Charity

‘* Jf a brother or sister be naked, and
destitute of daily food, and one of
you say unto them, Depart in
$eace, be ye warmed and filled:
notwithstanding ye give them not
those things which are needful to
the body; what doth it profit?” — ST JAMES ii. 15, 16.

A N Arab possessed a horse so famous far and near for its beauty, gentleness, and matchless speed, that he had many tempting offers to part with hen He refused them all, and, in particular, the repeated solicitations of one who offered an enormous price. One day, as, with head wrapped in mantle and lance at rest, he was pressing homewards through the burning desert, his horse suddenly started; and there, right across the path, lay a poor traveller — alive, for he groaned; but exhausted, and apparently at the point of death. Like the good Samaritan — for, though fierce, these wild Bedouins have savage virtues, are hospitable and friendly — he dismounted, and finding the unfortunate traveller unable to walk or even to stand, set him in his own saddle. No sooner done than, as if the vigour of the steed had been imparted to its rider, the bowed and languid form became instantly erect; the horse suddenly wheeled round, sprang off to the stroke, and a laugh of triumph revealed the trick. The man who had offered him an enormous price for the horse was on her back. Assuming the guise of distress, he had taken advantage of the other’s generous feelings, to steal what he could not buy. The injured man did not curse him; nor, fortified by the stoicism which the Mohammedans’ belief in fate imparts, merely bow his head to the misfortune. He soared above it to a height of moral grandeur which few reach. Calling on the other to halt, he said that he had one favour to ask; it was this, that he would never tell how he had won the horse, because, were that known, it might hinder some from receiving help in circumstances of danger not feigned, but real — and so doom the unfortunate to perish. It is but justice to human nature to add — what indeed shows that fine feelings may lie dormant in the worst of men — that the other was so touched by the unselfishness and nobility of this appeal, that he relented; and, riding up to the man he had wronged, gave him back his horse.

Human nature is a plant that, unchanged by climate, colour, or circumstances, presents the same characters, and bears the same fruit, amid the smoke of crowded cities as in the lonely desert. And this appeal of the Arab, in the advantage so often taken of our kindness, in the bad persons on whom it is bestowed, and the bad uses to which it is turned, touches what forms the greatest obstruction to the flow of charity, and our ready, literal obedience to the precept — “Deal out thy bread to the hungry; if thou seest the naked, clothe him, and bring the poor that are cast out into thy house.” But because others do ill, is no reason why we should cease to do well. The case is one to which the apostle’s words are specially appropriate, “Be not weary in well-doing.” This leads us to remark —

That the abuse of our charity should never dry itp our hearts.

Who is David, and who is the son of Jesse? so Nabal replied to David’s appeal for help, at the time he and his men were hiding in the wilderness of Paran — adding, by way of reason, this reproach to refusal, “There be many servants now-a-days that break away every man from his master.” Perhaps there were. The earthquake that casts towers and castles to the ground, brings vile reptiles out of it; the storm that sinks the noblest ships, throws sea-weeds and wrack upon the shore; and the political convulsions of Nabal’s time, producing corresponding effects, had very probably thrown the dregs of society, like scum, to the surface; and relaxing the bonds of order set loose bands of marauders on the land. These supplied the sordid churl with an excuse for refusing David; and so does the abuse of our charity those who seek to throw over their covetousness the cloak of some decent pretext. Theirs is never abused; their excuse but the sound of a hollow heart, the rattle that a withered kernel

makes within its shell. I do not now address

R myself to these, beyond reminding them of the solemn, awful, warning words, “Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.”

But there are many who feel for the poor. They would gladly relieve their wants. They are pained to see these wretched mothers, and yet more wretched children; but having found their charity often misapplied and thrown away on the unworthy and ungrateful, they are afraid to give; and not seldom tempted, on discovering how they have been imposed upon, to say in their haste as David did in his, All men are liars! But if charity often fails in its object, so do other things. The sun shines on many a fair blossom that never turns into fruit, and the clouds pour their bounties on fields that yield no harvest. But to leave figures for facts. Education, as well as chanty, often fails: it is but a small proportion of children that become ripe scholars. Moral training fails; how many parents, besides David, have had their hearts wounded and torn by wicked children! The labours of husbandry fail; it is but a proportion of the seed that springs; and a still less proportion that, reaching maturity, in golden sheaves rewards the farmer’s toil. Physic fails; diseases rage, and patients die in spite of it. Even the pulpit fails; but what preacher thinks of abandoning it, because many of his sermons do no good; nay, like abused charity, do positive harm — hardening those they fail to soften, and making people as indifferent to the most solemn things as a hoary sexton to the mouldering remnants of mortality, the skulls he tosses out of the grave?

