, the oppressed, the 
 bound, or we fire !' And our firing in that case would 
 be as righteous as our prayers ; the booming of the guns 
 would be as sacred an act as the uplifted psalm of 
 worship. 
 
 Every war undertaken for the deliverance of captive men, 
 for the manumitting of the serf, for the unshackling of the 
 slave, has been a righteous war. That terrible struggle 
 between the Northern and Southern States of America in 
 the middle of this century, urged on by the North in the 
 interest of the slave, and ending in the complete victory of 
 the deliverers, was. in my opinion, an epoch-making war, 
 putting an end to man's ownership of man, not only in the 
 States of America, but wherever the religion of Jesus is 
 professed, wherever civilization casts its shining light. 
 
 If there is one sentiment in our English songs of which 
 I am more proud than another, it is that of the skipper in 
 'Jack's Yarn,' where he tells the white-faced planter who
 
 W A R 75 
 
 had come on board after his runaway Sambo that an 
 English ship is the slave's refuge : 
 
 1 Every man is free, he cries, 
 Where the British colour flies.' 
 
 That result was certainly achieved by righteous war. 
 
 One of the great causes which, not long since, threat- 
 ened Europe, and England especially, with war was the 
 cry of an oppressed nation. The most revolting and 
 fiendish excesses of cruelty that it is possible to conceive 
 were being perpetrated day by day by the Turks upon the 
 Armenians, and for no ostensible reason, so far as can be 
 gathered, except that most damnable of all hatreds the 
 hatred of religion. For weeks these Mohammedan reptiles 
 had been sweeping down upon quiet, peace-loving, Christian 
 villages, ravishing their women, murdering their little children 
 and their strong men, burning their homes, stealing their 
 treasures, and leaving nothing behind them but ruin and 
 death. In one village comprising two hundred souls, six 
 only survived when the hateful band had done their 
 devastating work. On every hand we read of infants being 
 butchered like sheep, women so horribly treated that they 
 welcomed the cruellest form of death as a consummation 
 to be wished in preference to the vile outrages of the 
 invaders. 
 
 If we had no interest in these Christians other than that 
 of our common Christianity, and our common brotherhood, 
 the wails of their murdered men and outraged women 
 ought to impel us to interfere, even at the risk of war. But 
 we have an interest in Armenia beyond that of mere 
 brotherhood. When the Berlin Treaty was formulated, and
 
 76 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 the territorial rights and independence of certain small 
 states in Southern Europe and Asia were defined, England 
 distinctly told the Armenians that she would not leave them 
 to the exclusive and dreaded domination of the Turk ; she 
 gave Armenia the right to look to her for protection. And 
 not only so, but she has prevented Russia from giving 
 the aid which she was, and is, quite prepared to give. I 
 do not care to inquire what Armenia now thinks of us 
 and our pledges; but with the cold-blooded, red-handed 
 fanatic murdering the choicest of her sons by thousands, 
 and ploughing them into the ground like carrion, her 
 estimate of our Christianity and our honour cannot be very 
 high ! I do know what many honest-hearted, open-minded, 
 Christian -principled people at home are saying that Eng- 
 land is becoming a by-word and a reproach among the 
 nations. 
 
 Oh, yes, believe me, there is something much worse than 
 a righteous war, and that is cowardice, and silent acqui- 
 escence in tyranny and oppression. We have fought in 
 many places and on many seas where we should not have 
 fought, but in my opinion it is a greater sin to be passive, 
 when, by virtue of our pledges, of our manhood, of our holy 
 religion, we ought to be active. I quote, and fully endorse, 
 the words of Mr. Ruskin on this question : ' I tell you 
 that the principle of non-intervention ... is as selfish and 
 cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it 
 only by being, not only malignant, but dastardly.' 
 
 In saying all this, I am not overlooking the horrors of 
 war with its groans of the living and its thirst of the 
 dying, its crimson gore and its bleaching bones, its be- 
 reaved widows and orphaned children. But this notwith-
 
 WAR 77 
 
 standing, I would not only vote for the drawing of the 
 sword, but would myself volunteer to hold aloft the banner 
 of freedom, justice and brotherhood, should the opportunity 
 occur. 
 
 Till the spirit of Christianity reigns among the nations ; 
 till tyranny, oppression, rapine and lust be banished ; till 
 man to man the world o'er acknowledge a common life with 
 common interests, we must in the name of Christ maintain 
 the rights of man and redress the wrongs of man, avoid- 
 ing war where possible, but shrinking not from it where 
 necessity demands it. 
 
 It is only by the uplifting and the Christianizing and the 
 educating of the race that we shall bring in the day of 
 sacred promise 
 
 When swords no more, as it hath been, 
 Are arbiters 'twixt men and men ; 
 But fellow-men, the wise and great, 
 In council sweet shall arbitrate. 
 The world will turn a brighter page, 
 And enter on her golden age, 
 When wasting wars for ever cease, 
 And all her arts are arts of peace. 
 
 When nations meet in fond embrace, 
 And in a compact sweet and strong 
 Resolve to labour late and long 
 Till every land shall bolt and bar 
 Against the grim old tyrant WAR.
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ST. MATTHEW xxii. 39. 
 
 'Jesus said. . . . Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself.'
 
 GAMBLING 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 THIS commandment is declared by our Lord to be 
 one of the two foundations on which all the pillars 
 of religion and morality must rest. The sum total of all 
 which is due from man to God as his Maker and Father, 
 and from man to man as his brother, is expressed in the one 
 word Lore God with all thy heart, and mind, and soul, 
 and strength ; man, as thyself. I venture to think that 
 this second phase of the great commandment has often- 
 times been misinterpreted and perverted. It has been 
 quoted as though it meant, Despise self and respect your 
 fellows ; hate self and love your fellows ; forget self and 
 consider your fellows. It means nothing of the kind. It 
 pre-supposes the highest self-respect, self-honour, self-rever- 
 ence, self-consideration. It implies that all that man as a 
 psychical, spiritual being is capable of is due first to himself; 
 to plan his highest good, to control his highest energies, to 
 direct his highest ideals, to plume the wings of his highest 
 aspirations. And then it declares that the very same 
 principle, the same controlling, directing, planning energy, 
 is due from man to his neighbour, that is, his fellow-man, 
 
 6
 
 82 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 wherever found. It makes egoism the fountain-source of 
 altruism, self-love the spring of philanthropy ' Thou 
 shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'' 
 
 As I discuss the question which I have chosen to bring 
 before you, you will, I hope, see the bearing of this upon 
 the arguments which I am about to adduce. 
 
 My subject is Horse-racing and Gambling, but it is with 
 gambling that I want specially to deal. Against horse- 
 racing in the abstract there is, I think, very little to be said 
 without plunging into foolish and sentimental inanities. 
 The only argument that it is possible to adduce against the 
 practice is the argument of cruelty. There is no more 
 reason why a man, or a body of men, should not prove 
 which of two or of ten horses can run the fastest than there 
 is why railway companies should not prove which engine 
 is the speediest, or cyclists prove which is the champion 
 wheelman, or our latest inventors prove which of two 
 motor-cars is the faster. I am willing to own, too, that 
 there is something very thrilling and exciting in the thought 
 of a number of well-bred horses lithe, sleek, gloriously- 
 fashioned creatures contending for the mastery. The 
 horse, it seems to me, always conies next to man in graceful- 
 ness of motion, in dignity of form, and in intelligent parti- 
 cipation in the exhilarating competitions of sport. What 
 Shakespeare said of man : 
 
 ' In form and moving how express and admirable !' 
 
 we may say almost equally of the horse. It is a mistake to 
 speak of these noble creatures as belonging to the ' lower 
 orders' of creation. I fully and completely endorse the 
 statement once made by John Bright in the House of
 
 GAMBLING 83 
 
 Commons that ' there is no such thing as an inferior order 
 of creation.' 
 
 If ever this noble animal is seen at his best, it is on the 
 race-course, where the care and kindness and skill of man 
 has brought it as near to perfection as animal-life is capable 
 of attaining. It is quite conceivable, too, that the pleasure 
 which man realizes in witnessing the contest the horses 
 themselves realize in contesting. I dare say that whip and 
 spur do inflict a great deal of pain. I fully believe that 
 much more pain is frequently inflicted than is necessary 
 for the testing of the horse's highest powers. But this not- 
 withstanding, the cruelties of the race-course do not com- 
 pare with the cruelties inflicted on bus-horses in the slippery 
 streets of London, or on the skeletons called horses that 
 are made to drag ploughs and waggons on many of the 
 farms of the country. Some of the noblest horses on the 
 turf do not need either whip or spur to excite them to the 
 doing of their utmost. 
 
 We must recognise, too, that the practice of horse racing 
 is one which has taken a firm hold of our national life. The 
 people of England are essentially sporting people. They 
 have inherited the taste through a long line of ancestry : it 
 has entered into their very blood, along with their love of 
 country, love of kindred, love of home. ' This is a fine 
 day, what shall we kill ?' is the Frenchman's estimate of our 
 sporting characteristic. There is, no doubt, a great deal of 
 truth in it. 
 
 ' Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.' 
 
 But if the Englishman loves killing, it is not from motives 
 of cruelty, which would brand him as of the devil but 
 
 62
 
 84 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 from motives of adventure and the excitement of sport. 
 And be the motives right or be they wrong, they have 
 undoubtedly helped to form the English character, to mould 
 the English taste, to develop English manhood, and to 
 place the Englishman, as a physical being, in the forefront 
 of humanity. A select committee of the House of Lords, 
 appointed to consider the national custom of horse-racing, 
 and to report the issue, made the following report : 
 
 ' Your committee think it desirable that this amusement 
 (horse-racing) should be upheld because it is in accordance 
 with a long-established national taste ; because it seems to 
 bring together for a common object vast bodies of people in 
 different parts of the country, and to promote intercourse 
 between different classes of society ; and because, without 
 the stimulus which racing affords, it would be difficult, if 
 not impossible, to maintain that purity of blood and standard 
 of excellence which have rendered the breed of English 
 horses superior to that of any other country in the world. 
 The committee would, however, consider these advantages 
 more than problematical if they were to be unavoidably pur- 
 chased by excessive gambling, and the -vice and misery which it 
 entails? 
 
 That is the opinion of a body of men who were con- 
 sidered by the Government of the country competent to 
 form a just opinion on the matter. And with that opinion, 
 as here expressed, the common-sense of the nation is mainly 
 in accord. There is nothing in horse-racing opposed to our 
 religious and moral principles : there is nothing opposed to 
 our high sense of honour, refinement, and nobility. It is
 
 GAMBLING 85 
 
 not to the horses or the turf that we must look for evil. If 
 evil there be, it must lie in some other quarter. 
 
 It is to that other quarter that I now direct your atten 
 tion. Turn back for a moment to the Report of the Lords' 
 Committee. You will note that it concludes with this 
 remarkable sentence : ' The committee would, however, 
 consider those advantages more than problematical if they 
 were to be unavoidably purchased by excessive gambling, 
 and the vice and misery which it entails.' Are they so 
 purchased ? and is gambling, with its attendant vice and 
 misery, an essential feature of horse racing ? 
 
 Let us not close our eyes to these two facts that gamb- 
 ling is not the product of the race-course, and that it is not 
 peculiar to the turf. That gambling is one of the most 
 distinguished features of our race-meetings anyone who has 
 ever visited a race-course must know. I cannot ccnceive a 
 sight more humiliating, more opposed to the essentials of a 
 high state of civilization, more inhuman and fiendish, than 
 the betting-ring at a race. The jargon, the mad excitement, 
 the whole atmosphere, is a blot upon our modern life. 
 To the uninitiated the sights and sounds would be a hope- 
 less riddle, and he might well imagine himself in the midst 
 of pandemonium broken loose. 
 
 We lemember how, when Alderman Tittums was advised 
 at a race-meeting to put a ' pony ' on the Admiral, he sofily 
 suggested that a more appropriate proceeding would be 
 to put the Admiral on a pony. That illustrates the stupid 
 jargon of the ring to the uninitiated. 
 
 But more is there than stupidity, more than mad 
 buffoonery : there is vice of the most vicious character. 
 
 Mr. James Runciman, in an article in the Contemporary
 
 86 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Review, on the Ethics of the turf, says : ' To the racecourse 
 flows, without restraint, a full tide of the worst of men and 
 the most debased of women. It may be that there is not a 
 spot above the depths of hell which exhibits such a con- 
 centration of all that is sensual and devilish as the race- 
 course.' That is very plain speaking, but it is undoubtedly 
 warranted by facts. It is very evident that gambling is 
 the prime object of the gathering of this huge vicious mass. 
 
 Charles Kingsley said : ' Even before I thought seriously 
 at all I found myself forced to turn my back on race- 
 courses ; not because I did not love to see horses run, but 
 because I found that they tempted me to betting, and that 
 betting tempted me to company and passions unworthy, not 
 merely of a scholar and gentleman, but of an honest and 
 rational bargeman or collier.' 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield said : ' The turf is a vast engine of 
 national demoralization ' ; and of course he meant by the 
 turf the gambling that is associated with it. It is not horse- 
 racing pure and simple that draws these huge masses, but 
 the excitement of betting. On the Derby Day at Epsom 
 alone every year something like a million of money changes 
 hands over the hazards of the turf. 
 
 Mr. Labouchere, writing in Truth, says : ' Every race- 
 course in the country is a gambling establishment.' The 
 Speaker says : 'It is the curse of no small proportion of 
 the people of this country.' Dean Hole says : ' It defies 
 religion, degrades manhood, and spoils sport.' 
 
 Let us see where the root of this great evil lies. I have 
 said that gambling is not the product of, nor peculiar to, 
 the turf. In the last century it was carried to so great a 
 length that men betted literally on everything. Horace
 
 GAMBLING 87 
 
 Walpole tells a story of a man who was taken ill in a tavern, 
 whereupon odds were instantly given on the chance of his 
 recovery, and the spectators refused to send for a doctor 
 because it might prejudice betting. But then the custom 
 was mainly confined to one class the upper. To-day it per- 
 meates the whole of society. Princes gamble and peasants 
 gamble. The heir to the throne, in the royal enclosure at 
 Epsom, lays his bet ; Mary Ann, in the kitchen of the 
 suburban villa, lays hers. The clerk does it, the chimney- 
 sweep does it, the merchant does it, the loafer does it. 
 
 But wherein lies the harm ? There be those who say 
 that there is no more harm in laying points on a horse than 
 in insuring your life, which is a species of betting at any 
 rate, it is giving or taking hazards. This is very shallow 
 reasoning, and I will endeavour, in the light of Christian 
 ethics, to show you wherein the harm lies. 
 
 Let us be clear as to what we mean by Gambling. Dis- 
 trustful of my own powers of definition, I will give you the 
 definition of one of the master-minds of the age. Herbert 
 Spencer says : ' Gambling is a kind of action by which 
 pleasure is obtained at the cost of pain to another. It 
 affords no equivalent to the general good : the happiness of 
 the winner implies the misery of the loser.' That is a defi- 
 nition which, I presume, no one will be inclined to dispute. 
 It is clear, succinct, admirable. Let us look at it. 
 
 Gambling affords no equivalent to the general good, i.e. 
 it makes money a non-productive agent. If the whole 
 wealth of the world were gambled, the world would soon 
 be reduced to starvation. ' Money is a mark of civilization ' ; 
 I do not care what form the money takes, whether gold, 
 silver, copper, paper, or any other token that may be chosen
 
 88 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 as a substitute for these. To have exchange, commerce 
 and trade, you must have a recognised standard of money. 
 One of the tenets of civilization is that so much money shall 
 represent so much of that which is essential to life. A man 
 builds a house, the materials and labour of which represent 
 the value of so much money, and the taking of the money 
 for the house is a perfectly just transaction. Another grows 
 on his land so much corn, by which men live ; the receiving 
 of the standard value of the corn in money is an honourable 
 thing. Another weaves or makes a garment ; another writes 
 a book that will be an intellectual help or pleasure to the 
 community ; society says garments and books are worth so 
 much current coin, and the weaver, the tailor, the literary 
 man, are regarded as honourable men when they give so 
 much product for so much remuneration. 
 
