M I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER? 
 
 o 
 064 
 
 A SEKMON 
 
 I'KEACHBD BY THE 
 
 MORRIS JOSEPH, 
 
 ON THE 14TH OCTOBER, 1876, 
 
 ON THE OCCASION OF THE TWENTIETH CONGRESS OF 
 
 THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE PROMOTION 
 
 OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
 
 LIVERPOOL : 
 
 I*IUNTED BY EGERTON SMITH & Co., "MERCURY" OFFICE, SCHOOL LAM:. 
 
 1876.
 
 'AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?" 
 
 "And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, 
 I know not : Am I my brother's keeper?" (GENESIS iv. chap., 9th verse.) 
 
 THE first of the long series of crimes which have stained the history 
 of the human race had been committed. The jealousy and hatred 
 of his brother which was inflaming the heart of Cain not the last 
 instance of bitterness and ill-will springing from the performance of 
 religious rites had impelled him to the perpetration of one of the 
 most fearful offences of which human beings can be guilty that of 
 murder, nay, fratricide. The awful deed had just been done, and 
 the murderer, thinking that by avoiding the sight of his victim he 
 might escape the consequences of his act, either had hastened from 
 the spot where lay his brother's lifeless body or, according to the 
 Talmudical legend,* had hidden it in some secret place. 
 
 But he was speedily undeceived. His parents had previously 
 learned, when the voice of the Almighty reached them as they 
 crouched in the breathless terror of guilt within their shady retreat 
 in Paradise, that He knows every sin that is committed against 
 Him, and will, most certainly, call the offender to account for it. 
 And now in that awful moment, when the full sense of the enormity 
 of his crime was stealing upon him also " in the cool of the day "- 
 \vhcu the heat of passion had subsided and reflection had taken its 
 place now he was to discover, in his turn, that every crime every siu 
 against man God's all-seeing eye beholds in like manner, and for each 
 one will he hold the culprit responsible. " Where art thou?" was the 
 question addressed by the Divine voice to Adam and Eve as they 
 were concealing themselves, as they thought, among the trees of 
 Eden. " Where is Abel, thy brother?" the Almighty demanded of 
 Cain, when he was cheating himself with the idea that he might 
 rob another of God's precious gift of life and yet be held guiltless 
 by the Giver that though he had sinned thus deeply against his 
 brother who was 3ead, and could not avenge the wrong, he had 
 not also sinned against the Almighty who could and would bring 
 
 * Pirke R. Eliezer.
 
 his foul deed into judgment. The two expressions are similar in 
 form and in import. They taught the guilty ones the great lesson 
 of responsibility of responsibility in the one case for sins against 
 God, and in the other case for sins against man. It is with the 
 latter instance that we have now to deal. 
 
 " Where is Abel, thy brother ?" The words are addressed to all 
 of us to-day, though they were first spoken to Cain. We are taught 
 by the question, as he was, that we are held responsible by the 
 Almighty for our brother for our fellow-creatures and that the / 
 harm that happens to them through us not alone directly through / 
 our active interference, but also indirectly through our indifference, / 
 our apathy, our neglect will be laid to our charge, and we must ' 
 answer for it. We are answerable not alone for the suffering which, 
 by our sins of omission or commission we inflict upon those with 
 whom we are constantly coming in contact, but also for the wide- 
 spread misery which prevails amongst the general community to 
 which we belong if, though we know of it, we yet put not forth our 
 hand to relieve it, in even the slightest degree. It is not enough 
 that we care only for those who are of our own kindred or our own 
 race not enough that we strive to soothe the pangs and to reduce [ 
 the hardships which are endured by the poor of our own people I 
 not enough that we avoid inflicting pain either of body or of mind / 
 upon those who are dear to us. Our solicitude for suffering must; 
 have a wider range. We must say with the philosopher of old, 
 " I consider nothing that is human foreign to my sympathies." 
 
 There is much pain and want experienced by thousands of human 
 beings in this country every day. We cannot see an appreciable 
 part of the misery they endure, but we know of it, and we must 
 help to assuage it. Help to assuage it, not alone by the easy method 
 of giving money, but by using every power that in us lies, every 
 opportunity that is afforded us, for the purpose of striking at the 
 root of the evil, and thus preventing its recurrence in the future. 
 Those powers and those opportunities necessarily vary with the 
 individual. Some may be able to promote the good cause the 
 glorious cause of progress and humanity by making their voice 
 heard in its behalf in the Legislature of the country. Others who 
 have been gifted with special aptitude for the work, and who have 
 made the subject of poverty and its attendant evils their study, may 
 use their pen ; while those who have neither advantage may yet 
 give some of their leisure time to thoughtful consideration of this 
 grave question, and do all they can however little that " all" may 
 be by speech, and by the silent, yet potent influence of their vote 
 to bring about much needed improvement in the condition of our 
 poorer classes.
 