Man is answerable for duty; but not for results. And as with faith in a promised blessing, we are always to preach, in season and out of season, to sow beside all waters, you are never to cease your charities. Let not the cold ingratitude of other hearts freeze your own. Ingratitude! Abuse of mercies! Who met so much of these as our blessed Lord? Yet the fountains of His heart were ever full, and, till that heart was broken, never ceased to flow. His miracles yielded no adequate return; nor out of thousands to whose limbs they had given vigour, whose tongues they had loosed, on whose blind eyes they had poured light, brought one, so much as one, to cry, Crucify him not. Yet His works of beneficence were like a river that, breaking over every obstacle, and in its ample flood, burying the stones that would impede its course, widens as it runs, and is largest at the beach where it is lost in the sea. So let it be with our sympathies and charities! May our hearts, with advancing age, grow less sour and more sweet, less hard and more tender, like downy peach or golden apple that ripens to its fall.

Our charity should be discriminating.

Discriminating, first, as to its objects. The “household of the faith” have a prior claim on Christians. “If thy brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food” — thy brother, thy sister, these tender expressions apply to them in a holy and peculiar sense. Next come others; and last, but not to be omitted, our enemies. We never rise so high above ourselves, and so near to God as in yielding obedience to these wonderful divine words — If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.

Careful discrimination is required also both in what we give, and how we give. This is implied in the words, Blessed is the man that considereth the poor; and is brought out fully by those who turned these psalms into rhyme —

“Blessed is he that wisely doth
The poor man’s case consider.”

This is true of public charity. The poor man’s case has not been always wisely considered. Very much the reverse. Listen, for example, to this description of the old Poor-laws of England. “The pauper was led to think that the Government had undertaken to repeal the ordinary laws of nature; that children should not suffer for the misconduct of their parents, nor the wife for that of her husband; and that no one should lose the means of subsistence whatever might be his indolence, prodigality, or vice. They offered food to the idle, and impunity to the profligate.” And out of those convents that swarm with lazy monks and idle nuns, where shall we find more questionable, and, in many of their results, more pernicious charities than the splendid hospitals that rise around our city? These, not like its old walls, a defence, are monuments of the folly, if not of the vanity of their founders. There they stand, tempting parents to cast on cold officials the loving burden which God lays on a father’s back and in a mother’s bosom. Moses might never have been the man he was unless he had been nursed by his own mother. How many celebrated men have owed their greatness and their goodness to a mother’s training! What is the law of nature? God has committed children to the care of their parents, and the care of parents to their children; and the charity that interferes with this law of Providence is the -parent of evils far greater than it cures. In Scotland, the people once were poor, but not mean; and if our countrymen were proverbial for pride and poverty, it was the pride, if such term could be applied to a feeling so noble, which made sons and daughters work late and early, walk in sober gray, and live on the hardest fare to keep a venerable and venerated parent off the poors-roll. For the aged man or mother there was always a corner, and that the warmest in the cottage, where one whose infancy they had nursed tenderly watched their declining years. Within these homes, sacred to filial piety, I have seen a lovely counterpart to the scene without, where the ivy which once found support in old wall or hollow tree, now embracing, supports it in its turn, and covers its hoar decay with a graceful and glossy mantle. Honour to the humblest home whose thatch covers a parent’s head; where daily toil is cheerfully borne to obey the precept that finds an echo in our hearts, “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee!”

Discrimination as to whom, and what, and how we give, is also necessary in the distribution of private charity. St Giles, the patron saint of our city, in devout imitation of Him who made Himself poor to make us rich, is said to have sold all his property for the benefit of the poor, — to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And what were the result if any of us should blindly follow his example, and pour our fortunes into the lap of the parish that bears the old saint’s name? What good would it do the haggard men and women that there and elsewhere swarm so foul and thick from this rocky castle to yonder silent palace? We should make ourselves poor, but, alas! not them rich. They owe their poverty to intemperance and improvidence; and a stream of money turned on them being less like water poured on a sand-bed than oil on raging flames, would but increase their wretchedness, and feed the vices that have hung them in rags. “It came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom;” but now-a-days rags are more frequently than otherwise the devil’s livery.