 But what of the gambler ? Does he contribute anything 
 to the general good ? When he has filled his purse with 
 the results of a horse-race what has he left behind for the 
 person whose money he has received ? For whatever the 
 gambler puts into his pocket is taken directly out of the 
 pocket of somebody else, and nothing is returned to take its 
 place. The winner has neither thought nor laboured ; like 
 the fowls of the air, he toils not nor spins, and yet he loads 
 his pocket with that which society says must represent an 
 equivalent in the economy of social life. So that from an 
 economical point of view the gambler is a thief if he wins 
 and a fool if he loses. In the former case he gives nothing 
 for what he receives, which is tantamount to stealing ; in 
 the latter case he receives nothing for what he gives, which 
 is tantamount to fooling. 
 
 But let us go further. 'The happiness of the winner
 
 implies the misery of the loser,' says Spencer. You can't 
 say that of any form of honest dealing. There may be, 
 and ought to be, satisfaction on both sides when so much 
 money is handed over for so much goods. Well, now place 
 it beside this foundation of religion ' Thou shall love thy 
 neighbour as thyself.' 
 
 One thing we must recognise as an essential of gambling 
 is that more than one must be a party to it : if you gamble 
 at all, you must gamble with somebody. A man may in- 
 dulge in the vice of drunkenness, and be the only party to 
 the sin ; another may be a hateful liar, and affect nobody 
 but himself by his lying ; but if a man is to be a gambler, 
 he must either have a victim or be the victim. If he stakes 
 more than he can afford to lose, and loses, he victimizes 
 himself ; if he wins more than the other can afford to spare, 
 he makes him the victim. 
 
 I am not now dealing with petty sums, though the econo- 
 mical phase of the question condemns even those. If a 
 man is fond of horses, and fond of seeing the noble creatures 
 contesting on the turf, and puts a small sum say a portion 
 of his da>'s pocket-money on his favourite, if he loses he 
 has derived so much pleasure from the transaction, which, 
 by straining a point, we might say was an equivalent for the 
 money spent ; but if he does what is done tens of thou- 
 sands of times every year stake more than he can afford 
 to stake, and lose more than he can afford to lose, then if he 
 wins he robs his neighbour, and if he loses he robs himself 
 both cases being direct negations of the Divine principle, 
 ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' 
 
 There is a bookmaker in this country whose annual turn- 
 over is a quarter of a million, and whose annual profits
 
 90 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 are sixty thousand pounds. Whence comes that ? I say 
 without fear of contradiction, From men who for the most 
 part cannot afford to lose it. If I could only show you 
 what that means, you could have no doubt whatever as to 
 .the unchristian character of this terrible habit. Youths who 
 have rifled their employers' cash-boxes, thrown into the 
 world characterless, penniless ; wives and children brought 
 to shame by the folly of the husband and father ; homes 
 filled with tears, misery and anguish ; suicides who have 
 wrung their hands in ineffectual lamentation in the face of 
 the Baal-god of Luck all the direct offspring of this 
 wretched system. And this not in isolated cases, but in 
 hundreds and thousands of cases. 
 
 If you want to know to what extent the evil has grown, 
 and is growing, go into Fleet Street any afternoon when any 
 great race is coming off, and see the mobs who eagerly 
 watch the windows where the sporting papers are published, 
 waiting for the declaration of the result. Note the haggard 
 look on some of their faces, as I have done, a look that 
 has ruin and suicide in it ! 
 
 I know that the turf is not the only source and means of 
 gambling. I have heard of such places as Monte-Carlo, 
 Baden-Baden and Ostend, and I know something of what 
 goes on there. In connection with the first-mentioned, 
 there is a cemetery known as ' the suicides' cemetery,' where 
 they bury out of sight the hapless victims of their pernicious 
 systems. That fact is eloquent in itself. 
 
 Our own London Stock Exchange ' the great ganglion 
 in which the nerves of the business world meet' is per- 
 meated with the gambling spirit, as any honest stockbroker 
 would tell you. All brokers are not gamblers ; some of
 
 GAMBLING 91 
 
 them are very honourable, just, upright Christian men ; but 
 that gambling goes on on the Stock Exchange, to the ex- 
 tent of millions every year, is perfectly well known in the 
 commercial world. 
 
 I know, too, that much of the best and most manly sport 
 in England is made the occasion of gambling. Men lay 
 heavy odds on those who practise the art of self-defence, 
 on teams in a football match, on two players at billiards, on 
 the chances of cards all as foolish as it is pernicious. 
 
 And because it is foolish, pernicious, unmanly, unheavenly, 
 unchristian, undivine, opposed to the foundation princi- 
 ples of society, of economics, of morality and of religion, I 
 am going to ask you to forswear it. Even trifles light as 
 air sometimes lead to great issues. I am not going to con- 
 demn you for small points at a friendly game, or a pair 
 of gloves on a race course ; but I am going to ask you 
 to do your utmost to free our land, our commerce, our 
 innocent amusements and our great national sport, from 
 this awful blight which is settling down upon them, a 
 blight full of plague-germs as pestilential as the Black 
 Death. 
 
 If England is to have her pure manhood sullied, her 
 commerce undermined, her trade shackled, and her sport 
 and amusement contaminated by this plague-spot, then I 
 say the price is too high. Better do without our race- 
 meetings than maintain them to fill our cemeteries with 
 suicides' graves, and to devastate the homes of England 
 by ruinous losses on the turf. The conclusion of the 
 Lords' Committee was a just one : ' The advantages are 
 more than problematical if they are to be unavoidably 
 purchased by excessive gambling, and the vice and misery
 
 92 
 
 which it entails.' We must appeal to the Christianized 
 common-sense of men to strangle this hydra - headed 
 monster. 
 
 As this is the first Sunday in the New Year, I give you 
 these lines from one of the sweetest, most manly singers 
 of our day as most eminently befitting both the occasion 
 and the subject with which I have been dealing : 
 
 ' One song for thee, New Year, 
 One universal prayer : 
 Teach us all other teaching far above 
 To hide dark Hate beneath the wings of Love ; 
 To slay all hatred, strife, 
 And live the larger life ! 
 To bind the wounds that bleed ; 
 
 To lift the fallen, lead the blind 
 As only love can lead 
 
 To live for all mankind ! 
 
 ' Teach us, New Year, to be 
 Free men among the free, 
 Our only master Duty ; with no God 
 Save one our Maker ; monarchs of the sod ! 
 Teach us, with all its might, 
 Its darkness and its light ; 
 Its heart-beats tremulous, 
 
 Its grief, its gloom, 
 Its beauty and its bloom 
 
 God made the world for us !'
 
 feonfcon $ro6feme 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 REVELATION xxi. 2, 3. 
 
 ' And I, John, saw the holy city, New 
 Jerusalem, coming down from God out of 
 heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her 
 husband. And I heard a great voice out 
 of heaven, saying, Behold, the tabernacle 
 of God is with men, and He will dwell 
 with them, and they shall be His people, 
 and God Himself shall be with them, and 
 be their God.'
 
 LONDON PROBLEMS 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 I WANT first to correct a very sorry error that most 
 people fall into when they read this chapter, and espe- 
 cially this description of what St. John calls the New 
 Jerusalem, and that is to imagine that it has reference to a 
 future world, a final heaven outside the confines of this 
 little earth. Look again, I saw the holy city coming down 
 from God out of heaven? It was a place of habitation for 
 the sons of men on earth after that God had long dealt 
 with them. The nations going into it and coming out of it 
 are those who are being saved. The inhabitants are those 
 who are in a state of salvation. The city large, vast, com- 
 modious stretched over an area wide enough to be called 
 a country, and lifted itself towards heaven as high as a 
 mountain range. It bore, too, living and imperishable 
 marks of the Old and New Testaments. People went in 
 and out of it by gates which bore the names of the twelve 
 tribes of Israel, while the foundations of the city were in- 
 scribed with the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb. 
 I know it is a vision, having nothing in heaven or in earth 
 corresponding to it in literal reality, but it certainly is not a
 
 96 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 vision of the occupations and conditions of heaven and 
 eternity as they are commonly understood ; it is a vision 
 of what man, and man's life, and man's cities, and man's 
 world are to become through the work of Christ and the 
 indwelling of God in humanity. It is not described as a 
 city seen in heaven through some gate ajar, but a city 
 which, from some lofty mountain, St. John saw come down 
 out of heaven and locate itself here on earth. 
 
 Have we any realization of this glorious ideal among the 
 many cities of the world? Is there one on this fair earth, 
 seen from near, or seen from far, to which the wildest imagi- 
 nation could apply this glowing description of St. John's ? 
 No, no ; but the tendency, thank God, is thitherward, and 
 all progress appallingly slow though it be is towards that 
 goal. Men are trying to sweeten the lives of great cities, 
 trying at least to make room for the tabernacle of God, 
 trying to make it possible to realize St. John's glorious ideal 
 'They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more . . . 
 and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.' 
 
 That conception underlies the very idea of setting apart 
 one Sunday in the year as Citizen Sunday : and on that day, 
 ' in the place where duty to God is enforced,' thinking of, 
 and speaking of, our duty as citizens of this great city. 
 
 I want now to speak to you of the problems that con- 
 front us when we attempt anything towards the attaining of 
 the ideal of the Apocalypse. 
 
 i. And first the vastness of London. 
 
 None but those who have tried to do something for the 
 bettering of human conditions in London can have the 
 smallest idea of how appalling is the vastness of this great
 
 LONDON PROBLEMS <# 
 
 city. Those who live in it and go up and down its streets 
 have not the smallest idea of what is comprehended in that 
 one word, London. Try for a moment and think what it 
 means. Think of the four great capitals of Europe Paris, 
 Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg and it may help you 
 to realize the vastness of London to know that there are 
 nearly as many people within our metropolitan area as in all 
 those four great cities put together. We are all proud of our 
 colonial dependencies, but do you know that in the whole 
 of that great tract Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and 
 all the islands embraced under the term Australasia a 
 tract of country bigger than the whole of Europe there are 
 not so many souls as sleep every night within the area 
 embraced by the word London ? The same is true of 
 Canada : the inhabitants of all its splendid cities, its 
 flourishing towns, its thriving villages, its isolated home- 
 steads, all put together do not equal the population of 
 London. 
 
 Within the metropolitan area there are already seven 
 thousand miles of streets, and yet each year fifty miles of 
 new streets are added, and houses, not with pleasant breaks 
 of greenery and surrounding gardens overlooking undulating 
 meadows, but for the most part streets of houses joined one 
 to another, and oftentimes with more than one family in a 
 house. I have reminded you before of the cosmopolitan 
 character of the inhabitants of London. Every nation and 
 land, almost, upon which the sun shines has its repre- 
 sentatives here, some in small numbers, some in huge 
 multitudes. There are more Jews residing in London than 
 in the whole of Palestine ; there are more Roman Catholics 
 here than in Rome itself, more Irishmen than in Belfast, 
 
 7
 
 98 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 more Scotchmen than in Aberdeen, more Welshmen than 
 in Cardiff. And yet this huge cosmopolitan mass is adding 
 on to itself, partly by immigration, and partly by the 
 excess of the births over the deaths, seventy thousand 
 new souls every year. Every four minutes of every day in 
 the year a soul is born in London; every six minutes 
 someone dies. In round numbers that means one hundred 
 and twenty-three thousand births and eighty-seven thousand 
 deaths every year. 
 
 Now, I ask, is any one mind capable of taking in all that 
 is implied in the vastness of London ? Think of the 
 parishes, the districts, the centres of administration, the 
 machinery for government, for the preservation of order, for 
 securing anything like sanitary conditions, for supplying 
 food, water, and other necessaries of life. Why, the very 
 thought is overwhelming. To grapple with it is like having 
 to grapple with a mountain range whose lofty peaks conceal 
 one another, and whose rocky slopes contain chasms and 
 crevasses that are only visible near at hand. 
 
 2. Think, again, of the terrible extremes and inequalities 
 that exist in London. 
 
 This is by far and away the richest city in the world ; Us 
 wealth in every form surpasses anything and everything that 
 was ever got together in one place. Such vast and fabulous 
 proportions has it reached that the mind is altogether inade- 
 quate to comprehend its bulk and the significance of its 
 power. One of our ablest statesmen and statisticians told 
 us some time ago that this country amassed its wealth more 
 rapidly from A.D. 1800 to 1850 than in the whole of the 
 eighteen hundred preceding years. That is to say, that we
 
 LONDON PROBLEMS 99 
 
 increased in riches more in the first fifty years of this 
 century than from the time that Jesus the Christ lived to 
 the year 1800. And yet and it were almost past belief did 
 not hard facts that nobody can gainsay stare us in the face 
 London increased its wealth more in the twenty years 
 intervening between 1850 and 1870 than in the previous 
 fifty years. It is calculated that we Londoners spend 
 every year the vast sum of two hundred million pounds 
 this over and above what we save, and hoard, and invest. 
 But this, for all practical purposes, is talking gibberish ; 
 the mind absolutely refuses to grasp the significance of such 
 figures. 
 
 Let us look at the other side of the picture ; that we may, 
 perhaps, be able to take in and digest. Side by side with 
 these gigantic strides in the inarch of commercial progress 
 we have also, and keeping step along with it, the gaunt, 
 ghastly, sickening skeleton form of the most degrading 
 poverty. Rich as the metropolis is, rich beyond all possible 
 means of computation, it yet has a poverty more hopeless, 
 more bewildering, more maddening than anywhere else in 
 the world. In the year 1896 the paupers of London that 
 is, those who applied for relief to the guardians of the poor 
 numbered one hundred and twenty-three thousand eight 
 hundred and forty-four. That means that we have nearly 
 three times as many paupers in London as they have in the 
 whole of Wales. Added to this, it is computed that over 
 half a million are supported or aided more or less by charity. 
 Over and above these, again, there are thousands of little 
 children cursed, buffeted, neglected who live by prowl- 
 ing in the markets, in the gutters, the railway arches, and 
 the back slums of this awful city. 
 
 72
 
 ioo MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Think that the degraded women of London, who live for 
 sin, and by sin most wretched of all the wretched equal 
 the whole of the inhabitants of the city of Norwich ! Think 
 that the criminals of London equal the number of the 
 inhabitants of Huntingdon ! Think that its common 
 lodging-houses herd together some twenty-seven thousand 
 of the miserable social wrecks of life ! Think that the 
 number of those who live from day to day on the verge of 
 destitution is probably as great as the inhabitants of that 
 great northern city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne ! Think that a 
 third of the people of London are below the line of very 
 poor ! Think that one out of every five persons you meet 
 in the streets will die in the workhouse, in the hospital, or 
 in a lunatic asylum ! Think that one million of our inhabit- 
 ants live in one-roomed homes men, women, and children 
 all herding together like sheep in a pen ! Homes did I call 
 them ? Is it fair to ascribe that sacred name to the place 
 where filth predominates, and where decency is impossible ? 
 
 Some time ago a contributor to one of our journals made 
 a thorough examination of the conditions under which 
 'home work' by which is meant wage-earning home work 
 is done in London. I will give you a brief synopsis of 
 what he says, taken from one of our most sober-minded 
 weeklies. 
 
 ' Many of the houses of the home-workers were found to 
 be in an extremely filthy state, and the work was carried on 
 in them under highly insanitary conditions. Frequently one 
 finds the home worker occupying an attic room at the top of 
 a five-storied building, the ascent to which is by a dark and 
 dilapidated staircase, infested, it may be, by rats, or haunted 
 by that most pitiable of four-footed creatures, the slum cat.
 
