Christian Charity

“And there came a traveller unto the rich man; and he spared to take of his own flock and his own herd to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him.” — 2 SAMUEL xii. 4.

I WANT to speak to you this morning of the relations between the rich and the poor in our city life; and these verses from the Old Testament suggest, in the way in which the Old Testament always suggests the New, in the way of metaphor and parable, the full gospel truth at which I hope that we shall be able to arrive.

The mixture of gold and clay of which our human nature is composed is nowhere so strikingly displayed as in the constant tendency of men to conceive lofty purposes and then to try to attain them by mean and sordid methods. We are so used to the sight of it, that we do not feel how strange it is. That a being should seek nothing noble, should live a brute’s life through and through, that would be intelligible enough. That a being should seek high things and then refuse to take any low ways to reach them, should rather give up the hope of reaching them at all than seek them by unworthy ways; that too would be intelligible. But that men should seek the very highest, earnestly, zealously, genuinely seek it, and yet make the method of their search consist in acts which contradict the very essential ideas of that which they are seeking, this surely shows a strange condition of our human life. Men try to get more close to God by hating, persecuting, murdering, God’s children. Men try to convert their fellow-men to what they know is truth by arguments which they know just as well are lies. Men are captivated with the idea of self-denial, and then they invent ingenious ways to make self-denial comfortable and easy. The high impulse and the low self-indulgent method are both real, and this same confused and contradictory humanity of ours is able to contain them both. Men do not seem to know that, however bright and strong they frame the golden gallery of their ambition, the only chance of their getting up to it must be in the strength of the stairway which they build. They are always building steps of straw to climb to heights of gold.

In this old story from the book of Samuel we have a picture of a hospitable man, a man who really wanted to help the poor traveller who came to him, but who wanted to help him with another man’s property, to feed him on a neighbor’s sheep. There is real charity in the impulse. There is essential meanness in the act. “He spared to take of his own flock and his own herd to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him.” Here is real kindliness and real selfishness in the same heart; and not in struggle with one another but in most peaceful compromise. “I want to feed this guest of mine,” the rich man says. “How fortunate that I am able to do it without encroaching on myself, without taking of my own flock and my own herd.” And by and by there sits the guest before the smoking feast, and the host’s sheep are all heard safe and bleating through the open windows.

I have said that this Old Testament story was a sort of parable of New Testament truth. It might be more than that. It might be traced into almost literal application. No doubt in these our modern days we do precisely what this strange mixed creature of the book of Samuel did. We feed the poor whom we pity on our neighbor’s sheep. A great deal of our official charity, of our support of charitable societies which we urge other men to support while we are ready to disburse their riches with a patronizing condescension almost as if they were our own gift, comes very near the pattern of this ancient benefactor. But what I want most to speak of is not exactly that. There is what we may call perhaps a development, a refinement, of his self-deception, which escapes its grossness and yet keeps and repeats its essential vice. There is a sense in which it may be said that a man meaning to be charitable, and perhaps freely bestowing his money on the poor, still spares to take of that which is most truly and intimately his own to give to the wayfaring men who are always coming to him in the complications of our life. It is this sort of self-indulgence into which many most excellent people are always falling; and it is this which our best thought and our newest plans about charity are feeling very deeply must somehow be changed before the relations between the rich and the poor, between the householders and the wayfarers, can be what they ought to be in a Christian land.

