XIII. THE WORK OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.[1]

XIII. THE WORK OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.[1]

‘If I find ... fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’—Genesis xviii. 26.

My first thought, as I face you this evening, is of your variety—of your different classes and creeds, of your various communities, and your various views. My second thought is of your common object, of the one longing—the voice of your real selves—which converts variety into unity. You would save the city. Like Abraham, you have seen doom impending; like Buddha, you have seen sights in your daily walk which make the life of ease impossible. You have met poverty, ignorance, and sin.

You have met Poverty. You know families whose weekly income is under the price of a bottle of good wine; men dwarfed in stature, crippled in body, the inmates of a hospital for want of sufficient food; women aged and hardened, broken in spirit because their homes are too narrow for cleanliness or for comfort; children who die because they cannot have the care which preserves the children of the rich.

You have met Ignorance. You know men and women gifted with divine powers, powers of clear sight and deep feeling, you have seen such people taking shallow rhetoric for reason, delighting in exaggeration, clamouring for force as a remedy, adopting swindlers as leaders, making a game—a Sunday afternoon’s excitement—of matters which should tear their hearts, killing time which might have been fruitful in thought and joy and love. ‘The future belongs to the man who refuses to take himself seriously,’ says the mocking philosopher. The ignorance which accepts the teaching, and which goes with a light heart to agitate or to repress agitation, is a sight to destroy anyone’s ease of mind.

You have met Sin, the degradation which comes of selfishness. In West London it often hides under fine trappings. Culture covers a multitude of sins. In the exquisitively ordered banquet intemperance and self-indulgence are unnoticed; in the phraseology of the office greed and selfishness pass as political economy; and in the polished talk of books and of society impurity loses its true colour. You, though, are familiar with East London, and here you see sin without its trappings; you know that intemperance—over-eating and over-drinking—means a brutalised nature; you know that greed is cruelty, and that impurity is destructive both of reason and of feeling. You have seen the victims of sin, that drunkard’s home, the gambler’s hell, and the sweater’s shop. You know that the wages of sin is death, and that no culture can give to Mammon any nobility or warm his heart with any spark of unselfish joy.

Poverty, Ignorance, Sin—these threaten the city. Your common longing is to avert its doom. Our fathers nourished a like longing. They hoped in Free Trade, the Suffrage, the National Education, and they have been disappointed.

Free Trade has, indeed, greatly increased wealth; the number of the comfortable has been multiplied, but it is a question whether, in the same proportion, the number of the uncomfortable has not also been multiplied. Our England is larger than the England of fifty years ago, but a larger body—like a giraffe’s throat—may only provide a larger space for pain! At any rate, Free Trade, which has given us cheap bread, has not solved the problem of the unemployed.

The extension of the Suffrage, again, for which our fathers strove, has had good results; but the example of later parliaments and the growing tendency to legislate by demonstration hardly justifies their hopes. Our fathers held that the possession of the Suffrage would be effective to destroy Ignorance; they thought that responsibility would develop the seriousness which is necessary to knowledge. They—like other good men who need God’s forgiveness—fed Ignorance with abuse of opponents; with exaggerations, with party cries, they bribed Ignorance to establish its own executioner; and now Ignorance is too much puffed up by flattery, too much enriched by bribes, to yield to the voice which from the register and polling booth says, ‘England expects every man’ to vote according to his conscience, and then to submit to the common will.

Lastly, the passing of the Education Act seemed to many to be the beginning of a new age. Schools were rapidly built, money was freely voted, and the children were compelled to attend. The Education Act has not, however, taught the people what is due to themselves or to others. Greed is not eradicated because its form is changed, and, though criminals may be fewer, gambling is as degrading as thieving, and oppression legally exerted over the weak is as cruel as the illegal blow. The children do not leave school with the self-respect born of consciousness of powers of heart and brain and hand, nor with the humanity born of knowledge of others’ burdens. It seems, indeed, as if their chief belief was in the value of competition, and their chief aptitude a skill in satisfying an inspector with the least possible amount of work. At any rate, at the end of twenty years, when a generation has been through the schools, our streets are filled with a mob of careless youths, and our labour market is overstocked with workers whose work is not worth 4d. an hour.

Poverty, Ignorance and Sin threaten the city. Free Trade, the Suffrage, the Education Act have been tried, and the doom still impends. What is to be done? The principle of true action lies, I think, imbedded in the old Jewish tale. It is not laws and institutions which save a city—it is persons. Institutions are good, just in so far as they are vivified by personal action; laws are good just in so far as they allow for the free play of person on person. There may be need of reform in institutions and in laws, so as to give to all an open career and equality of opportunity, but it is persons who save; and if to-day fifty—a company of righteous—men could be found in London, the city might be spared and saved.

In support of this position I would offer two considerations. (1) The common mind is now scientific. Professor Huxley, in summing up the results of fifty years of science, claims the creation of a new habit of thought as a greater achievement than any material invention. The common man in the street no longer expects a miracle or worships a theory as men once worshipped the theory of social contract; he asks for a fact. The fact, therefore, that a neighbour is righteous does most to extend righteousness. He who knows a just man is likely to give a fair day’s wage and do a fair day’s work, to live simply and tell the truth, and it is bad pay and bad work, luxury and lying, which do most to make poverty. He who knows a wise man is likely to search after what is hidden in thought and things, and it is carelessness of what is out of sight which makes ignorance. He who knows a good man is likely to have a passion for honour, for purity, for humanity, and it is the want of higher passion which makes sin.