 LONDON PROBLEMS 101 
 
 At every landing narrow, grimy passages stretch to right and 
 left, and on either side of these, close packed, is a row of 
 " ticketed houses," that is, rooms on which the doors have 
 marked on the outside the number of occupants allowed 
 according to police regulations regulations that are fre- 
 quently evaded by means of that unknown and highly 
 elastic quantity, the lodger. On every landing there is a 
 water-tap and sink, both the common property of the tenants, 
 and the latter usually emitting frightful effluvia. Probably 
 the sink represents the entire sanitary system of the 
 landing. 
 
 ' Armed with a box of matches and a taper, and battling 
 with what seem to be the almost solid smells of the place, 
 one finally reaches the top, and on being admitted, finds, 
 perhaps, a room almost destitute of furniture, the work lying 
 in piles on the dirty floor, or doing duty as bedclothes for a 
 bedridden invalid and the members of the family generally. 
 In the case of one home worker, a shawl-fringer, where the 
 extreme of poverty had apparently been reached, I found 
 the sole furniture of the room was an old chair, a broken 
 cradle, and some empty packing-cases.' 
 
 And all that here in London ! Rich London ! Fashion- 
 able London ! Gay London ! Giddy London ! 
 
 You will, perhaps, suggest that this is a report of an ex- 
 ceptional district, and that the cases mentioned are excep- 
 tional cases. I tell you and I speak of what I know that 
 neither the district nor the cases are exceptional. That 
 report might be written of any twenty districts in London. 
 I know it is true, because I have cases equally bad, and 
 poverty equally appalling, in my own parish, and within 
 three hundred yards of my own church !
 
 102 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 I do not wonder that men say that all our show and 
 glitter and glamour is very much like the shining structure 
 of an old Mexican temple, reared upon a layer of living men 
 flung in for a foundation. London certainly is not the city 
 of God that St. John saw coming down out of heaven ; we 
 have rivers of tears unwiped, and hunger that is pinching, 
 and biting, and consuming the flesh of thousands of our 
 brothers and sisters, made, like ourselves, in the image of 
 God ! 
 
 3. Think now of the problem of rectifying, reforming, im- 
 proving, annihilating these wrongs, vices, inequalities, in- 
 justices, and sins. 
 
 The Church is at work, philanthropy is at work, charity is 
 at work all saying, These things must not be, shall not be- 
 But oh, what a hopeless, tangled mass it is ! To unravel 
 it looks almost as impossible as the dipping of the Thames dry 
 with a teaspoon. Where to begin, what to do, how to do 
 it, is the riddle and the puzzle. For, however well meant 
 our intentions may be, unless we work on right lines we shall 
 only make the tangle worse, and increase the evils that we 
 want to remove. 
 
 The agencies of the Church, directly spiritual and moral, 
 are at work, and with some measure of success, but yet only 
 touching the very fringe of the gigantic fog of practical 
 atheism. Philanthropy is devising all manner of schemes 
 for the educating, and the enlightening, and the uplifting of 
 the ignorant, the wayward, and the fallen; charity is sending 
 white-winged angels of benefaction into homes of want, and 
 yet, spite of it all, the evils continue. 
 
 One thing is certain : we have not yet solved the problem
 
 LONDON PROBLEMS 103 
 
 of the best line of procedure. We are asking one another, 
 Which is the better, to shut up the public-houses, and so 
 take away from the drunkard some of the temptations to 
 drunkenness, or leave these flaring, enticing places as they 
 are, and teach the man manliness and self-control ? And 
 while we are wrangling over these questions thousands of 
 drunkards die from the effects of drink every year. We 
 have not made up our minds whether it is better to allow 
 vice to parade the streets and secure its miserable victims in 
 the eye of the public, or sweep it into privacy to hug its 
 shame and its wickedness there. We do not know whether 
 it is better to shut the poor up in workhouses and stamp 
 them for ever with the mark of their poverty, .or to minister 
 to their wants in their own homes. These and endless 
 other questions are vexing and perplexing and paining us, 
 and meanwhile the roar and din of our folly and sin are 
 entering into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. 
 
 Two things, I think, we are fully and firmly convinced of. 
 One is, that we cannot make men wise, pure, just, and good 
 by legislative enactments ; that will only come by moral 
 evolution, and by the indwelling of the Divine Spirit. We 
 may get good and helpful laws on our side, but not all the 
 laws ever formulated will make men wise, or build them up 
 into a noble manhood. This will have to be done by 
 spiritual and moral and intellectual agencies, and those 
 agencies not professional alone, but general : the action of 
 mind on mind, example on conduct, sympathy on emotions, 
 and love on all. More holy characters is what we want, and 
 more altruistic, selfless souls willing to live for men, and, if 
 needs be, die for them ; men willing to say with St. Francis 
 Xavier :
 
 104 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 ' I want no heaven till all be Thine, 
 No glory-crown, while work of mine 
 Remaineth here ; till earth shall shine 
 
 Amid the stars. 
 
 Her sins wiped out, her captives free ; 
 For crown new work give Thou to me.' 
 
 Will you be one to say that ? 
 
 The other thing we are firmly convinced about is, that 
 indiscriminate charity, however well meant, is not only ill 
 advised, but a positive factor of evil. To give money to the 
 whining beggar in the street, or the plausible vagrant at 
 your door, is to fee the devil to promote idleness, filth, and 
 crime. No ; whatever help is given should be given through 
 recognised and accredited agencies, whose object it is to 
 give help where help is needed and to stamp out professional 
 vagabondism. 
 
 You will do well to make the Church your almoner. Help 
 her to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the 
 afflicted, to comfort the sorrowful ; and, if you care one jot 
 for the approval of your Lord and Master, help with these 
 words ringing in your ears : { Inasmuch as ye did it unto one 
 of the least of these, ye did it unto Me.' 
 
 Come, oh come, thou shining city of our God ! thou 
 holy Jerusalem ! thou tearless, hungerless, thirstless, glory- 
 encircled habitation for all the sons of men !
 
 &a6our (profifems 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ST. JAMES v. 4. 
 
 ' Behold, the hire of the labourers, who 
 have reaped down your fields, which is of 
 you kept back by fraud, crieth : and the 
 cries of them which have reaped are entered 
 into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. '
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 NOTHING that affects humanity in its social, com- 
 mercial, and physical economics can ever be alien 
 to the interests of Christian people. The Christian- reli- 
 gion of to-day ought to be what the Jewish religion three 
 thousand years ago was : the champion of the rights of 
 man, the protestor against the wrongs of man, and the alle- 
 viator of the ills of man. 
 
 It is not enough to preach a Gospel that bears only upon 
 man's destiny in the future life. The great want of the age 
 is a Gospel bearing upon man's destiny and circumstances 
 and condition in this life. It is not enough to provide what 
 is called ' spiritual refreshment ' for the souls of men. The 
 wants of the body are as loud-crying, as assertive, and as 
 imperative as the wants of the soul. And it is the business 
 of the Church of Christ to see that the wants of both are 
 met. He who preached peace to them that were afar off 
 and to them that were near also said, ' I have compassion 
 upon the multitude because they have been with Me now 
 three days and have nothing to eat .... Give ye them 
 to eat.' His religion is based upon the fact of the Divine
 
 io8 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Fatherhood, which necessarily implies the human brother- 
 hood of mankind. If there is one God and Father of us 
 all, then there is a solidarity of interest as well as of life in 
 the race, and one phase of the work of the Church is to 
 point out what those interests are; to insist upon their 
 recognition ; to demand their just solution. That must be 
 rny excuse for bringing before you to-day the great problem 
 of the relation of labour to capital. 
 
 This latter part of the nineteenth century has been called 
 the ' age of the working-man.' If the importance of 
 labour and the demands of the labourer upon those who 
 share the fruits of his toil be what is meant, then it is the 
 age of the working man. Clear is it that, whatever the 
 age may be, the relation of capital and labour is the one 
 problem that is struggling to find solution. The last ten 
 years have clearly proved to us, not only that the problem 
 demands solution, but that right-minded men of every class 
 in society are resolutely determined that the problem shall 
 be solved, and solved promptly and completely. For the 
 first time probably in human history the gulf between 
 the rich and the poor, between capital and labour, has 
 been spanned with the golden bridge of far - reaching 
 human sympathy. And to the credit of Christianity be 
 it said, that not only has it laid the foundations of the 
 bridge, but has been the very chains from which the bridge 
 has been suspended between the two solid piers of 
 humanity and charity. 
 
 During the conflict that has been waging between the 
 labourer and the employer, between the hired and the 
 hirer, certain facts have come to light which it is the 
 interest and the duty of everyone to know, certain prin-
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS 109 
 
 ciples have been enunciated which you and I and every 
 thinking man ought to ponder. 
 
 The system which has received most attention, and 
 which has revealed the saddest features of the question, 
 is that known as 'The Sweating System.' I may de- 
 scribe that system as the farming of human labour. Em- 
 ployers take contracts at an absurdly low rate, and then 
 grind their employes down to long hours, low wages, and 
 almost inhuman conditions of labour, in order to make 
 profit out of their contracts. 
 
 Another fact which has been brought to light is the fact 
 that an enormous amount of necessary and useful work is 
 done at a rate of remuneration that does not serve to supply 
 the absolute necessities of life; that after working twelve 
 and fourteen hours a day for six days in the week, men and 
 women are unable to earn sufficient to meet the barest wants 
 of their nature. 
 
 A third fact has come into prominence : that the hours 
 of labour in many of the most important industries are such 
 as to make human pleasure and progress impossible, and 
 existence itself almost unbearable. 
 
 Now, I am not here to discuss the merits or demerits of 
 this or that particular phase of the commercial economics 
 of the nation ; I am not going to attempt to point out 
 to you how these conditions have been brought about; 
 but I am here as a teacher and a minister of the re- 
 ligion of Jesus the Christ to say that these things 
 must not be, and that every Christian man and woman 
 must use his and her influence to remedy these dire 
 evils. 
 
 There are two principles which I am going to inculcate
 
 no MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 as essentials to the well-being of the classes who live by 
 the labour of their hands. 
 
 i . First, that all useful labour and by that I mean labour 
 devoted to things that supply the wants of mankind- 
 should receive sufficient remuneration to enable the labourer 
 to live. 
 
 In every case the principle ought to be recognised that 
 the labourer is not only worthy of his hire, but worthy of 
 such hire as shall supply him with all the requisites of life. 
 Whatever is useful, whatever is beneficial, whatever is neces- 
 sary, whatever is conducive to well-being, ought to pay the 
 producer enough to provide him with the things necessary 
 to existence. A working-man's only means of subsistence 
 is his capacity for labour ; where, therefore, he gives his 
 labour, there he has a right to look for remuneration. 
 
 But the revelations of the last ten years have shown us 
 that there are tens of thousands of cases where the whole 
 time and energies of men and women are engaged, and 
 where the wages paid are not sufficient to supply the com- 
 monest necessities of life. 
 
 A large number of men are employed in many depart- 
 ments of manufacture who work fourteen and sixteen hours 
 a day, for the miserable sum of threepence per hour. A re- 
 port issued a few years ago stated that the employes of the 
 various omnibus and tramway companies throughout the 
 country worked on an average sixteen hours a day, and that 
 their average pay was never higher than threepence per hour ; 
 that thousands of the railway men in the kingdom were called 
 upon at periods to work from thirteen to eighteen hours 
 per day ; that many of our metropolitan vestries employed
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS m 
 
 street scavengers at only fourteen shillings per week ; and 
 woman dust sifters, who worked all day up to their waists 
 in filth, for seven shillings per week. 
 
 A moment's thought must show you that, under such con- 
 ditions, it is absolutely impossible that life should be any- 
 thing but penurious drudgery. But there are worse 
 conditions even than these in the employment of different 
 forms of female labour. 
 
 In a reliable report relating to the employment of women 
 in mills and factories, I read of a woman who at 
 thirty two years of age was a cotton-spinner, and had been 
 at her work since she was nine years old. The report 
 stated that she was making the magnificent sum of six and 
 tenpence per week, and was supposed to live on sevenpence- 
 worth of bread a week, taking peasemeal for dinner every 
 day, except when she varied the diet with a halfpenny- 
 worth of broth out of a coffee-house. When eggs were 
 cheap she generally partook of an egg. An ounce of tea 
 and one and a half pounds of sugar had to last her a week ! 
 
 In Bermondsey there are hundreds of women employed 
 as sack-makers, who receive sixpence per dozen for making 
 sacks, and have to provide their own needles and thread. 
 An expert says it is impossible to make more than from two 
 to three dozen a day. A dock labourer's wife in Shadwell 
 reports that for making twenty double-sewn nail sacks, 
 which took her six hours, she only received the sum of 
 sixpence. A report issued by the commission appointed 
 to inquire into the 'Sweating System ' reveals an awful state 
 of things in regard to female work in the East End of 
 London. In one case a woman works from six a.m to 
 eight p.m., and does not clear one shilling per day. Another
 
 U2 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 woman (a trouser-finisher) works from eight a.m. to eleven 
 p.m., assisted by her daughter ; the two together earn five 
 and sixpence per week. Another woman (a shirt-machinist), 
 working from eight a.m. to eleven p.m., earned from five to 
 seven shillings per week, less ninepence for cotton and two 
 and sixpence for the hire of her sewing-machine. Another 
 (a shirt-finisher) stated that, after working hard all day, she 
 could not earn more than fourpence-halfpenny. 
 
 But even this is not the worst paid work there is. Button- 
 hole workers, who have to work neat holes five-eighths of an 
 inch long, are paid at the rate of twopence-three-farthings per 
 gross. A lady, speaking at an East-End meeting the other 
 day, quoted the case of a woman known to herself, who is 
 a widow and has children to support. She makes ulsters, 
 and is paid threepence each for making them. She and 
 her children were nearly starving so nearly, that when 
 some scraps of meat were given her, she said that if she 
 were to leave them in the children's way they would fight 
 for them. 
 
 Now, I am here to say that such women are in a worse 
 condition of slavery than any likely to be enforced by a 
 slave-holder, to whose interest it is that his slave should not 
 die. Can you wonder that they say to us : 
 
 ' Oh, to be a slave 
 
 Along with the barbarous Turk, 
 Where woman has never a soul to save, 
 If this be Christian work ' ? 
 
 Gan you wonder if such women take to vice and crime ? 
 I tell you that vice and crime cannot be a much greater 
 curse than such conditions of life and labour. I do not 
 wonder that the women of the submerged tenth turn out
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS 113 
 
 badly ; the only wonder is that there is one pure soul among 
 them one who wears the white flower of a blameless life. 
 
 The question at once arises, What can be done ? There 
 is another question that must be answered first, and that is, 
 What has brought about this state of things? I think the 
 answer to that question will be found in the word Competi- 
 tion. First, competition among employers, who are for ever 
 cutting each other down in prices for the sake of obtaining 
 trade. The competition of those who want to live on their 
 profits is aggravated by the competition of those who do 
 not need to make profits, because they are supported from 
 outside sources. And thus the man who must make a 
 profit in order to live has to grind down his employes, 
 and secure his profit by what he can save out of their 
 wages. 
 
 Then, too, there is competition amongst the labouring 
 classes themselves. If a woman or a man says to an em- 
 ployer, ' No ; I will not work for a reduced wage,' either is 
 met by the stereotyped reply : ' If you do not like it, you 
 can go; there are plenty who will.' That is really the root 
 of the evil there are plenty who will. Low wages prevail, 
 because the worker consents to accept them, and because 
 no worker who stands alone can refuse them. The isolated 
 worker must take what is offered or go without work ; and 
 to go without work means speedy starvation ; to accept it 
 at the lowest possible rate means a slower starvation, and 
 every woman or man would rather of the two accept that. 
 
 And now comes the question, What is to be done ? I 
 assert, after a good deal of reflection, that charity and I 
 mean by that doles of money is useless. To supplement 
 ill-paid labour with doles is to endow a wrong system, and 
 
 8
 
 H4 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 to support a pernicious principle. There are employers 
 now who say, ' Oh yes, we only pay five or six shillings a 
 week, but they don't depend on it : they are helped in 
 various ways.' 
 