 5 
 
 We dare not be indifferent to such matters. We dare not confine 
 our sympathies within the circle of our own religionists, and think 
 that our duty lies only there and extends no further. There is 
 enough to be done, Heaven knows, even within that limited sphere, 
 to alleviate misery and to ameliorate the social condition of the 
 indigent. The work is of sufficient difficulty and magnitude to en- 
 gage the most anxious thought of philanthropists for generations 
 yet to come, and to make those of this generation weary, nay, well- 
 nigh despairing. But that is no adequate reason why our aims 
 should not be wider, or our efforts be restricted always to the same 
 narrow channel. It is possible for us to lend an attentive ear to the 
 claims which the great problems presented by distress generally 
 have upon our consideration, without neglecting the smallest particle 
 of the duty we owe to our own poorer brethren. ' The two sets of 
 obligations run parallel to each other. They do not clash. "We 
 are our "brother's keeper," and "brother" has a larger signification 
 than the relationship springing from the ties of blood or religion. 
 Every pang which is suffered by a member of the great community 
 to which we belong, whether he be near to us or far from us, either 
 in point of affinity or creed, is a thing that concerns us all. So long 
 as we permit our fellow-creatures to live in a foul atmosphere or in 
 unhealthy dwellings, knowing, as we do, that such surroundings 
 must sooner or later accomplish their fell work and produce di- 
 and suffering, so long do we neglect culpably neglect duties which 
 devolve upon us by reason of our common humanity duties which 
 have been laid upon us by the " One Father whom we all of us have," 
 by the " One God who has created us." Nay, whenever human 
 beings succumb to an epidemic which might have been either stamped 
 out before it became mischievous, or prevented altogether ; when 
 people die needlessly die through wanton neglect on the part of 
 the living die because the sanitary arrangements of our towns and 
 houses are defective, or because sufficient precautions have not been 
 taken to confine an infectious disease within the smallest possible 
 limits their death is indirectly laid at our door. They have died, not 
 only through the fault of those who are in power and whose business 
 it is to look after such matters, but through the fault of the commu- 
 nity at large, whose business it is to look after those in power, and 
 therefore through your fault and mine who are members of that 
 community. We are responsible for their death, and " the voice of 
 the blood of our brother crieth unto God from the ground." 
 
 And we cannot plead in answer to the accusing voice that our 
 brother's well-being has nought to do with us, that we have our 
 own affairs to attend to, that we are not our " brother's keeper." 
 For this is the plea that Cain advanced, but in vain, when the de-
 
 6 
 
 mand "Where is Abel, thy brother?" was whispered to him. 
 " 'Lord of the Universe,' " he replied," so the Kabbins teach, " 'hast 
 Thou not made me a husbandman ? I have to cultivate my field and 
 my vineyard. Am I my brother's keeper?'"* So, too, it is useless 
 for us to urge in our defence that we have our own immediate work 
 in life to do, our own bread to earn, our own welfare to care for, 
 and that we ought not to be taxed with the additional duty of 
 actively promoting the general weal or with, responsibility when the 
 measures taken to secure it fail. Already to a certain extent we 
 assume that duty and admit that responsibility by cheerfully bear- 
 ing those pecuniary burdens which are imposed upon us by the 
 State with a view, among other objects, to preserve the public 
 health and to mitigate the distress which prevails among the lower 
 orders of the people. And our duty begins only with these money- 
 payments. It does not end till we have done our best to ensure 
 that the sums thus contributed will be applied in such a manner, 
 and in the practical administration of such laws as will secure the 
 high purpose for which they are designed. 
 
 Nor is it only the social and physical welfare of our " brother "- 
 still using the word in its wider sense that is entrusted to our 
 keeping. Strange as it may sound, we are answerable also for his 
 vices and his crimes at least, for such of them as might have been 
 prevented had our legislation and our social arrangements been 
 different. We do not always recognise this truth, but it is a truth 
 nevertheless. We see a being who, we are taught, has been created 
 in the image of God, but from whose aspect and demeanour every- 
 thing that is godlike or, let us say manly, has faded away, reeling 
 out of a public-house in a condition which it would be an insult to 
 the brute to call bestial. Whatever faint glimmerings of a soul he 
 may possess are extinguished for the time. He is simply an embo- 
 diment of self-indulgence of the lowest kind. He drags himself 
 back to his wretched habitation misnamed home and there, per- 
 haps, crowns the debasing pursuits of the last few hours by a 
 cowardly, if not a murderous, attack upon his wife. Some will 
 shrink in horror from the scene ; others will have no word strong 
 enough to denounce such fearful vice, or no word tender enough to 
 express their commiseration with the poor victim ; only a few will 
 bestow a pitiful thought upon the drunkard, sodden though his 
 brains are by drink, vile though he is altogether, reflecting that his 
 degradation is not entirely his own fault, and that he might have 
 become a respectable member of society, certainly not a disgrace to 
 it, if his lot in life had fallen in more pleasant places. But fewer 
 
 * Pirke R. Eliezer.
 
 still will think a little further, and ask themselves whose fault is it, 
 besides this man's, that he has sunk so low ? whose fault besides his 
 that he has no higher tastes than the love of drink, that there is one 
 place the public-house which stands for him instead of amuse- 
 ment and books, almost instead of home, that from vice he is 
 tottering into crime ? But those who do so think and so ask can 
 find but one answer to this question. Whose fault is it in great 
 measure ? It is our own our own because we have done little or 
 nothing to save that man from falling into these depths of degrada- 
 tion. 
 