The righteous man is in a real sense the master of the city. He, as Browning says, who ‘walked about and took account of all thought, said and acted’ was ‘the town’s true master.’ Were there in London a company of such righteous men, the power of Poverty, Ignorance, and Sin would be broken.

(2) I am often led to observe that taste is more powerful than interest. People remain on in situations, hold opinions, and adopt habits which are against their interests, because they are more in accordance with their tastes. They like the surroundings, they like the life, and liking is an armour which resists the strong lance of the economist. Now why is it that taste overpowers interest, and that habit is stronger than law? It is because taste comes through persons and is spread by contact. The habits or tastes, therefore, which lie at the root of Poverty, Ignorance, and Sin may best be met by the formation of other habits, which come through the example of persons, by the contact of man with man. Righteous men are therefore necessary—men who would live simply and share their luxury, whose gain would not mean another’s loss, who would work for their bread, who would do justice on wrong-doers, show mercy to the weak, and walk humbly before God. The habits of respectable people, the waste, the idleness, the sensuousness are writ large in the poverty, ignorance, and sin of the disreputable. Fifty—a company of righteous men, rich or poor, setting an example of generosity and honesty, living Christ’s life in contact with others—might create habits in them which would take the place of the old bad habits.

The question is sometimes asked, What has been the secret of the success of Christianity? Its basis is not a system but a life. Jesus, the Righteous One, drew to Himself the righteous. They that loved the light came to the light and found the universe instinct with life. Like leaven, the disciples leavened the mass. Christianity, in distinction from other systems, gives no scheme of belief and promises no paradise of plenty—it says instead, ‘The kingdom is within you.’ ‘When you do right you have all that God can give.’ ‘The joy of Christ’s is the highest joy, and His is the joy of the righteous.’ Christianity spreads, if it spreads at all, by pointing to a life.

To you, then, desiring to save the city, I take up the lesson as old as Abraham and illumined in Christ. I say, ‘Be righteous.’

Now, as once more I look at you, I am conscious of you not only as fellow-workers seeking a common end, but as our friends. I remember how one has sorrow, another joy, and another pain; I know the anxiety which besets those whose dear ones are in danger, and the failing of heart which comes with age. I go farther, I remind you that I know some of your shortcomings, the impatience and the indolence, the will worship and the weakness, the too great speech and the too great silence. I think I know the difficulties of some as I am sure I know the goodwill of all of you. Remembering, then, that some are sad and some are tried, I say again, ‘Let everyone do that which he knows to be right.’ This implies self-examination, the deliberate questioning, ‘What do I think?’ ‘What am I doing?’ This means that everyone must settle what is the law he ought to obey, and then see how, in word, and thought, and deed, he keeps that law. Before the bar of conscience all must plead guilty, and by its judgment some will have to give up pleasures and some take up burdens.

‘Thy kingdom come,’ we pray. A sudden answer to that prayer would, it has been said, be like an earthquake’s shock.

‘Thy kingdom come.’ Let it come. At once rich men would be seen hurrying from their luxurious homes to restore profits wrongly and hardly taken, and poor men would busy themselves to put good work in the place of bad work. The conventional lie on the lady’s lip would become a bracing truth, and the political orator would stop his abuse to do justice to opponents. The idler would become busy, the frivolous serious, and the Church bountiful. For the pretence of work, the business about trifles, the everlasting money changing, the service of fashion, the gathering and squandering, the ‘aimless round in an eddy of purposeless dust’—for these there would be work which would leave men wiser and the world cleaner. Instead of scandal there would be interchange of thought, and instead of ‘bold print posters,’ calm statement of fact. The drunkards would give up drink, the indolent their ease, and no one again ‘would beat a horse or curse a woman.’ Men would become honest and quiet, they would give up envying and strife. Time spent on foolish books and in foolish talk would be devoted to study, and all obeying the call of duty would serve the common good. Such a change in character would bring about a change in things, and could, indeed, turn the world upside down. If the rich were as generous and just as Christ, if the poor were as honest and brave as Christ, there would not be much left which Socialism could add to the world’s comfort. Personal righteousness must lead to peace and plenty, and without personal righteousness peace and plenty are impossible. It is, then, for us, with our high hopes, with our common longing for the time when none shall hurt or destroy, when none shall be sad or sorrowing—it is for us to be righteous. We all know a right we do not do; whatever we do, whatever we give, whatever we are, there is more we ought to do, more we ought to give, and more we ought to be.

To-night, then, seeing the doom discernible amid the undoubted blessings of this Jubilee year; to-night, conscious that the progress (for which we thank God) has threatenings as well as promises, I preach, ‘Be righteous.’ No, it is not I who preach. It is Poverty, Ignorance, Sin. It is God Himself speaking through the pity and anger raised by the sight of these things. It is God Himself speaking through the reason raised by the thought of these things. It is God, the Almighty, the ‘I am,’ ‘Who is, and was, and will be,’ who says to-night, ‘Be righteous.’ If fifty righteous men, with Jesus as their Master, ‘feeding on Him by faith,’ would form a Holy Communion, the city might be spared for their sakes.

Samuel A. Barnett.

PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON

JUNE 1888.