 Charitable donations to able-bodied men and women can 
 only be, in effect, a rate in aid of wages, and therefore in 
 the end a force towards the reduction of wages. 
 
 One thing we can do : we can help to create and to sup- 
 port a powerful public sentiment that shall demand honest 
 pay for honest work. We can demand that the den of the 
 sweater shall be closed. We can demand of the merchant 
 or the manufacturers of whom we buy the necessaries of 
 life that in their production men and women shall have 
 received just wages. We can demand, by voice and pen, 
 and by the still more powerful weapon, the money that we 
 spend, that the producer shall be justly rewarded for his 
 work. 
 
 Can you bear, sir, to think that the shirt you wear was 
 made for the miserable sum of three-halfpence ? 
 
 ' Oh, men, with sisters dear ! 
 
 Oh, men, with mothers and wives ! 
 It is not linen you're wearing out, 
 But human creatures' lives !' 
 
 It can never be right, never be fair, never be Christian, 
 that facts should warrant such a song as this : 
 
 1 There are ninety and nine that live and die 
 
 In want and hunger and cold, 
 That one may revel in luxury, 
 
 And be wrapped in its silken fold : 
 The ninety and nine in hovels bare, 
 The one in a palace with riches rare.
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS 115 
 
 1 They toil in the fields do the ninety and nine, 
 
 For the fruitage of Mother Earth ; 
 They dig and they delve in the dusky mine, 
 
 And riches untold bring forth ; 
 But the wealth released by their sturdy blows 
 To the coffers of one for ever flows. 
 
 ' The sweat of their brows makes the wilderness bloom, 
 
 And the forest before them falls ; 
 Their labour builded our thousand homes, 
 
 And our cities with lordly halls ; 
 But the ninety and nine have empty hands, 
 And one owns cities and homes and lands.'* 
 
 It can never be right that working-men and women 
 should be taught to sing these words as a just description 
 of their lot : 
 
 ' We plough and sow, we're so very, very low, 
 
 That we delve in the dirty clay, 
 Till we bless the plain with the golden grain, 
 
 And the vale with the fragrant hay ; 
 Our place we know we're so very, very low 
 
 'Tis down at the landlord's feet ; 
 We're not too low the grain to grow, 
 
 But too low the bread to eat. 
 
 ' Down, down we go we're so very, very low 
 
 To the hell of the deep-sunk mines ; 
 But we gather the proudest gems that glow 
 
 When the brow of the despot shines ; 
 And whene'er he lacks upon our backs 
 
 Fresh loads he deigns to lay ; 
 We're far too low to veto the tax, 
 
 But not too low to pay. 
 
 ' We're low, we're low we're very, very low 
 
 Yet from our fingers glide 
 The silken flow and the robes that glow 
 Round the limbs of the sons of pride ; 
 
 * From 'Anti-Poverty Songs.' 
 
 82
 
 Ii6 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 And what we get and what we give 
 We know, and we know our share ; 
 
 We're not too low the cloth to weave, 
 But too low the cloth to wear.'* 
 
 That this is an exaggeration of the truth I quite believe, 
 but that there is any truth in it at all is a terrible comment 
 on our Christianity and on our sense of fairness. Whoever 
 makes or produces a necessary of life or a luxury ought to 
 be rewarded in a measure sufficient to meet all legitimate 
 wants. 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out 
 the corn.' 
 
 For the labourers themselves I see no alternative, in the 
 present state of things, to combination. I am not here 
 to champion all the principles connected with Trades 
 Unionism. Trades Unions have their evils, but I am per- 
 fectly convinced that those evils, great as they are, are as 
 nothing compared with the gigantic tyrannies, injustices and 
 inequalities by which the labourer has been oppressed. In 
 demanding their rights the toilers may rush to extremes 
 they are rushing to extremes, mad extremes, some of them 
 but still their redemption lies in combination. It must be 
 ours to see that tyranny does not exchange places ; that the 
 scourge which the capitalist once held does not pass into 
 the hands of the labourer. 
 
 2. The other principle which I should like to inculcate is 
 a recognition of the unity of interest that exists between 
 capital and labour. 
 
 This principle, carried into effect, means the allotting to 
 
 * From 'Anti-Poverty Songs.'
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS 117 
 
 the labourer, or artist, or artizan, in addition to his normal 
 wages, a portion of the net gains accruing from his labour. 
 I know I shall be severely handled for advocating such a 
 principle, but I am certain that it is based upon the triple 
 foundation of justice, philanthropy, and self-interest. Justice, 
 because the man who supplies the labour for the production 
 of a thing has a direct interest in the value of the thing pro- 
 duced, and ought to be a sharer of the gain or loss accruing 
 from it. Philanthropy, because it is the best form of help- 
 ing men to help themselves. Self-interest, because it will 
 result in closer ties between employer and employed, in 
 better work, and in more cheerful service. 
 
 Rightly carried into effect, the principle allows the em- 
 ployer to considerably increase the earnings of his work- 
 people without suffering any even the smallest diminution 
 in the amount of his own profit. Paradoxical as this theory 
 may seem, when examined carefully it soon turns into a 
 matter of fact. Consider the waste that goes on under the 
 existing wage-system, under which the worker is not con- 
 cerned whether the business pays or loses. If you put a 
 man on time-wage, he dawdles over the job as long as the 
 foreman will let him ; put him on piece-wage, and he scamps 
 the work as much as the foreman will let him. Working- 
 men, taking them in the lump, work, like their employers, 
 not from love of their work, but from love of its pecuniary 
 results. 
 
 If masters want their men to do more work and better 
 work ; to work not merely for wages, but for the credit of 
 the business ; if they want them to avoid involving them in 
 unnecessary expense, they must make the interests of their 
 employes identical with the interests of their business. It
 
 Il8 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 must be, to some degree at least, a joint-stock concern with 
 a limited liability. 
 
 You may tell me that that is a bubble theory. My 
 answer is that it has been tried with the most assuring 
 success. The country which has adopted it the longest, and 
 the most widely, is France. And there evidence of its 
 success meets you at every turn. In Switzerland, in Ger- 
 many, and in other European countries, the system is in 
 operation with admirable results. In America the profit- 
 sharing firms include some of the most successful and most 
 respected names in the business world. In England it has 
 been adopted by a few large firms, but not to any very wide 
 extent. A manager of one of the largest firms adopting 
 the principle writes : ' So far the results have been satisfac- 
 tory. The employes take a more lively interest in their 
 work than is the case when working merely for wages, and 
 are much more economical of time and material. On our 
 own part we get a better choice of hands, who become 
 attached to the place, and who are concerned in its pros- 
 perity.' 
 
 On the moral side the results of the method would be 
 equally beneficial. We all know how bitter is the feeling 
 existing to-day between Capital and Labour. And one of 
 the most powerful causes of this animosity is the opinion so 
 strongly entertained that it is unjust that all profits derived 
 from labour should go to the capitalist. The spontaneous 
 concessions which the system would make to the legitimate 
 claims of labour in every phase of industry would tend per- 
 manently to sweeten the relations between employer and 
 employed, to convert the working-man from a dissatisfied, 
 and often dishonest, drudge, into a contented, willing,
 
 LABOUR PROBLEMS 119 
 
 zealous co-operator, no longer feeling himself a slave toiling 
 to gratify the greed of a taskmaster, but a co-partner with 
 his superior. And thus the teachings of the Christ would 
 find some faint fulfilment : ' One is your Master . . . and 
 all ye are brethren.'* 
 
 * For some of the facts and figures in this sermon I am indebted to 
 articles in the Fortnightly Review, vol. xlvi. , p. 437.
 
 Queefton 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ST. MATTHEW xii. n, 12. 
 
 1 And He said unto them, What man shall 
 there be among you that shall have one 
 sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath 
 day, will he not lay hold of it, and lift it 
 out ? How much then is a man better than 
 a sheep ? Wherefore it is lawful to do well 
 on the Sabbath days.'
 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 CITIZEN-SUNDAY has been instituted for the avowed 
 V_x object of seeking to impress upon the citizens of 
 London the duties that arise out of their citizenship duties 
 to themselves and to one another. 
 
 In their appeal to the clergy and to ministers of all 
 denominations to observe the day, the committee justly 
 say : ' The very vastness of London benumbs our sense of 
 its unity, and of the imperative necessity of corporate and 
 concentrated action for its welfare. We cannot apprehend 
 or fix our individual relation to it. The responsibilities that 
 we are incurring moment by moment are so widely dissipated 
 that they slip out of our sight. Each one of us is lost amid 
 the crowd, and our public obligations lose themselves with 
 us. Nothing can correct this defalcation of conscience but 
 a large and organized rally of our total force of social energy. 
 Our reason, imagination, heart and will, must all be touched 
 by the heat of a universal endeavour. They must be roused 
 from their apathy by a public challenge to face the tremen- 
 dous charge laid upon them in all its fulness, its coherence, 
 its seriousness, its terrible importunity.'
 
 124 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 With that statement I cordially and entirely agree. We, 
 the Church, the great body of citizens who name the name 
 of the Christ the Son of Man, the Great Worker for men, 
 the Divine Philanthropist we at least must rise to our 
 duties, and must heed with a determined will the impor- 
 tunate pleadings of our fellows for better surroundings, 
 purer conditions of life, and fairer prospects for the attain- 
 ing of even humble ideals. A thousand questions press 
 themselves upon us, and wait in stately silence for our 
 answer. Let us face them, and then by our noblest energies 
 rid our consciences of the stain of indolence and un- 
 concern. 
 
 I will not trouble you with a long list of the questions 
 with which we should concern ourselves. I am going to 
 confine my remarks to one question only, and that one of 
 paramount importance the Sunday question. 
 
 And I want first to say that in my opinion Sunday is one 
 of the darkest blots on the face of our fair city. The way 
 in which it is spent by the great masses of our fellow- 
 citizens suggests nothing to my mind but ineffable sadness. 
 I do not refer to the way in which the upper and middle 
 classes spend their Sunday with their church parade, 
 their fashionable strolls, their afternoon receptions, their 
 evening wine-parties. All that is stupidly inane in the 
 upper classes, as the extra feeding, sleeping, and vicious 
 idleness of the middle classes are unworthy alike of the day 
 and its observer. What I have to say is mainly in reference 
 to what is called miscalled, no doubt, in many cases the 
 working class, that is, the vastly predominant class of this 
 London of ours. 
 
 You know, because sneering newspapers and pessimistic
 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION 125 
 
 journalists are always telling you, that ninety-nine hundredths 
 of this class do not observe Sunday in a religious way : that 
 is, they do not go to places of worship. They are not 
 careful, however, to tell you how they do observe it. Their 
 object is to have a cheap sneer at religion, and not to 
 awaken sympathy for the working classes. If only one in a 
 hundred goes to church, where do the ninety and nine go? 
 There is one sad, comprehensive, condemning answer, 
 which embraces more than fifty per cent, of the men the 
 public-house ! That is their church, their recreation-room, 
 their holiday resort. They repair thither at the earliest 
 opportunity : hang about the street-corners waiting till the 
 restricted hours have passed, and then they enter and 
 remain many of them till closing time, most of them 
 longer than is consistent with soberness. 
 
 It is easy enough to call them boozers, drunkards, 
 Sabbath-breakers, and the like. Any fool can call a mad 
 dog names. Have we ever thought of the reason for all 
 this ? Why does the working man spend his Sunday in the 
 public-house, or in some low club that has no restricted 
 hours and exists simply for the pleasures of drink ? 
 
 It is obvious that he must spend his Sunday somewhere. 
 Religion and custom combined have told him that Sunday 
 is a day of rest, a holiday. He must not go to his work- 
 shop ; he must not handle his tools, or ply his trade. So 
 far, so good ; for that at least let God be thanked. In these 
 days of stress and toil it is a blessed thing to have coming 
 once a week, breaking in upon life's hurly-burly, the calm, 
 the rest, the relaxation of the Sabbath. In ideal the thought 
 is glorious nothing more so in our national life. Where 
 the misery comes in is in the observance. And I do not
 
 126 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 hesitate to say that as it is observed by the majority of the 
 people it is a curse rather than a blessing. 
 
 Let us try, then, to get at the root of the matter ; let us 
 see what, in the economy of life, the day might be. 
 
 First, let us be clear as to whence, and for what objects, 
 we get our Sabbath. I need not, of course, tell you that 
 the day has its origin in the Mosaic law. It was given by 
 Moses to the Israelites at a very early period of their history, 
 partly as a sign between God and them, thus marking them 
 off from all other nations by its observance, and partly as 
 commemorating their deliverance from Egypt. In the 
 fourth commandment, as we use it to-day in the Decalogue, 
 the reason given for observing the day is that on the seventh 
 day God rested from His creative work ; that He hallowed 
 the seventh day, and made it holy for all time. Whereas, if 
 you turn to the book Deuteronomy you will find Moses 
 urging the observance of the Sabbath for another reason. 
 He says : ' Keep the Sabbath-day to sanctify it. ... And 
 remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, 
 and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through 
 a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm : therefore the 
 Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath-day.' 
 But at the bottom lay the broader, more humanitarian 
 reason man's need for rest. The day was a recognition 
 of the fact that man is so constituted that he must have 
 regular periodical cessation from toil. 
 
 Our Lord tells us that ' the Sabbath was made for man.' 
 Because man is what he is, therefore the Sabbath was 
 ordained. Moses seized upon the fact to impress upon a 
 people naturally inclined to idolatry and to a materialistic
 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION 127 
 
 form of religion the duty of consecrating a fixed portion of 
 their time to Jehovah. Starting at the bottom that the day 
 was a day of rest, based on the fact that God rested, and 
 that hence He hallowed rest as well as toil, he rose to the 
 higher fact that man, being a spiritual creature, might con- 
 secrate the day to God in holy worship. And so rigidly did 
 he fence around this conception of one day in seven being 
 given to God, that no fire was permitted to be made, on 
 pain of death ; no food was to be prepared, nor the smallest 
 feature of trade tolerated. For gathering a few sticks on 
 the Sabbath a man was arraigned before the congregation 
 and sentenced to death. That was the Mosaic spirit, which 
 was fostered and cherished by the Jewish Church till the 
 time of our Lord. The Judaistic party out-Mosesed Moses 
 in the severity which they imposed upon the Sabbatic rest. 
 Not only would they neither do nor countenance work of 
 any kind in themselves, but they even went so far as to 
 debate whether it was not a violation of the Sabbath if on 
 the first day of the week they ate an egg laid by a hen on 
 the seventh day of the week. 
 
 But what said the Christ to this conception of the day of 
 rest ? From the first He ignored it as a thing alien to the 
 Divine purpose. Many of His works of mercy He performed 
 on the Sabbath, although He knew that in doing this He 
 would shock and scandalize every religionist of His time. 
 He allowed His disciples to act in utter violation of Jewish 
 law. He boldly declared that the Sabbath was instituted, 
 not for man's privation, but for man's good. It was a day 
 for beneficence, not for asceticism. He protested against 
 the idea that works of mercy, and deeds of love, and acts of 
 helpfulness were desecrations of the day, or of its Author.
 
 128 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 We know what ground His followers took. We know 
 how little by little the Jewish Sabbath dropped out of their 
 lives altogether, and how in its place they established a new 
 rest-day, viz., the first day of the week, because it was their 
 Lord's day the day on which He rose triumphant over 
 death. We know that from that time to the present all 
 Christians have observed the first day. 
 