For one of the truths about the advancing culture of a human nature is that it is always deepening the idea of possession and making it more intimate. “My own” are always becoming more and more sacred words to growing men. What is your own? In the crude savage state, in the intellectual and spiritual childhood beyond which many men never get, it is your goods and chattels, your money and your houses and your clothes. They are your property. Then grow a little finer man, and what succeeds? You come to certain habits, certain ways of life, the tokens and signs of certain privileges which you have enjoyed. These mark your deepened conception of your personality. You value yourself be cause of these; the manners of a gentleman, the habits of a man who has lived well and is well-bred. You look down on the rich man, however rich he be, who has not these. Mere wealth becomes to you only the garment which sets off the habits of your cultivated life, and which is yours only in the moderate sense in which the garment ever is the man’s. He might lose it or cast it away, and yet still keep all himself. But by and by you become yet a profounder man. Below the habits of your life opens the world of thought and knowledge. Ideas take hold of you. You take hold of ideas. And when you have done that your ownership in them be comes so real and vivid, they are so truly a part of your self, so intimately and really yours, that it seems as if the previous ownerships had not deserved the name. Riches are mere trinkets, and habits are mere tricks. Of neither will the man say unreservedly, “This is mine,” who has found a new sacredness in those words as he has learned to use them of the truths which have be come to him like very life. And then once more, when life still further deepens, when in the gradual attainment of character the man comes to count that his own which he is, when to possess intrinsic qualities, to know himself brave, patient, self-respectful, humble, pure, becomes the satisfaction of the soul, then are not all the previous notions of possession once again made slight? Even the knowledge which his mind has won will hardly seem to be truly his own to the man who has realized with what far more intimate ownership his whole nature has taken possession of a character. What we know is like some thing lent to us, something that we may possibly forget, something that we may even throw away in fuller light. It is not ours forever like the thing we are, and which being it once we must be always through the eternities, unless in some eternity we cease to be ourselves.

These are the deepening degrees of ownership. You see how, as each one of them becomes real to a man, the previous ownerships get a kind of unreality. The saw age owns his forest. The man of civilization owns his rich and complicated life, and his houses and fields are but the symbols of the higher life he has attained. The scholar, the thinker, has passed down and into a yet profounder property. He has come to that which no circumstances, no man, can take away from him. And then the seeker after character, he whom in Bible phrase we call the “saint,” has gone into the inmost chamber, and counts money and company and even knowledge as only the means and assurances of the one thing which he really possesses, which is himself, his personal nature, his character.

And now is it not clear that with this deepening of the idea of property, the idea of charity must deepen also? I want to give a poor man what is mine. It is my duty and my wish to give. What shall I give him? If I have got no farther into the idea of property than the first stage, I am satisfied when I have filled his empty hands with dollars. But if I have gone farther than that, I cannot be content till I have bestowed on him by personal care something of that which dollars represent to me and without which they would be valueless, the noble and ennobling circumstances which civilization has gathered round my lot. But if I have gone deeper still and learned to count truth the one precious thing in all the world. I shall feel that I have “spared to take of my own” to give him, till I have at least tried to provide not merely for the body but for the mind. And then, to take once more the final step, as soon as I have come to think of character as the one only thing that I can really call my own, my conscience wiD not let me rest, I shall think all my benefaction an imperfect, crippled thing, until I have touched the springs of character in him and made him the sharer of that which it is the purpose and joy of my life to try to be.

I have dwelt long on this because I wanted to make clear the true philosophy of those convictions which have been growing stronger and stronger in the minds of charitable people of late years, and which have recently found expression in the most intelligent and conscientious efforts for the relief of poverty. Evidently it is by these convictions that all the best charity of the future is to be inspired. The sum of those convictions is that no relief of need is satisfactory, none meets the whole want of the needy man or answers the whole duty of the benefactor, which stops short of at least the effort to inspire character, to make the poor man a true sharer in what is the real substance of the rich man’s wealth. And at the bottom of this profounder conception of charity there must lie, as I have tried to show, a deeper and more spiritual conception of property. The rich man’s real wealth, what is it? Not his money! He is a poor * man to the end if he has nothing except that. And yet it is something associated with his money. It is some thing which his money may give him peculiar opportunities to win and keep. It is something which came to him in the slow accumulation of his money. It is a character into which enter those qualities, independence, intelligence, and the love of struggle, which are the qualities that make true and robust manliness in all the ages and throughout all the world; independence, or what the poet calls “the sweet sense of providing,” the joy of self-support; intelligence, or the trained quickness to discern what is the true nature and what the true relations of the things about him; and love of struggle, the capacity of buoyant hope and of delight in the exercise of powers against resistance, — these are the substance, the heart, the core, of the rich man’s privilege. And men are coming more and more to feel that the rich man does not do his duty by the poor man, the rich class does not really take of its own and give it to the poor class, unless by some outflow of itself it gives these qualities, and sends a perpetual stream of independence, intelligence, and struggle, down through the social mass, making the spiritual privileges of those who are living on the heights of life the possession and inspiration of the waiting, unsuccessful, discouraged souls that lie below.