 Had we seen that he was provided with instruction when he was 
 young, instead of letting him grow up with a mind devoid of all 
 worthy ideas, and without the power of gaining them in after 
 life ; had we stepped into the home in which he was being reared, 
 and removed him from the debasing associations surrounding him, 
 he would in all probability have been saved. Yet we held aloof and 
 let him drift. Or again, if when he had attained to man's estate, and 
 as yet, vice had not gained complete mastery over him, we had given 
 him the facilities for forming and realising a nobler ideal in life which 
 had been denied him in his earlier days, the evil might even then 
 have been averted, and joy and prosperity might have been there, 
 where now there is little else but misery and ruin. Yet still we 
 extended not our hand to deliver him, but suffered him to go on and 
 meet his fate. Surely in the veritable words of Joseph's brethren we 
 may mournfully confess, " We are verily guilty on account of our 
 brother in-as-much as we saw the anguish of his soul when he be- 
 sought us and we would not hear ! "* 
 
 But our guilt may be still greater. The evil of the present may 
 be the origin of evil in the future. We must not forget that suffer- 
 ing and sin will perpetuate their consequences unless they are 
 eradicated. The weakness of the indweller in the close unwhole- 
 some streets of the great town is transmitted to his offspring, and 
 so on through many generations. The crime or ignorance of the parent 
 may become the inheritance of the child. The llabbins of the Talmud 
 point out* that in the Hebrew of the sentence " the voice of the blood 
 of thy brother crieth unto me from the ground," the word " blood " is 
 in the plural. And they account for the circumstance by saying, 
 that while the loss of money affects only him who is robbed of it, 
 murder deprives of life not only the victim, but also his unborn descend- 
 ants. In like manner, all the prevailing evils of our social system 
 affect the health and the life not only of the present generation, but 
 of generations yet to come. And do not imagine this is simply a 
 
 * Genesis xlii,, 21. t Talmud Treat. Sanhedrin, fol. 37 A.
 
 social or at best a purely moral question which I am speaking upon, 
 It is one of a still higher character it is a religious question. It 
 is a subject which Judaism has always recognised and for which it 
 has found a prominent place in its system. Charity dispensed upon 
 the wisest and the widest principle ; Education in its most complete 
 and comprehensive form ; the preservation of the Public Health ; 
 Legislation with a view to preventing crime as well as punishing 
 the criminal all these great subjects occupy an important position, / 
 side by side with Theology and abstract Religion, both in the/ 
 Mosaic Code and in the Talmud. 
 
 And therefore, on these grounds on the ground that we are not 
 altogether guiltless of the charge of permitting much suffering and 
 vice and crime to exist which we might have striven to prevent or 
 eradicate on the ground that the social evils prevailing in our 
 midst will, if unheeded, produce an increased crop of misery and 
 degradation in the future it becomes our duty, enforced as it 
 is by the teachings of religion as well as of humanity, to do all 
 that lies in our power earnestly to grapple with those evils hence- 
 forth, so that there shall be no other brother the voice of whose 
 blood shall cry against us unto Heaven. 
 
 You will readily understand that what | have said has been sug- 
 gested by the Social Science Congress which is now sitting in this 
 town, and in which I should have been glad to see more of our fel- 
 low-townsmen, and more of our own co-religionists, taking an active 
 interest. But the responsibility for the social and moral wellbeiug 
 of our fellow-men is not taught by such a Congress : the Congress 
 is due to a recognition of that responsibility. The duty of using 
 every effort to improve the worldly condition and to exalt the minds 
 and hearts of our fellow-creatftres is as old as religion and a part of 
 religion. For there can be no higher, no more heavenly task than 
 to scatter among the struggling, the ignorant, the care-laden masses 
 of the people, the golden seeds of knowledge, of virtue, and of 
 happiness. It is a work which is dictated by religion, and which / 
 bears upon its face the Divine stamp of religion But it is a work / 
 whose results will be religious too, since every mind in which truth //' 
 and exalted ideas are implanted which otherwise would never have If 
 blessed it, every heart that is made more contented, every life thattf 
 is made better and purer, is another mind, another heart, another J 
 life brought nearer to God.