 Now I ask, By what logic are you going to retain the 
 restrictions of the Mosaic Sabbath while you play fast and 
 loose with the day itself? For remember that the very com- 
 mandment which says, ' In it thou shalt do no manner of 
 work,' also says, ' The seventh day is the Sabbath of the 
 Lord thy God.' If, on the other hand, you contend as I 
 do most sincerely that the fourth commandment is not 
 binding on these points, you will see that it is not the enact- 
 ment itself that is sacred, but the facts underlying it, viz., 
 man's need of rest, and the Divine will that He should 
 consecrate it to highest ends. The Pharisees of Christ's 
 time maintained that the necessities of man's nature must 
 yield to the letter of a legal enactment ; Christ taught that 
 the letter of the enactment must yield to man's necessities. 
 The day itself is nothing ; what lies behind it is everything. 
 ' One man esteemeth one day above another,' writes St. 
 Paul; 'another esteemeth every day alike.' And he simply 
 adds : ' Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,' 
 as though he would say, It matters little which day you 
 observe, so long as you observe one, and keep before you 
 the Divine principle implied. 
 
 And yet, with the words and deeds of Jesus before us, 
 with the teachings of His blessed Apostles in our minds, is it 
 not strange that for three centuries we have been trammelled
 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION 129 
 
 with the spirit of Judaism ? ' The Sabbath was made for 
 man,' said the Master. ' Yes,' said our Puritan forefathers, 
 'to scathe him, scourge him, deprive him, humble him, 
 afflict him.' They would have the old rigidity of the Jewish 
 Sabbath, and, while changing the day that God ordained, 
 they strictly kept the letter of the enactment in regard to 
 work. And, what is worse, they not only refused to enjoy 
 the rest-day themselves, but they determined that no one 
 else should enjoy it. It was essentially a day in which men 
 were made to afflict their souls. 
 
 Who that has reached middle-life does not remember the 
 dreary Sabbaths of his youth ? Games of every kind were 
 forbidden ; music, save some dreary hymn -tune, was 
 silenced ; reading was inadmissible, unless the reader was 
 content with his Bible, Prayer-Book, or some other religious 
 work. A kind of unnatural silence reigned in the house, 
 and everywhere. Gloom and lugubriousness were pre- 
 dominant. 
 
 I want to assert and with all the emphasis of which I 
 am capable that that is not the Christ-spirit. Like a 
 great many other things in Puritanism, it is a perversion of 
 what is, and might be made for everyone, a glorious institu- 
 tion. I have said that God gives us the day of rest because 
 it is a necessity. The rest was jealously guarded by Moses 
 because amongst a nomadic people rigidity of rule had to 
 be maintained. Jesus our Lord acknowledged the Divine- 
 ness of the rest-day, but He would have none of its restric- 
 tions. So far as we can learn, He did precisely on the 
 Sabbath that which He did every other day. The Jewish 
 idea was separateness ; His was permeation. The Jew 
 hedged around one day from all unhallowed associations ; 
 
 9
 
 130 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 He would make all days holy. The Jew reserved sanctity 
 for certain offices and certain places ; He saturated all life 
 with God, and flooded all earth with heaven. 
 
 Well, how does this bear upon the question which we 
 have set ourselves to consider here ? Let us see. We 
 acknowledge the Divineness of the institution of the Sabbath 
 as meeting a physical, moral, and spiritual necessity in man. 
 We say that it is a Divine law that every man should rest 
 from his ordinary work one day in seven. We acknowledge 
 the fitness of the first day of the week for that rest, because 
 of its hallowed associations. We believe that the early 
 Christians acted perfectly within their right, not only in 
 rejecting the rigour of the Jewish Sabbath, but in changing 
 the day. But what have we to say of the day ? How 
 should it be spent ? and in what way ? If we reject the 
 Puritan notion, what have we to advocate in its stead ? 
 What are we to say to those teeming thousands of toilers 
 who are cut off from their work, and must spend the day 
 somehow, somewhere? Of course, the ideal is the prin- 
 ciples that underlay the Puritan Sabbath consecration and 
 worship. We should like to see all the sons and daughters 
 of toil presenting themselves before the Lord in holy 
 worship ; we should like to hear their voices uplifted in songs 
 of thanksgiving. That is the ideal. And we are sure that the 
 ideal, if realized, would make for the uplifting of mankind. 
 But while man is what he is, the realization is impossible. 
 Men won't give the day to God because God is not realized 
 by them : He is not a part of their lives in any way. Their 
 capacities for God lie dormant. And you might just as well 
 tell a lot of blind people to go to the National Gallery, or a 
 number of deaf people to go to a classical concert, as tell
 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION ,31 
 
 them to go to church. More's the pity, I know, but the 
 fact remains : church means nothing to them. What have 
 they left ? Their homes and the public-house. If you go 
 to their homes, you will find nothing there to induce a man 
 to spend his Sabbath in them ; you will find many things 
 dirt, dreariness, squalor to send a man out of them. The 
 homes of some of the working-men of England are a disgrace 
 to them, and hence to us. They have nothing left, then, but 
 the street and the public-house ; and what that means to 
 them anyone with eyes to see may soon learn : it means 
 the degradation of their manhood, the bartering away of 
 their self-respect, the ruining of the temple of God, the 
 blighting of their lives, and the suicide of their better 
 natures. That is what it means. 
 
 ' Shut the public-houses,' say some. Well, I have no 
 objection to that if you do it on the principle that the 
 publican should not be privileged beyond others in his 
 opportunities for plying his trade. But I do object to it if 
 you do it on the ground that the working-man shall have 
 no place of resort ; that he shall be driven out to the streets 
 or back to his bed. You will never make men righteous 
 by law ; nor will you ever increase man's nobility by re- 
 moving temptation out of his way. What, then, would I 
 do ? I would give them other opportunities, and such 
 opportunities as should be powerful rivals to the public- 
 house opportunities that should appeal to the better nature 
 in them, and woo and win them to loftier ideals, nobler 
 manners, purer conduct. 
 
 I would make access to the country easy on Sunday ; I 
 would open every museum and art gallery that our cities 
 possess ; I would have music in our parks and public 
 
 92
 
 132 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 squares and halls ; I would have lectures on science, on 
 art, on manufacture, on the thousand and one problems of 
 life. I would make the day a festal day, with one broad 
 banner stretched across it from dawn till midnight, and on 
 the banner inscribed one word ' Love.' Then, not only 
 would the religionist sing, 
 
 ' Bright days ! we need you in a world like this. 
 Be brighter still ! Ye cannot be too bright. 
 The world's six days of vanity and toil 
 Would, but for you, oppress us with their might. 
 
 ' Bright days ! in you heaven cometh nearer earth ; 
 And earth more fully breathes the balm of heaven ; 
 The stillness of your air infuses calm ; 
 Fairest and sweetest of the weekly seven ! 
 
 ' Bright days ! abide with us ; we need ye still. 
 Ye are the ever-gushing wells of time ; 
 Ye are the open casements where we hear 
 The distant notes of heaven's descending chime': 
 
 the poor, the down-trodden, the weary, the sinful, and the 
 great mass of toilers would join in the song. 
 
 I will attempt very briefly to meet some objections that 
 have been raised to this free way of spending Sunday. 
 
 i. There is the puritanical religionist's objection that it is 
 a desecration of the day. 
 
 The Lord's words are an answer to that : ' What man 
 shall there be that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into 
 a pit on the Sabbath-day, will he not lay hold of it, and 
 pull it out? How much, then, is a man better than a 
 sheep ?' Our brother men have fallen into the pit the pit 
 of sensualism, of dull, dreary, unheavenly materialism, and
 
 THE SUNDAY QUESTION 133 
 
 anything that will help to get them out is lawful. c The 
 Sabbath was made for man.' 
 
 2. The next objection is that it entails a vast amount of 
 labour for those who are already sufficiently hard-worked ; 
 that it would take away the Sabbath from a great number 
 who need its rest equally with other toilers. True ; but 
 Sunday is not the only day in the week on which rest can 
 be found. Where men have to work at night they sleep 
 during the day, and accommodate themselves to the 
 arrangement. It would be perfectly easy to secure for 
 those who work on Sunday a rest-day during the week, and 
 to provide for them on that day all the privileges of worship 
 and relaxation that others enjoy on the Sunday. The 
 justice of the nation ought to secure for every man one 
 day of absolute respite from accustomed toil in every 
 seven. 
 
 3. Another objection is that it would empty our churches. 
 So much the more shame on the Church if, with her music 
 her liturgies, her vast talents for educating, informing, and 
 gratifying man's highest tastes, her wealth, and her Divine 
 mission, she can't compete with museums and art galleries. 
 I think it would have the opposite effect. All beauty tends 
 Godwards ; to draw men away from their low surroundings, 
 and from their lower selves, is to bring them heavenward. 
 I have implicit faith in all refining influences : they are 
 among the regenerating forces of the world. 
 
 4. Another objection is the economical objection. It 
 would cost so much. Yes, it would be expensive ; but we
 
 134 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 had better spend our money on that than on beer and 
 horse-racing. We spend nearly two hundred million pounds 
 for these things every year ; a tenth of that spent on our 
 Sundays would turn them into heavenly days, crowded with 
 heavenly messages. The nation can afford to do it ; the 
 man in the pit must be lifted up. 
 
 I commend these thoughts to you. Think generously 
 of them ; think charitably. If you do not accept my con- 
 clusions, give me credit for sincerity of motive, and for 
 the desire to serve alike my fellows and my God. The 
 Pharisees called our blessed Lord a Sabbath-breaker. 
 ' They kept the law of the Sabbath, but they broke the 
 law of love.' They strained out a gnat, and yet swallowed 
 a camel. Take heed, lest in your over-zeal for the externals 
 of religion you copy them, and not the Christ. Make the 
 Sabbath a delight. Say, 
 
 ' Thou art a day of mirth ; 
 And where the week-days trail on ground, 
 Thy flight is higher, as thy birth : 
 O let me take thee at the bound, 
 Leaping with thee from seven to seven, 
 Till that we both, being toss'd from earth, 
 Fly hand in hand to heaven.'
 
 (parenfaf puttee 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 i SAMUEL ii. 19. 
 ' His mother made him a little coat. ' 
 
 ST. MATTHEW xviii. 10. 
 
 ' Take heed that ye despise not one of 
 these little ones.'
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 AT the time that judges ruled in Israel, and before the 
 days of Judaic monarchy, there lived at Ramathaim- 
 Zophim a place the precise locality of which cannot now 
 be determined one Elkanah, who, in all probability, was a 
 Levite. From the little that the historic narrative tells us 
 about him, we gather that he was a man of good, liberal 
 nature, free and happy in his ways, kind and open-handed 
 in his home, and loving to his wives for he had two but 
 especially tender to the one whom he loved with the greater 
 affection. 
 
 It may be noted that the historian, while freely recording 
 the fact of his having more than one wife, does not mention 
 it as a blameworthy or reprehensible thing. No comment 
 whatever is made; no hint that it was either immoral or 
 irreligious. It may have been then, as it is with the 
 Samaritans to this day, that, one of his wives being child- 
 less, social usage permitted marriage with another. 
 
 In Elkanah's home there were two wives, but by no 
 means two kindred souls. One was bitter in spirit, and 
 heart-weary at seeing the happy motherhood of the other ;
 
 138 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 and the other, jealous because of the diversion of her 
 husband's greatest love to the childless one, made her own 
 blessing of children a perpetual taunt and irritation to the 
 disconsolate Hannah. For it seems that Elkanah's devoted 
 love was lavished on the childless wife, and so life was made 
 bitter to each by two distinct and different causes. 
 
 The yearly act of worship, in which all the family went 
 up to Shiloh, full-handed with offerings to the Lord from 
 Elkanah's liberality, and joyful, as those should be who 
 went up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles, came as an 
 annual climax to Hannah's grief. At one of these annual 
 visits, feeling in the bitterness of her soul that she could 
 endure her childlessness no longer, we are told that she 
 stood before the Lord, and prayed, and wept sore : ' And 
 she vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, O Lord of hosts, 
 if Thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of Thine hand- 
 maid, and remember me, and not forget Thine handmaid, 
 but wilt give unto Thine handmaid a man child, then I will 
 give him unto the Lord all the day's of his life.' 
 
 And standing there with tears of suppliance on her cheeks, 
 and the sobs of a bruised and breaking heart on her lips, a 
 voice spake to her, saying, ' Go in peace.' The desire of 
 her heart was granted Elkanah's household was brightened 
 with the presence of a child from the wife whom he loved. 
 And when next they went to Shiloh it was not with sadness ; 
 when next Hannah prayed in the tabernacle it was not 
 silently, nor with a bitter heart and tearfulness, but with 
 triumphant praise, and a song that irresistibly carries on the 
 heart to the hymn that magnified the Lord as it poured forth 
 from the soul of the Mother of Jesus. 
 
 How overflowing was Hannah's joy ! How she welcomed
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES 139 
 
 little Samuel as a direct gift from God in answer to her 
 prayer ! And her joy did not shut the remembrance of her 
 vow out of her heart. With a grateful heart she performed 
 her wonted pilgrimage, but with a new gift in her hand. 
 God's gift was to be given back to Him at His own shrine. 
 As she handed him to the aged Eli, she said : ' For this 
 child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition 
 which I asked of Him, therefore have I lent him to the 
 Lord. As long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord.' 
 And hence Samuel found his home in the tabernacle of the 
 Lord's house. And, as he grew, he ' ministered before the 
 Lord, being a child girded with a linen ephod. Moreover, 
 his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him 
 from year to year when she came with Elkanah to offer the 
 yearly sacrifice.' What the coat was we are unable to say, 
 but whatever its shape or texture, it must have been a rich 
 and becoming garment that was made for a child that had 
 been lent unto the Lord. 
 
 But why have I chosen this as a text ? Because it brings 
 before us a mother who recognised the solemn responsibilities 
 of motherhood ; a mother who took in the twofold possi- 
 bilities of her child's life : the spiritual and the physical 
 the psychical and the animal. As a spiritual entity, she lent 
 him to the Lord ; as a physical being with physical wants, 
 she made him a little coat. 
 
 It is of this twofold nature of the duties of parents that I 
 want to speak : our duties in relation to our children as 
 physical beings, and our duties in relation to them as moral 
 and spiritual beings. It is an infinitely solemn thing to be 
 a parent. Every child born into the world is a bundle of 
 tremendous responsibilities, and whether it shall come forth
 
 140 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 into life, its heart attuned to the eternal harmonies, and after 
 a life of usefulness on earth go to a life of joy and bliss in 
 the immortal sphere, or whether across it shall jar eternal 
 discords, and after a life of wrong-doing on earth it shall go 
 off into impenetrable darkness, is much more determined 
 by the fulfilment or the neglect of parental duties than we 
 are wont to recognise. 
 
 i. I will speak of parental duties as they affect the physical 
 natures of children. 
 
 (a) And, first of all, I want to emphasize this fact, with all 
 the earnestness born of a profound conviction, that no one 
 has a right to become a parent who is not prepared to fulfil 
 all the obligations that are incumbent upon parents. 
 
 I am oftentimes perfectly astounded at the careless, irre- 
 sponsible way in which the procreation of children is 
 regarded. Men and women whose means barely suffice to 
 keep bodies and souls together go on having children as 
 though they were breeding animals which could be sold 
 when the stock proved larger than the capacities of the 
 larder. It is a sin against society, it is a sin against posterity, 
 to bring children into the world with no prospect of being 
 able to bring them up into manhood or womanhood without 
 privation ; as, indeed, it is a greater sin still to become 
 parents when in the very act of procreation you give to your 
 children germs of disease or vice that will be a curse to them 
 so long as they breathe the breath of life. 
 
 It is idle and impious to say that God never sends 
 mouths without sending food to fill them. God has placed 
 in your hands the power of procreation, and if you multiply
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES 141 
 
 offspring while your poverty or your misfortune is a curse to 
 you, you might as well babble the heathen gibberish of 
 Kampschatka, as pray that God would feed and clothe your 
 children. He expects us to act in accordance with His 
 laws, social as well as moral ; and to defy those laws and 
 then pray that God will intervene is not only ' a far cry to 
 heaven,' but an insult to the eternal majesty of the Law- 
 giver. 
 