And then, at once, one thing is evident, that this makes charity a far more exacting thing than it can be without such an idea. It clothes it in self-sacrifice. It requires the entrance into it of a high motive. 1 may feel it well to give a poor man money, or even to train him in the decencies of life, or even to give him knowledge, from very low motives; merely to save myself from importunity, merely that he may not offend my fastidious taste, merely that he may become less dangerous. But before I seriously undertake to make of him an independent, intelligent, struggling brother-man, to wake him from his torpor, to set him on his feet, to kindle in his soul that fire which keeps my own soul full of light and warmth, I must have something more than the impulse of a wise economy. This needs a sympathy which makes his life, with all its needs and miseries, my own. It demands of me to wrestle with his enemieu, to undertake a fight for him which he is not yet ready to undertake himself, to sacrifice myself that I may make his true self live.

Perhaps this is more clear if we see how it is illustrated in all the profoundest gifts which men are called on to give to their fellow-men. The most sacred gift that any of us can try to give to his brother is Christian faith; and I am sure that if you have ever thought of it at all carefully, you have seen that just in proportion to the profoundness of the faith which you yourself possessed, has always been the profoundness of the act of giving it, and also the degree of struggle and effort and self-sacrifice with which the gift has been bestowed. Here too the conception of property measures the conception of charity. If faith to you meant nothing deeper than the holding of certain well-proved propositions, then the giving of faith to your brother-man meant only the presentation of those propositions to his intellect, all backed up with their unanswerable proof. And it was wholly an easy thing to do. You glibly told the argument which you had learned, and all your pride of partisanship stood eagerly waiting to see assent dawn in your pupil’s face. But if faith by a far deeper experience had come to mean for you something far more profound, the resting of your soul on the soul of your Father, the full entrance of your nature into God’s nature by grateful love, then how much greater was the boon you had to give. How much more earnest was your struggle with your disciple till he had received it. How you used the well-proved propositions only as the means of bringing these two hearts together, God’s and God’s child’s. How you wrestled and watched and prayed. How at last, when your friend really was a believer, your joy was all generous and noble; fully and thankfully content that he should be a sharer of your faith, even though his views of truth and the propositions in which he stated it were very different from yours.

There is a more sacred illustration even than this. We all think of God as giving of that which is His own to us who are His children. Is it not true that according to our conception of God’s ownership will always be our thought of His bestowal? Property and charity once more will correspond. If when we think of God, the great privilege of His perfect life seems to us to be that He is perfectly happy, that He can never suffer, then the great gift of God will seem to us to be mere happiness, immunity from suffering, reward to all His servants who have served Him well, and simply forgiveness, simply the lifting off of penalties from the sinners who have repented of their sins. And to such gifts we cannot well attach the thought of sacrifice with out the shaping of some half- commercial theory such as long clung about the truth of Christ’s atonement and still haunts that truth to the bewilderment of many earnest minds. But if, upon the other hand, God’s great possession is His holiness, if the sublime prerogative of His perfection of which we always think is that He never sins, then His great gift will be holiness too. Not safety from punishment but purity from wickedness will be the promise which shines like a star before our spiritual hope. And in the giving of that supreme glory of His glorious life we can well see, by dim illustrations that our own life furnishes, how there not merely may be but there must be sacrifice. The mysterious intrusion of sorrow for us into the divine life, the surrender of incarnation, the tragedy of crucifixion; all this becomes not clear of mystery, but full of gracious possibility, as soon as, with the highest conception of God’s possession, we have mounted to the completest idea of His salvation.