The love of drink is “the root of all evil.” In an obscure and wretched close you have lighted on a decent and devout widow, with no cordial by her dying bed but a cup of water. Happy to find such a person there, as a flower blooming in the desert, you hasten to minister to her necessities; these words of Jesus sounding in your ears, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of them, ye did it unto me.” But the wine given to touch dying lips a wretched daughter turns to another purpose; so one day, when engaged in prayer, the opening of a door, thick and strange mutterings, a reeling step, the noise of one falling induce you to open your eyes — and there, before you, on the same bed, lies a dying mother and a dead-drunk child. You have often climbed the stair to read and pray by the bed of a woman who talks religiously; and whose sickly husband, and pale, ill-fed, ill-clad children, have drawn out your bounty. Circumstances occur to excite suspicion, — suspicions darken, deepen; and one day, from beneath a pillow, on which her head and God’s Word lie, you drag the evil to light, — draw out the drunkard’s bottle. Away, high up in a garret room, you find a young man, sinking under a slow decline, and shivering beneath a thin, threadbare coverlet, in the cold that blows keen through patched and broken window. You try to raise his thoughts to the Saviour and the house of many mansions; and leave to send warm coverings for his emaciated form. Before your return, that wretched apartment has seen a terrible struggle. Turning a deaf ear to his pitiful cries, unmoved by the tears on his hectic cheek, his father and mother have pulled the blankets from his body; and sold them for drink. I speak what I know; what my own eyes have seen, and ears have heard. These are examples of the difficulties that beset the feet of charity, and teach the necessity of discrimination, if we would not increase the evils we attempt to alleviate.

Nor is that all. What we bestow on idleness or on vice is so much taken from the worthy poor. They have the first claim on what we can spare; and to throw away our means on others is to defraud the widow, the orphan, and poor, innocent, suffering children. It is, therefore, our duty to meet improvidence and intemperance sternly — no doubt with Christian pity, but that mingled with the indignation due to those who are not so much robbing us, or the rich, as heartlessly plundering the worthy poor. There are such — many worthy poor. We should seek them out; and it should be our happiness to contribute to theirs. Let us earn for ourselves what is better than gold that perisheth — the blessing of them that are ready to perish — a character such as His, who, at once the painter and the subject, has left us in this likeness of Himself the most beautiful portrait of man, “When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; when the eye saw me, it gave witness of me. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I delivered the poor that cried; the fatherless and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me; and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.”

Charity brings its reward — first in this world.

While there is no class more tender-hearted than physicians, I have observed that people who live amid their comforts, and are seldom brought into relationship with suffering, are apt to grow selfish. In such circumstances our nature, like a single tree that stands out in the open field, grows dwarfed and gnarled. Indeed, just as without sin the character of God had not been fully developed, nor shone forth full-orbed — merciful and gracious, as well as great and holy, it is difficult to see how, without the presence of suffering, helplessness, and poverty, our nature could have been brought out in some of its most attractive aspects. Sympathy with suffering, as well as our sense of what is right and wrong, separates us by an immeasurable distance from the lower animals. It presents one of the truest and noblest characteristics of humanity. The pampered dog never turns a piteous eye on some lean, and hungry, and houseless fellow; but, growling at his approach, and rushing open-mouthed to the assault, drives him from the door. It is fellow-feeling, not mere feeling that raises a man above a beast. It is that which allies us to the angels who take a lively interest in mundane affairs, and, watching the struggle between good and evil, fill heaven with joy as often as the battle goes for Christ, and a sinner is saved. And those gentle sympathies and kindly feelings which the abodes of poverty awaken, are means whereby the Spirit of God softens us — moulding the plastic heart into the likeness of that blessed Saviour who is “touched with a feeling of our infirmities,’’ and of that blessed God who is “very pitiful and of great mercy.”