 God has placed it within the power of every man and 
 woman to determine whether they will be parents or not : 
 it is only mad folly or base sensualism which says these 
 things are outside our control. They are absolutely and 
 completely within the control of everyone, and you have 
 no right to choose to be a parent, or indulge the faculties 
 that lead to parenthood, unless you are prepared to realize 
 that upon your head the eternal responsibilities of parent- 
 hood rest. How many parents could say with Hannah, 
 ' For this child I prayed ' ? Where there is one who can 
 say so, there are many who regard every addition to the 
 family as an unmitigated nuisance. 
 
 (l>] But to proceed with parental duties to children. 
 Having begotten them, it is your parts and duties to see 
 that the faculties, functions and capacities of their nature 
 are met, trained, exercised to the utmost limits of your 
 powers. 
 
 I do not think that parents ever half sufficiently consider 
 their responsibility in regard to the perfecting of the physical 
 nature of their children. Not only should every possible care 
 be exercised in procreation, so as not to transmit to offspring 
 anything that will be a curse or an impediment to them, but,
 
 1 42 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 having begotten them, it is our never-ceasing duty to guard, 
 direct, control and help them against every possible de- 
 formity and imperfection. Oh, how many of us suffer, not 
 only from our parents' follies and sins before they were 
 parents, but from their deliberate neglect after that we 
 became their charge ! 
 
 Do not think it a thing beneath your notice to see that 
 even your children's teeth grow regularly, that they learn to 
 carry themselves without stooping, that their habits of eating 
 and drinking, as well as the things they eat and drink, are 
 such as conduce to their health and general well-being. 
 Small things have often mighty issues. Always remember 
 two things in respect to your children : first, that their bodies 
 were intended to be God's temple. See, therefore, that 
 from the first they form habits of cleanliness, neatness, 
 order. Point out to them the marvellous skill and wisdom 
 displayed in their creation. Teach them reverence for their 
 bodies as a whole, and for certain functions that lie at the 
 very base of life in particular, as all lying within the good- 
 will and purpose of God. Secondly, remember that they 
 in turn are to become progenitors ; that when the grass 
 will be growing green on your grave they will be men and 
 women with children and grand-children flitting about the 
 avenues of their life. A defect or a deformity caused by 
 your neglect will transmit itself to posterity, and you will 
 thus become the parent of ills that never come within the 
 scope of God's purpose. 
 
 Moreover, I think it to be the duty of all parents to give 
 their children the benefit of their experience in all the 
 things that pertain to them in their relation to the opposite 
 sexes. Tens of thousands have been led to perdition for
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES 143 
 
 want of a few words of warning or of explanation from those 
 to whom they had the right to look as much for education 
 in those matters, as in how to use their legs when they were 
 learning to walk. Is it not surprising that the very things 
 that most affect our happiness or misery, the things that, 
 more than any others, go to the making or the marring of 
 the whole of life, are the things that most parents never 
 talk to their children about ? I would have every mother 
 realize that it is as much her duty to teach her daughter the 
 meaning and the mystery of all the wondrous functions of 
 her budding womanhood as to teach her to pray. I would 
 have every father realize that it is his duty to teach his son 
 the secrets of purity and the right government of his 
 passions, as much as to teach him to read or to write. And, 
 as parents, you must do it yourselves ; do it seriously, do it 
 earnestly, do it, if you will, on your knees before God ; but 
 you must do it. It doesn't come within the scope of what 
 is called scholastic education ; it doesn't lie within the 
 province of the pulpit : it is your special province, and on 
 your rightful performance of the duty the fate of your child 
 may hang. What St. Paul wrote to Timothy, ' Keep thyself 
 pure,' you ought to write on all the outgoings and in- 
 comings of your child's life. It is abhorrent pruriency that 
 prevents the discussion of these things between parents and 
 children. The young are naturally curious, and if you do 
 not tell them they will inquire about these things of others 
 probably as ignorant as themselves, and that often means the 
 opening of the floodgates through which streams of vice flow. 
 
 (c) Again, I think it a duty of parents to manifest interest 
 in all that concerns the life of their children.
 
 I 4 4 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 There is only one thing that I love Martin Luther for, 
 and that is, not his theses on the doors of the Wittenberg 
 church, wherein he defied the Pope I don't care an old 
 button about those theses but I love him because he 
 played at trundling hoops with his children. I am very 
 fond of Charles Kingsley the novelist, but Charles Kingsley 
 scrambling sweets on the lawn at Eversley, or writing that 
 delightful story, ' The Water Babies,' purely for the amuse- 
 ment of his own children, is more admirable still. But the 
 Luthers and Kingsleys are not by any means typical 
 fathers ; they are, I fear, very rare exceptions. If in many 
 cases the advent of another baby is regarded as a nuisance, 
 in quite as many cases are the children in their growing 
 years nuisances. How many times have parents been 
 heard to say : ' I could do this, that, or the other, but 
 for the brats !' How many fathers are there who insist 
 that the children shall all be got off to bed before they 
 come home for their evening meal ! Fathers they may 
 be, but they are not men in the noblest sense of that 
 word. 
 
 There is something radically wrong where a child is ever 
 a nuisance, no matter what its faults or failings. A father 
 is infinitely more a man when he buys toys for his children, 
 than when he spends his money on sumptuous mid-day 
 meals, or on wine and cigars. The meanness which talks 
 of children being a great drain on one's resources, and of 
 compelling one to economize, greatly to one's discomfort, 
 finds no place in perfect parenthood, which is built upon 
 altruism and glorified by love. St. Paul emphasizes it when 
 he says : ' Children ought not to lay by for their parents, 
 but parents for their children.'
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES 145 
 
 2. I turn now to the moral and spiritual aspect of 
 parental duties. 
 
 And I would impress you with this fact, that your duties 
 to your child as a moral and spiritual being are equal to, or 
 even more important than, your duties to him as a physical 
 being. In both cases the duties begin at the cradle. As 
 an actor, conscious and voluntary, a child is nothing ; a 
 puppy, a kitten, a lamb is endowed with as many qualities 
 as a newborn child except in the matter of potentialities. 
 .Where the child transcends the animal is in the fact that 
 the animal will be bound to the realm and sphere of the 
 animal world for ever ; it will affect nothing outside the 
 merely animal; whereas a child has in it germs of a life 
 and destiny which may shape or shake empires, which may 
 influence the whole world of men for time and for eternity. 
 And in this matter the responsibilities of parenthood are 
 so great, because parents impress their children as no 
 others can impress them, and because they impart to them 
 influences which will go with them into life, into death, into 
 eternity. 
 
 If you want your son to grow up a noble-minded man, 
 do not let him be impressed with the fact that you regard 
 eating and drinking and the gratification of the senses as 
 the Alpha and Omega of existence ; let him learn from you 
 that altruism is the secret source of all the real happiness, 
 and the basis of the loftiest nobility, that are known to this 
 life. If you want your daughter to grow up to be a queenly 
 woman, do not let her see that your own and her dress are 
 the A and the Z of your entire planning. How can a child 
 be taught the grand lessons of self-denial, frugality, humility, 
 and spiritual-mindedness when you smother it with the
 
 146 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 artificial trappings of pride and extravagance? Do not 
 transform an immortal being into a doll-baby, or give it the 
 idea that the realization of the latest fashion-plate is the 
 ideal of life. 
 
 Give your child a shilling to spend at toyshops, or in 
 those pernicious things, ' sweets,' and a half-penny for the 
 offertory when it comes to church, and you teach that child 
 that self-indulgence is twenty-four times as important as 
 Christian charity and sacrifice to God. 
 
 I think, too, that parents are not only in a great measure 
 responsible for their children's dispositions, but also for 
 their tempers. Always be scolding your children, and 
 knocking one's head against the other, and if they turn 
 out to be mild and sweet-tempered, it will be a miracle. 
 There are a great many of us who can sympathize with 
 Sydney Smith, who said that the clouds of his boyhood 
 were never larger than a woman's hand, but that they 
 usually ended in a squall. That is fatal to child-life. 
 
 If a child is handled harshly, or jerked into obedience, 
 always found fault with, and never praised for doing his 
 best, he will most probably turn out a sulky, obstinate, 
 irritable creature. And yet that that kind of thing is constant 
 in hundreds of households, one knows from observation. 
 Here is a reported incident of what took place in one 
 such : Mother, to her eldest child : ' Where is Bertha, and 
 what is she doing?' Child: 'I don't know, mother.' 
 Mother : ' Then go and find her, and tell her she mustn't !' 
 
 ' She mustn't !' What a bugbear those words have been 
 to many a child's life ! 
 
 Do not think that the children are on the road to ruin 
 because they make a racket. Noise is a sign of life, and
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES 147 
 
 is, in my opinion, one of the greatest aids to growth and 
 health. 
 
 Do not talk disparagingly of your children in their 
 presence, or be always scolding them as irremediable repro- 
 bates. Always be telling your daughter that she is the 
 worst girl you ever knew, and do not be surprised if she 
 turns out to be the worst woman you ever knew. Children 
 are quick to observe, ready to catch and retain impres- 
 sions. Every sentiment that looks into the eyes of a child 
 looks back again out of the eyes in the form of character. 
 
 Remember, too, that they will think much more of what 
 you do than of what you say. Some day in your boy's 
 presence, in a hasty moment, you drop an oath. Quick as 
 lightning it is out and gone. You say to yourself afterwards : 
 ' I hope the boy won't take to swearing.' You need not 
 hope ; you have taught him, and he will do as you have 
 done, and think it one of the signs of manliness because 
 ' father does it.' 
 
 Again, children are very quick to detect the reality or 
 the hypocrisy of your religion. It will not be enough that 
 you teach them to pray : you must live your prayer. If 
 they see you very devout in church, very attentive to the 
 prayers, very glib in your recitation of the creed on Sunday, 
 and yet on Monday see you practising positive deception, 
 violating some principle which their unseared conscience 
 pronounces right ; if they hear you slandering and back- 
 biting, and see that your temper is not under proper con- 
 trol, they will judge your religion at its proper worth, that 
 is, a miserable sham. A child's conscience mirrors in its 
 translucent depths the essential elements of the heavenly 
 kingdom, and woe betide you if the elements reflected in 
 
 10 2
 
 148 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 your conduct and character do not in some measure answer 
 to theirs ! It was not without a meaning for all time that 
 the Master once took a little child, and set him in the 
 midst of the disciples as a type of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 Be careful in talking of religion and religious things that 
 you do not give false impressions. I cannot say what the 
 majority of the children of to-day think of religion ; I only 
 know that the impression made on my mind when a boy 
 was that religion was a very gloomy and sombre thing, and 
 not at all in keeping with the exuberance of a child's spirits, 
 or the abundant cheerfulness of a child's nature. I am 
 afraid the impression is not dead yet. Sunday in many 
 homes is a day of lugubriousness. All music, save some 
 doleful hymn-tune, is silenced ; mirth is checked or sup- 
 pressed as out of keeping with the day ; the tone of voice, 
 the dress, the manners, are all Sabbatarian. And hence 
 the one day in the week that children ought to love the 
 best they love the least. A lugubrious Sabbath is a carica- 
 ture of the holy day. ' Sunday books ' are mostly mon- 
 strosities ; all pure, helpful literature is as fit for Sunday as 
 for week-days; all music is sacred that is not associated 
 with vulgar words ; all beauty, brightness, cheerfulness, are 
 consistent with the Lord's Day. The Christian religion is 
 not a dark angel bringing night-shadows under its wings, it 
 is a bright angel dropping brightest benedictions on the 
 hearts of men ; and it is your duty to teach your children 
 these things. 
 
 Teach them that God is interested in them ; that He 
 loves them, and that our sins grieve Him. Bring down to 
 their minds in all the loveliness of His character, His 
 meekness, His simplicity, the Ideal Man, Jesus our Lord.
 
 PARENTAL DUTIES , 49 
 
 Teach them that they may go to Him with their sorrows ; 
 that He is with them in their joys, and that He waits to 
 present them in a glorious angelhood to His Father in 
 heaven. 
 
 Thus treat them, thus teach them, and though you may 
 leave them no riches, no property, you will leave them that 
 which is infinitely preferable, the secret of God's peace, 
 which shall make the memory of you an evangel, and the 
 thought of you an angel of blessing.
 
 0e nimaf 
 
 IN TPIE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
 
 ST. MATTHEW x. 29. 
 ' Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? 
 and one of them shall not fall on the ground 
 without your Father.' 
 
 i ST. PETER iii. 8. 
 'Be pitiful.'
 
 THE ANIMAL WORLD 
 IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 IT has been laid at the door of the Christian religion 
 sometimes as a slur by the scoffer ; sometimes as an 
 indictment by the sceptic; sometimes as a matter of the 
 deepest regret by Christians themselves that the animal 
 kingdom outside man finds no recognition in its creeds, its 
 moral maxims, or its ethical dogmas ; that animals are 
 never mentioned, except as the servants of, or food for, the 
 lord of creation. 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold, in a most interesting essay on the 
 question, ' Are Animals Moral ?' says : ' All Christian peoples 
 stand, for the most part, a sadly long way behind those of 
 the East in their conduct to animals. Good Buddhists 
 never intentionally take away life at all. The modern 
 Hindoos of any good caste, borrowing from Buddha his 
 noble regard for the right of everything to live, never touch 
 meat as food, seldom even fish. ... By a single decree of 
 Mohammed the whole of Islam acts a thousand times more 
 kindly to animals than Christendom.' 
 
 That is a statement which almost amounts to an indict- 
 ment ; and in so far as the practice of those who profess
 
 154 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 and call themselves Christians is concerned, I for one am 
 bound to admit that it is a just indictment. But that the 
 fault lies with the Author of Christianity, or the moral 
 maxims of His religion, I indignantly and emphatically 
 deny. It is due to the ignorance, the thoughtlessness, and 
 the perverted tastes of Christians. 
 
 I want you to think of man's relation to the animal 
 world, and then I will point out to you how the religion we 
 profess bears upon our conduct to animals generally. 
 
 i. And first grasp this fact, that man and every living 
 creature have a common origin. 
 
 I do not care what theories you hold as to Biogenesis ; 
 I do not care whether you follow Moses or Darwin in 
 accounting for the phenomena of life upon earth this is a 
 fact which cannot be gainsaid, that man shares with every 
 animal that lives the primal elements of life and the con- 
 stituent elements of life. Life in germ form and in the 
 embryonic stage is one and the same for a thousand 
 varieties of animals, including man. In his most interest- 
 ing work on ' Vertebrate Embryology,' Marshall states that 
 'All animals living, or that ever have lived, are united 
 together by blood relationship of varying nearness or 
 remoteness, and every animal now in existence has a 
 pedigree stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred 
 generations, but through all geologic time since life first 
 commenced on the earth.' 
 
 It is astonishing, too, what wondrous similarity exists 
 between many of the organs and organic functions in man 
 and those of other animals the organs that perform the 
 functions of secretion and excretion, of inhalation and
 
 THE ANIMAL WORLD 155 
 
 exhalation ; those that promote the digestion of food and 
 the formation of blood-corpuscles ; the various ducts and 
 canals, nerve-centres and muscle-tissues all have a striking 
 likeness in man and beast. Speaking of ourselves, we say, 
 in the language of the old Hebrew poet : ' For I am fear- 
 fully and wonderfully made'; but the smallest insect that 
 spreads its gossamer wings under the glowing rays of the 
 summer's sun equals, if it does not surpass, us in the fear- 
 fulness and wonderfulness of its creation. We think that 
 man is the crown and glory of creation : in potentiality he 
 may be ; but there is evidence of as much creative skill, as 
 much marvellous design, as much lavishness of endowment, 
 as much delight in the work of the Creator's hands in the 
 bee, the butterfly, the humming-bird, and the eagle, as in 
 what Shakespeare calls ' the paragon of animals,' man. 
 The denizens of the mighty depths of ocean, as well as 
 those that skim and float and fly in the vaulted dome ot 
 heaven, vie with man in witnessing to the studious care 
 displayed by God in the adaptation of faculty to function 
 and function to environment. As far, too, as provision for 
 their mere animal wants is concerned, it is as abundant for 
 the brute as the man. ' He filleth all things living with 
 plenteousness,' giving to all alike with an open hand, and 
 with no sign of favouritism. 
 