This last illustration gives me the chance to say distinctly what I have already intimated once or twice, that the deeper conception of benefaction, which will not rest satisfied with anything short of the imparting of character, still does not do away with the inferior and more superficial ideas. It uses the lower forms of gift still as means or types or pledges. When I think of God as the giver of goodness, I am led not less but all the more to thank Him for the forgiveness of my sin. But that forgiveness is not any longer an end in itself. It has become to me the means, the figure, the promise, of the holiness, His own holiness, for which He is trying to melt a way into my soul. When I try to bring my friend to a spiritual faith in God, the arguments with which I try to meet his objections become not less but more dignified and urgent because their value lies not in themselves but in the new spiritual condition for which they are laboring to make a way. And so when you or I or a whole charitable community conceives the profounder thought that the poor are not merely to be rescued from starving but inspired and built up into self-support, intelligence, and the love of struggle, there is in such a new conviction no abandonment of the necessity of money-giving. The giving of money becomes all the more necessary. Only it is ennobled by being made the type of a diviner gift which lies beyond. Sometimes the higher gift may be so directly given that the type is needless. Sometimes the modern benefactor may say like Peter at the temple-gate, “Silver and gold have I none, but in the name of Jesus rise and walk;” but the rule of life will be that the type is needed for the full work of the reality; and money must be given all the more richly and willingly, the more transparent it becomes to show the higher purpose lying in behind it.

We live, as I have said already, in the midst of a certain dissatisfaction with the methods of charity which have long prevailed; in the midst of much misgiving and wondering whether perhaps the work of almsgiving men and women and of charitable societies, which have poured out their benefactions freely in our great communities, has not often done more harm than good. All thoughtful citizens have welcomed the effort after a more systematic and intelligent administration of charity of which we have heard much, and of whose development we hope to see a great deal more. We need to remember certain things as we think about it. First, that all true organization helps spontaneity and does not hinder it. The organization which discourages spontaneous action, and does not, by due direction and suggestion, simply reduplicate its force and so encourage it, is worse than worthless. And second, that the effort to help the poor not merely out of starvation, but into character and the self-support which can only come by character, is not a relaxing but a tightening of the demands of charity. It makes charity harder and not easier. It calls for profounder sympathy, and for more sleepless vigilance. To the charitable man or the charitable community which keeps both these truths in mind, which is on its guard perpetually against the hardening of charity into a machine, and expects perpetually the opportunity of completer and completer entrance into the lot of the suffering and needy, to such an one there looms up, I think, now in the distance, a noble vision of what the relations of the rich and poor in a great city may become. It is a vision which has the same charm of soberness, thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and infinite promise, that belongs to what we may call the more rational and lofty Christian faith which it seems as if God was opening before His church. It is a vision not of money recklessly flung abroad in undiscriminating relief of suffering; nor, on the other hand, of tight, hard machinery, grinding forth help without sympathy, from between the wheels of inflexible organization; but a vision in whose fulfilment there shall be some thing like the true kingdom of God on earth, in which no soul shall be satisfied until, to some other soul which is personally its care it shall be giving the best that God has given it, making use of all lower gifts richly and freely, but always with the purpose, never lost sight of, never forgotten, of bringing character, the life of God, into the life of one more of His children.