The hammer and the iron are both hardened by the same stroke. So is the heart that, denying pity, does a cruel thing, and the heart that denied suffers it. But acts of kindness improve the morale both of him who gives, and of him who gets. Indeed, it is both a sad and a lightsome thing to visit the dwellings of the poor. It clears our sky of vapours. We return more contented and happy; much stouter to endure the petty troubles of our own lot — seeing how comfortable our circumstances are compared with those of others, and how many would be glad to exchange condition and cup with us.

Next to peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, there is no higher happiness on earth than lies in making others happy; nor is man ever so gracious and God-like as when shedding brightness and blessings around him. There is no flower in gay parterre so beautiful as the roses that grow on an orphan’s cheek; no sunshine like the smile of a happy face; no sound of woman’s voice, or lute or harp of sweetest strings, so full of music as the singing of a widow’s heart; no jewel on queenly brows so brilliant as the tear in eyes we have lighted with gratitude and joy. Yes — it is more blessed to give than to receive; and these beautiful lines apply as well to charity as to mercy — “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice bless’d. It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.”

Charity brings its reward in another world.

Some of the greatest masters have given us pictures of the Last Judgment; placing Him whom they had often painted dying on His cross amid a crowd of enemies, high above another crowd — . crowned and seated on a great white throne. Around Him are the host of heaven, and stretching away into distant space are the hosts of heaven, His angel train. Before Him is the world; a vast assembly where, all on one level, stand kings and beggars, priests and people, the master and his slave, men and women, childhood and old age. Their attire, or some other expedient of the painter’s, reveals what had been their condition; their place, and the passions on their faces, what it is. Here, on the right hand, some are on their knees, adoring — some forms stretch upward with eager arms — some strike golden harps — some are waving palms of victory; but all, with their eyes fixed on Jesus, look as if they had never sinned nor sorrowed. God has wiped away all tears from all eyes; and their beautiful faces, so serene, so pure, so radiant with heavenly joy, inspire the wish, as we gaze on the picture, Their place be mine! may I die the death of the righteous; and may my last end be like His!

Between these and those* on the left, what a contrast! how great a gulf! Despair, horror, agony, are depicted in their looks; driven downward by armed angels, they fall headlong into the hell that opens its fiery mouth to receive them; while above their wail we seem to hear the words of Jesus, as, waving them away, He says, with a touch of sadness in His voice, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels!” These pictures, though often studied as mere works of art, are great sermons. Like Jonah on the streets of Nineveh, they might arrest the feet of busy crowds, as they cry from the walls where they hung, Remember that thou must die, and after death the judgment.

The picture on which I would fix your eyes is one of Christ’s own painting. It sets before us not so much the scene as the ground of the last judgment. The multitude are parted into two great classes — at the close of the day to be for ever parted. “These” — I quote our Lord’s own words; the everlasting is not mine, but His — “these,” proving that no stern prophet ever spake such awful truths as the Saviour’s own gentle lips, — “these go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal.” Momentous verdicts! changeless destinies! On what pivot do they turn? on this, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visits to the sick and to the prisoner in his lonely cell. The tree is known by its fruit. Unhappy trees on which Christ, coming to seek such fruit, finds none! I am not saying that we are not to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints; or that there is no importance in creeds, or difference between churches; or that if people are sincere, it is of no consequence what they believe; or that there is any other name given under heaven whereby we can be saved but the name of Jesus. I have no hope but His cross. I may give all my goods to feed the poor, and my body to be burned; yet if I have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Still our Lord exalts charity to the poor into a test of piety — of living, saving faith. Identifying Himself with them, He says, “Inasmuch as ye did or did it not unto one of the least of these, ye did or did it not to me!” David returned to Saul, bringing the giant’s head; the spies came back to Moses, loaded with grapes from Eshcol; Jesus ascended to His Father, bearing in His hand the soul of the thief, blood-won trophy of His victory; one has said that Wilberforce went up to God, taking with him the broken fetters of eight hundred thousand slaves. What proofs of true piety shall we carry to heaven? What works will follow us? Shall widows and orphans, the wretched and the ragged, coming from homes which our bounty has blessed, and our prayers have sanctified, though not our saviours — “for there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus*’ — be our witnesses? May their testimony, that the same mind was in us that was in Christ, call down on us this gracious approving sentence, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”