 2. I want now to emphasize the fact that animals 
 possess, along with man, though not in the same degree, 
 the powers of volition for constructive, preservative, and 
 pleasurable ends. Time was when men disputed that 
 animals had minds ; instinct was allowed them, but reason 
 denied them. That disputation has now been removed
 
 156 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 into the limbo of dead follies. We have come to discern 
 and that so clearly as to leave no room for doubt that 
 animals betray intelligence, and in many cases of a very 
 marked and high degree ; that they share with us many of 
 the finer feelings and emotions ; that they have memories ; 
 that they continually form progressive percepts ; that they 
 invent new means and methods of gratifying their faculties 
 for enjoyment, and that, like man, they learn by experience. 
 I am not going to carry this phase of the argument so far as to 
 ignore the tremendous difference existing between the poten- 
 tialities and attainments of human reason and those of the 
 reason of the brutes. Man, according to Mr. Romanes, stands 
 alone in 'the power of objectifying ideas, or of setting one state 
 of mind before another state, and contemplating the relation 
 between them.' He says : ' The power to think is or, as I 
 should prefer to state it, the power to think at all is the 
 power which is given by introspective reflection in the light 
 of self-consciousness. . . . We have no evidence to show 
 that any animal is capable of thus objectifying its own 
 ideas ; and therefore we have no evidence that any animal 
 is capable of judgment.' This notwithstanding, there is in 
 many animals a marvellous amount of sagacity, and of 
 thoughtfulness manifested in prevision and forecast, in 
 courage and in self-sacrifice, in gratitude and in affection, 
 even surpassing those things in man. 
 
 I might give you a long list of mental phenomena which 
 man and brute share in common, though in varying degrees. 
 But take those of the emotions only fear, surprise, affec- 
 tion, pugnacity, curiosity, jealousy, anger, hatred, mirthful- 
 ness, sympathy, pride, resentment, grief, cruelty, benevolence, 
 revenge, shame, regret, deceit, and in many cases an extreme
 
 THE ANIMAL WORLD ^7 
 
 sense and love of the beautiful that some, or all of these, 
 'are common to a thousand forms of animal life nobody 
 would deny. 
 
 I think, too, there is striking evidence that some animals 
 possess faculties and powers which man does not possess, 
 'and that though we surpass them in reason, they surpass us 
 in other potentialities which, if we knew their value, might 
 make us envy the brute in its possession of them. I have 
 seen a look in a dog's eye which gave me the impression 
 that the dog knew, or had a sense of, something of which I 
 was wholly ignorant. The ant, the bee, and the spider, 
 from whatever motives they work, have certainly been 
 man's teacher and precursor in constructive and adaptive 
 methods of work. It is a humiliating thought to me that 
 the bee and the spider can do what I cannot do, and that 
 long before the human geometrician had formulated his 
 laws, those laws existed in the brain of the tiny creature that 
 wove its silken webs in the hedgerow. I should like to 
 feel what the lark feels when it soars to heaven's gate and 
 sings. Its song tells me that there is something thrilling in 
 its tiny bosom to which my breast is a complete stranger. 
 
 ' Teach us, sprite or bird, 
 
 What sweet thoughts are thine : 
 I have never heard 
 
 Praise of love or wine 
 That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 
 
 ' Chorus Hymenoeal 
 
 Or triumphal Chaunt, 
 Matched with thine would be all 
 
 But an empty vaunt, 
 A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.' 
 
 In face of these facts, who dares talk contemptuously of
 
 158 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 the 'dumb animals,' of the 'lower creation,' and of the 
 ' beasts that perish '? No animal is dumb to God : even the 
 young lions, roaring after their prey, do seek their meat from 
 Him. There is no such thing as ' lower orders of creation.' 
 That which in our poor limited sight may seem the lowliest of 
 all God's works, to Him may be the crown of His creative 
 skill. And how know we that the brutes perish any more 
 than man ? Of ourselves we say, when overtaken by death, 
 ' Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the 
 spirit shall return to God Who gave it.' The very science 
 which has taught us the conservation of energy, and which 
 thereby supports the Biblical doctrine of man's immortality, 
 teaches us that in the economy of nature there is no such 
 thing as destruction ; dissolution, change, deformation, 
 reformation, but no destruction. ' Nothing that once hath 
 been, though ages roll between, and it be no more seen,' is 
 lost. God has a place for every force that has taken to 
 itself sphere or form, and it may be that over and above the 
 many mansions which He has prepared for man in the great 
 other world, He has made some provision for the other 
 works of His hands. Science is certainly beginning to 
 assert the doctrine of the immortality of all life, and from a 
 rational point of view there is as much ground for believing 
 in the immortality of the brute as of the man. ' It is the piti- 
 less professors of materialism, who do not care how many 
 gentle and helpless four-footed or four-handed beings they 
 torture,' who can conceive for the brute nothing beyond an 
 ephemera] existence which imposes no obligations on man. 
 St. Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning and travailing 
 in pain together, and certainly hints that that which shall 
 come to man in the form of a higher destiny shall come
 
 159 
 
 also to every other work of God capable of realizing it. 
 'The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the 
 manifestation of the sons of God.' I do not profess to take 
 in the full meaning of this, and hence I do not dogmatize on 
 a matter concerning which we must all necessarily be in the 
 dark. But I have my own views and hopes on the ques- 
 tion ; and I, who admire all forms of life, and greatly love 
 many, shall be disappointed if in the other life I do not 
 find there some of the creatures to which I have become 
 attached here. 
 
 3- I come now to the allegation that Christianity says 
 nothing of man's duty to the animal world ; that it is silent 
 as to man's relationship with other forms of life. 
 
 According to the letter of the New Testament, this is 
 mainly true, but according to the spirit of its teaching, it is 
 absolutely and altogether false. If you seek for positive 
 and direct commands against cruelty you will not find 
 them. He Who said, ' Honour thy father and thy mother,' 
 did not say, ' Be kind to, respect and reverence, all forms 
 of life wherever you find them.' But we have something 
 better, something infinitely higher than such a command as 
 that : we have a God-life lived in God's world under purely 
 human conditions ; lived, too, to show us how every son 
 of man should live; lived to leave us an example that 
 we should follow in His steps. Look at that life, then, not 
 alone in its relation to man, but in its relation to the world 
 which was the scene of its activities ; look at it in its rela- 
 tion to every creature and thing which formed its environ- 
 ment, and see if you can find anything but love, and pity, 
 and gentleness, and sympathy, and respect, and reverence
 
 160 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 for everything God has made. .Can you conceive of the 
 lowly One of Nazareth, as He went about His Father's 
 business, dropping benedictions upon the sordid, sorrowing, 
 suffering, sinful lives of men can you conceive of Him as 
 even participating in an act of unkindness, of cruelty, of 
 pain-giving to the very humblest of God's creatures ? Did 
 He not say that ' not a sparrow falleth on the ground without 
 your Father '? Did He not unveil the world as impregnated 
 with the Divine Presence, and all its phenomena as displays 
 of the Divine wisdom and goodness ? Did He not show 
 how intimately God is connected with every form of life ? 
 Of the grass He said, God painted it ; of the birds of the 
 air, ' Your heavenly Father feedeth them.' I can think of 
 Him as entering into the meaning and the mystery of the 
 life and instincts and pleasures of the animal world ; as see- 
 ing responsive elements existing between the Creator and 
 the creature ; as knowing how God takes in all life, and how 
 in some way all life apprehends God. 
 
 Christianity means the copying of Christ ; the repro- 
 duction of the tone, and temper, and emotions of His 
 character in our characters. If He were really born in us, 
 and reproduced in the whole of humanity, how differently 
 would the relations existing between man and the other 
 creatures of God be recognised ! How changed would 
 man's conceptions be of his duty towards his neighbours, 
 the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, as well as 
 his neighbour man ! 
 
 Think, too, of the elements of the Christian religion as 
 they were propounded by the Apostles of Christ, and see 
 how they touch riot only every phase of human life in its 
 relations with human life, but how they impregnate character
 
 THE ANIMAL WORLD 161 
 
 with a spirit that touches all things with reverence, and out- 
 pours itself on all things in love. ' The fruit of the spirit 
 is love, joy, meekness, gentleness, long-suffering'; has that 
 any bearing upon conduct in its relation to other forms of 
 life ? ' Be pitiful,' says St. Peter. Think you that he meant 
 pity only for human woes and weaknesses and follies and 
 sins ? I think he meant for everything. The true Christ- 
 man, in all his splendid, courageous, heroic elements of 
 character, is one who is ever kind, and to whom cruelty is 
 unknown. 
 
 ' He prayeth well who loveth well 
 
 Both man and bird and beast ; 
 
 He prayeth best who loveth best 
 
 All things both great and small ; 
 
 For the dear Lord who loveth us 
 
 He made and loveth all.' 
 
 Men once said that Christianity did not condemn, or even 
 discountenance, slavery ; and yet it was the spirit of Christi- 
 anity firing the noblest souls of men that rose up to demand 
 the abolition of slavery. And prate how men will about 
 animals having no recognition in the Christian religion, that 
 religion shall yet bring about for them higher consideration, 
 more kindness, more thoughtfulness, yea, I would even 
 say, as perfectly in keeping with the faith I hold, and more 
 love from man. 
 
 The fact that, in our high state of civilization, we need 
 such a society as that for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
 Animals stands out as a sickening ulcer upon the fair face 
 of our national life. It is a slur on our holy religion that 
 not until recent years had we such a society as that which 
 is now instituted The Church Society for the Promotion 
 of Kindness to Animals. Nor is the Church less Christian
 
 162 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 when she stands as the animal's friend than when she 
 holds her synods for the settling of her theological dogmas. 
 It is essentially the mission of the Christian pulpit to tell 
 men that they have no right to inflict needless pain upon 
 any creature that shares with man life derived from God ; 
 and we must not hesitate to tell them so in words that they 
 cannot misunderstand. We must say to Science, that in ex- 
 perimenting upon animals for the benefit of mankind she 
 must deal tenderly, humanely, reverently, with even the 
 humblest life she touches. We must tell Society that to 
 encourage the slaughter of millions of the songsters of the 
 air to provide the table with unnecessary delicacies is an 
 outrage to Christian sentiment, and that to murder birds of 
 gay plumage to decorate the attire of fashionable ladies is 
 a wanton insult to the Creator. We must see that nowhere 
 shall cruelty be practised for the pleasure or the gain of 
 man. We must insist that where animals are killed for 
 what man thinks to be necessary food, the process of killing 
 shall be marked by all the kindness, care, and tenderness 
 that is possible. Not to do this is, in my opinion, not to 
 fulfil one of the highest phases of our mission to the 
 world. 
 
 It is narrated of Mohammed that one day a young 
 Meccan peasant brought to him two young pigeons which 
 the feathered mother had followed all the way from the 
 nest. ' See !' said Mohammed, ' she has more courage than 
 the stoutest of my spearmen ! She braves instant death 
 for her younglings ! Do you dream Allah created the heart 
 of a dove like this, that you should carelessly spill the love 
 and life forth from it at your fancy ? I bid ye give back 
 her couplet to that mother-bird ; and henceforth never
 
 THE ANIMAL WORLD 163 
 
 shall any true believer presume to slay a bird or a beast for 
 food without first asking pardon from God and patience 
 for the victim, repeating these words : Bis'm Allah al Kerim 
 In the Name of God the Compassionate.'* To the 
 credit of Mohammedanism be it said that never since that 
 day has any devout Mussulman tasted the flesh of bird or 
 beast over which the hallal has not thus been pronounced. 
 Is there not tenderness enough in our Christian sentiment 
 to effect a similar thing? Are the followers of the gentle 
 Christ to be less gentle than the Mussulman ? 
 
 Christian men, Christian women, learn to be kind to 
 every animal that would share with you in friendship the 
 benisons of God. ' The mystery of their existence is 
 profound ; the long silence of their patience may cover 
 solemn and terrible accusations which they will some day 
 make against us before the Judgment-seat of the universal 
 life !' 
 
 * Sir Edwin Arnold. 
 
 II 2
 
 Soofe !
 
 ECCLESIASTES ii. 14. 
 
 ' The wise man's eyes are in his head ; 
 but the fool walketh in darkness.'
 
 FOOLS! 
 
 ON hearing that the population of Great Britain and 
 Ireland was, according to a census which had then 
 just been taken, about thirty millions, Thomas Carlyle 
 exclaimed, 'Thirty million people mostly fools !' Probably, 
 and the sage of Chelsea among the number. For the term 
 ' fool ' is a relative term, and in different mouths means 
 wholly different things. There is no human standard of 
 pronouncement by which we can apply it You cannot 
 measure a man's mind, or motive, or ideal, and then 
 tabulate him wise or fool according to your measurement, 
 as you can measure his stature by feet and inches and then 
 pronounce him tall or short. There is something of the 
 fool in every man even the wisest; there is much of the 
 fool in most men even the best ; there is all of the fool in 
 many, though they be not so labelled or designated. If 
 some angel from the other world were to come to earth, 
 and label us according to our true merit, what an unfolding 
 there would be ! Ay, and what a hubbub when his work 
 was done ! How many of us who, in our conceit, think 
 ourselves a bit above the common cut would be filled with
 
 1 68 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 surprise as we read our own label ! What a sickening un- 
 folding those four letters FOOL would be to many who 
 think themselves more than ordinarily possessed of wisdom ! 
 
 Let us observe, however, that the term is not applicable 
 to inherent qualities, or the want of them, but to the use or 
 abuse of such qualities as we may possess. It is not the 
 largeness or smallness of the brain, the keenness or dulness 
 of our mental capacities, the knowledge that we have stored 
 up or passed by unheeded, that constitutes a man wise or 
 foolish, philosopher or fool ; no, but what we do with what 
 we have. It is a question of ideal, motive, conduct, 
 purpose, pursuit, and not of mental calibre or attainment. 
 The man with little or no brain is an idiot ; the man with 
 the big brain who devotes its powers to unworthy ends, to 
 the pursuing of low ideals, to the attaining of worthless 
 objects, that man is a fool. The idiot is the man who 
 has not ; the fool is he who misuses what he has. And yet, 
 bold as it may seem to say, the number of the latter 
 surpasses the number of the former as the stars seen by the 
 aid of the telescope surpass the number of those seen by 
 the naked eye. 
 
 Fools ! fools ! How shall we speak of them ? Where 
 begin ? Rich fools ! poor fools ! great fools ! little fools ! 
 wise fools ! ignorant fools ! old fools ! young fools ! male 
 fools ! female fools ! fools everywhere ; thirty millions of 
 people, mostly fools. Few idiots ; fools in multitude ! 
 How shall we distinguish them ? By what standard shall 
 we judge them ? For myself I decline to be judge or 
 measurer. We may not act here as they act in detective 
 tactics, where they 'set a thief to catch a thief.' As one
 
 FOOLS / 169 
 
 conscious of what the label would be that the angel-visitant 
 would affix to him I will not set up my own powers as 
 capable of rightly judging others. To the law and the 
 testimony we will go ; to the highest rule of conduct known 
 to mortals we will turn ; by the brightest light in which men 
 have seen light we will read. What saith the Bible ? What 
 saith God ? Over and over again the voice of the Eternal 
 hath spoken, and the listening ear has caught these words, 
 1 Thou fool !' To whom were they spoken ? To myriads, 
 no doubt ; but for convenience' sake we will classify them, 
 and when classified we will take three as fairly representa- 
 tive of the fools of all time : r. Fools in regard to religion. 
 2. Fools in regard to knowledge. 3. Fools in regard to 
 worldly possessions. 
 
 i. Fools in regard to religion. 
 