We, to whom the question comes of what the rich man may and can do for the poor man, live in the midst of a great city; a city ever growing greater and greater, and putting on more and more the character which belongs to those vast aggregations of humanity which, according to some men’s judgment, are the frightful plague-spots of the earth, arid, in the judgment of other men, are the crowns and glories of our planet. We have the poor man before us not in the mere fact of his poverty, but as his poverty is always being bruised and embittered and exasperated in the life of a great city. Let us think for a moment what it must be to be poor here in the midst of these roaring and insulting streets; how different the burden of poverty must be here in the city from what it is when a man has to carry it through quiet country lanes, with all the sweet sights and sounds of nature in his eyes and ears. Then we shall see something of the wisdom and profoundness which the problem of charity demands here in the city. The city poor man then, remember, lives in the sight of wealth which is continually changing hands. There is no settled fixedness of property. Where one man flourished yesterday another man is flourishing to-day, and the old prosperity has disappeared. Not in the city, as in the country, do the same households hand their houses down for generations as if they had some chartered privilege of security with which no upstart aspirant must interfere. In the midst of this pervading atmosphere of chance, of opportunity, the poor man walks with a perpetually disappointed hope which never can entirely die out in calm despair; restless with a continual wonder that, in all this ceaseless change, none of the shifting fortune ever falls to him. What condition of things could be more fit to create discontent which never ripens into energy, a movement which can only fret and chafe. The city poor man seems to live on the brink of a Bethesda which the angel is forever troubling, but into which he learns to peevishly complain that there is no man to put him down at the right moment. Its waters seem to mock and taunt him as they sparkle inaccessible in the sun light.

And again, the poor man in a great city sees wealth and wealthy men as a class. He does not know them as individuals. And a class of men, known only as a class, keeps all the exasperating qualities of personality, but loses the graciousness which belongs to individual relations. The political party which we hate is always more hateful to us than the men of whom it is composed. The religious sect which we despise is always more despicable to us than its individual believers.

And yet again, the city poor man is very apt to live in squalid circumstances which, while they make him wretched and embittered, disable at the same time the powers of repair, and beget a dull and heavy carelessness. To the poor man in the country, however poor he is, the bright skies at least bring unconscious influences of order; and the fields, with their circling seasons, will not let him totally forget that there is such a thing as beauty. You cannot shut out the horizon with its hope from the most hopeless soul. He little knows how almost absolutely indestructible is the elasticity of the human soul, who thinks that poverty in the city loses nothing in being condemned to live in the midst of perpetual disorder, ugliness, and dirt.

And still, with all his enforced hopelessness, the stir of the great city keeps the mind of the poor man in its midst alive, awake. He never can become as torpid as the country clown. There is no opiate for him in the thin and eager air. He must lie upon his rack with senses all acute and active.

And yet, once more, the poor man finds himself of necessity made a servant and contributor to the very wealth which overbears him, and whose existence often seems to him an insult. In the complex existence where he lives, he cannot draw his life apart and till his little plot of earth and disregard the wealth which he cannot possess. He has to build up fortunes which are not his own. He seems to be the rich men’s creature, used for their purposes as long as they require him;

“And having brought their treasure where they will, Then take they down his load, and turn him off, Like to an empty ass, to shake his ears And graze in commons.”

And then, to name only one circumstance more, if, as so often is the case, the poor man in the city is one who once was prosperous, he is kept sore always by having to live in the presence of his old prosperity. He meets his old proud footprints stamped in the familiar streets. The ghost of what he used to be insults him everywhere. The memory of other days intensifies each misery. He cannot draw a curtain of forgetfulness about his altered lot, and fall asleep in dull content.