 'The fool hath said in his heart, No God.' You must 
 not adopt the reading of the Authorized Version or the 
 Prayer-Book rendering of this statement. The original will 
 not bear translating ' The fool hath said in his heart, 
 There is no God.' All the wisdom of the ages were not 
 equal to arriving at that conclusion. To be able to make 
 such a statement as that, man must himself be possessed of 
 some of the attributes which we ascribe to God. He must 
 have measured all the heights above, and plumbed all the 
 depths beneath ; he must have peered into every secret 
 hiding-place of the universe, and scanned all the infinite 
 recesses of infinite space; he must have learnt how the 
 things that are came to be ; he must have seen the esoteric 
 cause of every exoteric phenomenon ; the riddle of life
 
 170 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 must be to him as an open vision, and the puzzle of death 
 as a tale that is told ; he must have been everywhere at the 
 same moment, and seen everything at the same time, or 
 how can he dare to say, ' There is no God ' ? An idiot, 
 incapable of thought, powerless to reason, may say it ; but 
 a thinking mind, a reasoning judgment never ! 
 
 We do not need much philosophy to teach us that behind 
 every effect there is a cause ; that every consequent must 
 have had a precedent ; that every phenomenon is the result 
 of action. The thinking minds of the world have come to 
 the conclusion that the cause, the precedent, the active 
 force, above, behind, and within all we see, and all that is, 
 is God. Called by different names ' Jehovah, Jah, and 
 Lord ' yet names that practically connote the same object, 
 the Infinite, Eternal, Almighty Presence. 
 
 No ; the fool's negation is not the negation of reason, 
 but the negation of conduct. He does not say ' There is no 
 God,' but he lives and acts as though there were none. 
 He won't be affected by thoughts of God ; he won't be 
 trammelled by the everlasting ought that accompanies a 
 recognition of God ; he won't be distracted from his own 
 selfish ends and purposes by any obligation that the thought 
 of God imposes. He will go through life as though God 
 were a myth, and His purposes dreams ; he says in his 
 heart, ' Be God what He may, He shall be nothing to me.' 
 The Voice Eternal cries to all such, ' Thou fool !' and 
 alas ! the multitude to whom it cries ! The world is thronged 
 by men who do not doubt there is a God, who do not 
 reason until they convince themselves that there is no God, 
 who are not careful to ascertain what arguments there may
 
 FOOLS! 171 
 
 be for or against the dogma that HE Is the Eternal, 
 EVERLASTING I AM ; but who do not care a bent pin one 
 way or the other ; whose conduct is not affected, whose 
 judgment is not touched, whose ideals are not governed, 
 whose pursuits are not ordered by one single thought of 
 Him, by one single concern about Him. 
 
 It may be doubted whether, impelled by reason, there is 
 one single atheist in this world ; it is absolutely certain that 
 there are millions who are as indifferent to God as though 
 He were a bronze monstrosity enshrined in a heathen 
 temple ; who give Him no more thought than they give to 
 the inhabitants of the other planets that hang suspended in 
 space. Practical atheists ! Godless souls ! Fools ! No 
 God ! Life a babbling current over a stony bed ; coming 
 no whence, going no whither ; with no recognition of the 
 Divine ' I ought,' no care for the Divine ' I must !' Fools ! 
 Why ? Because only in God is life realizable. Only in 
 Him do we grasp the meaning and the mystery of life. 
 Only in His light do the riddles find an answer, and the 
 puzzles a solution. Only in Him is there satisfaction for 
 those yearning capacities that disseverate and distinguish 
 man from the brute. Only in seeking Him do we seek the 
 absolute. Only in finding Him do we find rest. 
 
 ' He lives who lives to God alone, 
 
 And all are dead beside : 
 For other source than Him is none 
 
 Whence life can be supplied. 
 For life within a narrow ring 
 
 Of giddy joys comprised 
 Is falsely named, is no such thing, 
 
 But only DEATH disguised !'
 
 172 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Fools ! We know them : the young man bent on sensu- 
 ousness ; the slave of his appetites, his passions, his basilar 
 powers ; given up to the pleasures of the table, the pleasures 
 of the wine-cup, the pleasures of animalism, the greed of 
 lust. No prayer to hallow his days ; no white-winged angel 
 to hallow his nights ; no eye for the chariots of God sweep- 
 ing through the heavens dropping benedictions; no thought 
 of the Ineffable. Poor little shrivelled, atheistic soul ! No 
 God ! No God ! 
 
 One of such, and a typical one, visited Niagara in 
 company with some kindred souls. As he stood above the 
 raging cataract, and looked at it leaping, surging, dancing, 
 laughing, throwing up here a pearly mist of gauzy glory, and 
 there a rainbow of gorgeous hues, he put his little disc of 
 glass to his eye and simpered : ' Neat ; yes, very neat.' 
 Turning to leave the stupendous scene, his eye caught the 
 form of one of the females who had travelled with them, 
 tricked out in colours that might make the rainbow spanning 
 Niagara's mighty gorge hide itself in the mist. Her virtue 
 was no greater than it should be; but as the eye-glassed 
 youth saw her, he exclaimed : ' By Jove ! isn't she magni- 
 ficent !' Niagara was ' neat ' ; a woman in fashion's gaudy 
 array flesh and blood that appealed to the brute in him 
 was ' magnificent.' I know that young man. I see him in 
 every West-End club, and at every ball. He stares at me 
 out of every box in the theatre. I meet him in every 
 thoroughfare. I hear his guffaw in every wine bar ! Fault- 
 lessly dressed ; able to carry his walking-stick and umbrella 
 in the approved fashion all this, and yet a fool ! 
 
 And what of the thousands and tens of thousands of men
 
 FOOLS! , 73 
 
 absorbed in business until they have no room for God, no 
 time for prayer, no moments for meditation in the hushed 
 silence of eternity ? Fools ! 
 
 What of the women, immersed in fashion, steeped in 
 frivolity, the slaves of ' society,' the drudges of the froth of 
 civilization ? Very beautiful, very gay, many of them very 
 winsome, but all fools ! 
 
 Of myself I dare not say that ; but it stands as the verdict 
 of the Eternal \Visdom, ' The fool hath said in his heart, No 
 God.' And whoever is saying it, either with the lips or in 
 the life, is thereby stamped for all the eternities a fool ! 
 
 2. Let us think now of the second class Fools in regard 
 to knowledge. 
 
 ' Fools despise wisdom and instruction ;' there is another 
 text from that Divine treasury of human experience the 
 Bible, and, like the previous one, it stands as a universal 
 truth. ' How long will . . . fools hate knowledge ?' asks 
 the wise man. For ever, is the answer of Experience. It is 
 not that they hate the wise, or hate the fruits of knowledge 
 in others ; not that they despise those who by wisdom open 
 up the secrets of the universe for us. No ; what they hate 
 is the labour, the toil, the incessant application necessary to 
 the attainment of knowledge , what they despise is the 
 heavy, steep, rough road to wisdom. The pleasures of the 
 senses are much stronger in their appeal than the pursuit of 
 knowledge. It is easier to remain ignorant than to grow 
 wise ; and because it is easier, the majority choose it, but 
 their choice makes them fools. 
 
 I was talking to a lady not long since about one of John
 
 174 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Ruskin's books, and she confessed to me that she did not 
 read Ruskin much, because she found it so hard to under- 
 stand him. Not that she coiild not understand, but because 
 she found it hard to understand. Precisely ; that is the 
 spirit of the age. We like to have our thinking done for us, 
 and take our scraps of knowledge as we take medicine in 
 homceopathic doses. The man who makes strong appeals 
 upon our brain force, who harrows our reason, and makes 
 us rub our brows, and literally dig out his meaning, we do 
 not like that man. We want someone to analyze his work, 
 bring his great thoughts down to little simple propositions, 
 turn his grand, archaic, philosophic terms into vulgar 
 English ; then we say, ' Dear me, how interesting !' 
 
 There never was a time in the history of the world when 
 knowledge was so accessible to universal man as it is now, 
 and probably there never was a time when it was more 
 universally despised. Think how that for a few shillings we 
 can buy books that will give us a whole treasure-house of 
 knowledge on almost every phenomenon of the universe. 
 And yet how few avail themselves of them ! Is it not a 
 sorry proof that the wise man's dictum of the fools of his 
 day is true of the fools of to-day that where one scientific 
 handbook, dealing with questions that affect life on every 
 side, is sold, a thousand novels find buyers ? 
 
 A great wise man writes a book on some of the laws of 
 the universe say astronomy, or geology, or mineralogy, or 
 botany, or zoology ; another man, not wise, but witty, smart, 
 with an eye to those three almighty letters s. d., writes a 
 novel dealing with the eternal sex question, a novel that 
 a sensible reviewer does not hesitate to stamp as 'smutty.'
 
 FOOLS / 175 
 
 Which, think you, will have the larger circulation ? I will 
 tell you. The great wise man thinks himself fortunate if 
 five hundred copies of his book are sold ; the pot-boiling 
 writer of the smutty novel advertises the fact that the first 
 edition of his book consists of fifty thousand. 
 
 Surely, Carlyle, thou wert right ' Thirty million people, 
 mostly fools.' ' Fools hate knowledge.' 
 
 I am accidentally thrown into the company of a young 
 man, and, being interested in every type of human being, I 
 try to find out all I can about him. I learn that he is one 
 of that over-worked and under-paid class of men known as 
 city clerks. His hours are from nine to four. ' Delightful !' 
 say I : ' I wish mine were ! Then you have a good bit of 
 spare time ?' ' Oh yes, moderate.' ' You live in the suburbs, 
 I presume?' 'Yes.' 'How, then, do you spend your 
 evenings ?' ' I read mostly.' ' Excellent !' 
 
 I begin to think I shall like that young man, and so I try 
 to learn further, and to see if we have anything in common. 
 Perhaps we are interested in the same studies. ' Are you 
 studying history, or languages, or any of the physical 
 sciences ?' I ask. ' No ; I am a novel-reader.' ' What ! 
 Wholly a novel-reader ? Can you tell me the name of yon 
 glistening star ? Can you tell me the habits and the laws of 
 the life of the primrose ? Can you speak any language but 
 your own vulgar tongue ? Do you know anything of the 
 history of the formation of this earth ? No ! And yet you 
 spend your evenings novel-reading !' 
 
 Give me a label. I am sorry to do it he is smart, well 
 dressed, gentlemanly but God says it, and he must go to 
 his own place, a place among the 'thirty millions, mostly
 
 176 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 fools !' I label him Fool. And if I were to label everyone 
 like him, the army of labelled ones would be mightier in 
 number than the soldiers of the Queen. 
 
 Nor is the folly confined to the male sex. I am perfectly 
 astounded when I talk to women, taking them as a class, at 
 their utter want of knowledge of everything outside the 
 domestic and social sphere. I cannot get up anything ap- 
 proaching enthusiasm for the latest thing in bonnets, hats, 
 mantles, and gowns ; I admire them greatly, but I can't 
 discuss them. I don't want to talk about things domestic. 
 To discuss my neighbours bores me ineffably. And when I 
 have said this, what is there left but the last novel, the play 
 of the moment, or society's latest function ? And all this 
 with a universe of worlds wanting to tell us their secrets, 
 with flowers nodding to us to be recognised and understood, 
 with millions of treasure-houses holding their doors ajar that 
 we may go in and explore. Oh, if you would only give the 
 time you spend on novels, literary scraps, and sentimental 
 rubbish, to some definite study, you would not only inform 
 your own mind, and have a source of lasting satisfaction in 
 yourself, but you would enrich the world with higher ideals, 
 nobler aims, and purer methods of life. For ' as the woman 
 is, so is the man.' ' How long, ye simple ones, will ye love 
 simplicity . . . and fools hate knowledge ?' 
 
 3. I come now to the third class of fools indicated in the 
 Bible, that is, fools in regard to worldly possessions. 
 
 There are two characters depicted to us in our Lord's 
 parables as great examples of this kind of fool Dives and 
 he who is known as the Rich Fool. Both immensely rich,
 
 FOOLS' i 77 
 
 yet the one crying in Hades piteouslyand in vain for a drop of 
 water to cool his parched tongue ; the other dying suddenly 
 at the moment when he thought his happiness had begun. 
 Now, wherein lay the foolishness of these men? Not 
 certainly in the fact that they were rich. Our Blessed Lord 
 never spoke of riches as things in themselves to be con- 
 demned or despised. What He did condemn was the 
 miserable folly of storing riches, and not using them to 
 right ends. 
 
 In describing the condition of the Rich Fool, He does 
 not so much as hint that there was anything blameworthy. 
 The man's ground brought forth plentifully : that showed 
 him a good farmer, and hence a worker with God. When 
 barns proved too small to hold the produce of his land he 
 would pull them down and build greater : that showed him 
 a prudent man. Why, then, did God hurl that awful 
 anathema at him ' Thou fool : ? Why ? Because the man 
 regarded his stored riches as things to be kept to minister 
 to his own selfish greed. God intended them to be used 
 for the world's common good. That is clear from what 
 our Lord adds as a comment on the parable : ' For so," 
 says He, ' is everyone who layeth up treasure for himself, 
 and is not rich towards God.' 
 
 Money is good, riches are good, treasure is good, when 
 honestly gained and rightly used ; but to store them for the 
 pleasure of having them, and with the gluttonish intention 
 of making them minister to the lusts of a sensual life, is 
 wicked ; and the man who so acts is a fool. 
 
 And yet what an immense proportion of the thirty 
 millions are fools in this sense ! 
 
 12
 
 178 MODERN PROBLEMS AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 
 
 Listen to John Ruskin on this question. Speaking to 
 the merchants of Bradford in a lecture, he asked them : 
 ' What is it you want ? Suppose you get millions of gold 
 pieces, what would you do with them? and what do you 
 want them for? If you do not want money as a mere 
 instrument to noble ends ; if you only want it to hoard it, 
 to pile it up, and to die worth (what a ghastly phrase " to 
 die worth " !), say, half a million, why not save all your 
 pains, and practise writing ciphers, and write as many 
 as you want ? Write ciphers for an hour every morning 
 in a big book, and say every evening, I am worth all these 
 noughts more than I was yesterday. Won't that do ?' he 
 asks. 
 
 If not, why not ? Noughts in a ledger are quite as use- 
 ful to you as gold pieces in a bank that you mean to 
 leave there till you die. It is not what you have, but what 
 you use, that makes you rich ; it is not what you gain, but 
 what you hide, that makes you a fool. And yet the rever- 
 ence of the world is for fools. A man may be a positive 
 ignoramus, unable to speak the Queen's English, a good 
 bit of a brute in his private life, and yet if it is known that 
 he has a huge fortune in the bank, the world bows down 
 before him, as the Israelites did before another golden calf. 
 He dies ; men speak of him as the dead millionaire. God's 
 epitaph on his tomb is, 'Thou fool !' 
 
 The genuine riches are the riches gained by doing good. 
 Not in accumulating, but in devoting ; not in storing, but in 
 wisely spending, does true wisdom lie. There would have 
 been IJQ tormenting flame for Dives if he had done his duty 
 with his riches ; there would have been no condemnation
 
 FOOLS ! 179 
 
 for the other rich man if he had had higher ideals of the 
 uses of wealth. 
 
 If you would escape the awful epitaph, written by God's 
 own finger, be selfless with that which you gain. Care less 
 for what you are going ' to die worth ' than for what is the 
 true worth of living : even to be rich towards God, and to 
 lay up treasure in heaven. And thus 
 
 ' Make the heavenly period 
 Perfect the earthen.' 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDKORD.
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 "Kouss at, \k 
 
 REV. W. J. HOCKING, 
 
 Vicar of All Saints', Tufnell Park. 
 
 A Book of Addresses for use on Good Friday, either at 
 Home by those who cannot keep the Three Hours in Church, 
 or by the Clergy in Church. Small crown 8vo, cloth boards, 
 is. net. 
 
 'The best among recent manuals of the kind which we have seen.' 
 Church Bells. 
 
 LONDON : WELLS GARDNER, DARTON & CO., 
 3, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.G.