Now put all these conditions together in your mind, and then think what a tumult of unrest, of hopeless, blind, unreasonable, disorderly repining and complaint the poor man of the city carries in his heart. He does not analyze it into its elements, as I have tried to do, but it is all there; far more terrible in its unanalyzed completeness than any such enumeration of its elements can describe. He is no man of our imaginations, no mere lay-figure for a sermon. He is real. You meet him every day. His is the face that looks moodily at you as you hurry by him on the sidewalk, or throw the street’s mud from your carriage wheels upon his coat. His is the hand that rings your door-bell in the dusk; and his the voice that whines and cringes to you in your hall, and curses you as he goes down your steps, with the memory of your glowing comfort before his eyes, and your quiet assurance that you have no money to give him in his ears, and the leaden load of wretchedness and disappointment heavier than ever at his heart. His is the house you hurry by in some back street, and wonder how a man can live in such a place as that. And 0! be sure there do come to him hours when that horrible home seems to him every whit as hateful as it does to you. He is no fancy. He is terribly real. The streets reproach him with their boisterous prosperity and arrogant wealth. To us those streets are sympathetic. To prosperous men, full of activity, full of life, the city streets, overrunning with human vitality, are full of a sympathy, a sense of human fellowship, a comforting companionship, in all that mass of unknown and, as it were, generic men and women, which no utterance of special friendship or pity from the best-known lips can bring. The live and active man takes his trouble out into the crowded streets and finds it comforted by the mysterious consolation of his race. He takes his perplexity out there, and its darkness grows bright in the diffused, unconscious light of human life. But when activity beats low and life has lost its buoyancy, when the wretched man is miserably and desperately poor, then the streets and the crowds are no longer sympathetic; then the great sea which used to heave the strong ship on, whether it would go or no, opens its depth and drowns the broken wreck. Ah, how little do we know of how the great full city which is always enticing and encouraging and exhilarating us, is mocking and beating down and treading under foot some poor brother who walks along the pavement by one side.

What can we do about it, do you say? Ah, that is the question that our charity and charitable people are just coming to see that they must answer. Thank God, they are learning to look deeper for their answer than they have ever looked before. They will find the an swer gradually. Some time or other they will find it perfectly. I certainly am not so foolish as to think that I can give it ready-made here in the hurried end of a sermon. Enough if I have set any of you to thinking that it must be found, and that the finding of it is no easy task.

But one or two things let me say before I close, that I may not seem to have spoken wholly unpractically. The first thing that men must do in order that they may really, thoroughly relieve the poor, is to profoundly recognize that there can be no complete and permanent relief until not merely men who have money shall have given it to men who have no money, but until men who have character shall have given it to men who are deficient in that last and only real possession. Not till you make men self-reliant, intelligent, and fond of struggle, fonder of struggle than of mere help, — not till then have you relieved poverty. If you could give every poor man in this town of ours a house, a wardrobe, and a balance in the bank to-morrow, do you think there would not be poor men and rich men here among us still? There must be, so long as there are some men with the spirit of independence, the light of intelligence, and the love of struggle; and other men who have none of those things, which make the only true riches of a manly man. And the second thing is this: the rich men of our community must be truly rich themselves, or they can have nothing worth giving to the poor; nothing with which they can permanently help their poorer brethren. Only a class of men independent, intelligent, and glorying in struggle themselves, can really send independence, intelligence, and the dignity of struggle, down through a whole city’s life. This is the reason why your selfish and idle rich man, who has neither of these great human properties, does nothing for the permanent help of poverty. The money which he gives is no symbol. It means nothing. 0 let us be sure that the first necessity for giving the poor man character is that the rich man should have character to give him.

And then, lastly, the rich men, rich in character, must know that no man can give character to other men without self-sacrifice. Labor, personal effort, personal intercourse with the poor, these must come in before the work can be done. You cannot do your duty to the poor by a society. Your life must touch their life. You try to work solely by a society, and what does it come to? Is it not the old story of the book of Samuel? The traveller appeals to you, and you spare to take of your own thought and time and sympathy to give to the wayfaring man that is come to you. They are too precious. You say: “There is thought, time, sym pathy, down at the charity bureau to which I have a right by virtue of a contribution I have made. Go down and get a ticket’s worth of that.”

The poor are always with us. The wayfarers come to us continually, and they do not come by chance. God sends them. And as they come, with their white faces and their poor scuffling feet, they are our judges. Not merely by whether we give, but by how we give and by what we give, they judge us. One man sends them entirely away. Another drops a little easy, careless, unconscientious money into their hands. Another man washes and clothes them. Another man teaches them lessons. Thank God there are some men and women here and there, full of the power of the Gospel, who cannot rest satisfied till they have opened their very hearts and given the poor wayfaring men the only thing which really is their own, themselves, their faith, their energy, their hope in God. Of such true charitygivers may He who gave Himself for us increase the multitude among us every day.