My Brother's Keeper

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” — GENESIS ir. 9.

THE first chapters of the Book of Genesis still keep their hold on human life. Indeed, it some times seems as if the difficult and puzzling questions which have been raised concerning them had tight ened that hold instead of loosening it. Many men at least have come to see that, whatever may be the fact with regard to the historical nature of the record which is written there, the narrative has a spiritual truth as a description of man’s perpetual experience, which is most valuable and never can lose its power. Much in those chapters may perplex us, but yet its pictures never fade out of our sight nor lose their meaning for our consciences.

The new-made garden with its freshness of sparkling stream and waving tree and bounteous grass; the man, first alone and then with his life richened and deepened by the woman’s presence at his side; the mystic catastrophe of the disobedient eating of the apple; the gateway with the angels and the flashing, flaming sword and the poor man and woman terrified and desolate outside; then the new poetry and pathos that came into the world with the first family

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life; the birth of the first children, the first boys the world had ever seen; and then, all of a sudden, bursting like a thunderbolt out of the sky, hatred and murder! How that picture has fastened itself in men’s hearts! The dreadful, forsaken plain where one brother lies dead beside the smouldering altar, while the other brother wanders far away with the irrevocable deed burning at his soul, trying in such hopeless despair to make himself believe that he is not the wretch he knows himself to be, answering the voice of God which speaks to him from without and from within with this angry and helpless and passionate rejection of responsibility, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

I take this last picture out of the old Book of Genesis to-day. Very different indeed is this wild son of Adam, roaming desperate through the primeval earth, from the decent and reputable citizen of our modern world on whose lips to-day we can almost hear the same question which came forth from the mouth of Cain. But the words are the same. To-day the same disclaimer of responsibility shows how disordered is our world. Still men who ought to know and care how it is faring with their brother-men refuse to know, refuse to care. We may leave Cain in his far-away remoteness and, turning to our own present days, ask ourselves the meaning of man’s indifference to his fellow-man, ask what the meaning is of that which so many men say in their hearts when they are bidden to hold themselves responsible for the lives of other men, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

And, first of all, I think, we ought to remember how difficult it always is for men to imagine them selves into a way of life of which they have had no experience or trial, and not to let that difficulty impose on us. It may be the very way of life for which they were made. The life which they are liv ing may be most imperfect and unnatural, but when you say to one of them, “Come here! Be this! “he turns upon you in unfeigned surprise. The whole thing looks impossible. You say to the idler,” Come, be a scholar. Taste the fascination of great books “; and he replies, ‘’I cannot. Other men were made to study, but not I.” You say to the selfish man, “Come, here is need, relieve it “; and he looks you in the face as if you had asked him to climb to the stars. You say to the undevout man, “Come, be religious. Come, love and worship God”; and he replies, “You do not know me. You are taking me for another kind of man. It is as if you asked an eagle to swim for you or a fish to sing.” All the time, in each man lies sleeping the power whose possession he denies, and in the use of which alone can he attain to his true life. Do we not come to feel how almost absolutely worthless are men’s descriptions of their own impossibilities? Whatever is of the general substance of noble humanity, every man may be in his degree. For a man to stand up and say,” I cannot learn”; “I cannot be generous “; “I cannot be devout,” proves only how little he knows himself.

Once, I think, I used to be imposed on by such statements. Once, when a man said any of these u8 MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

things about himself, it seemed as if it might be true, as if here might be a man in whom this one capacity of manhood had been left out; but so constantly the flowers have broken out of such unlikely soils, so often the darkest heavens have burst forth in unexpected stars, that it has come to seem as if no man’s assertion of his own deficiency were trustworthy. “God knew things of him that he did not know of himself,” we say when some new life opens upon a man who thought he had exhausted his capacity of living.

Let us be taught by such sights. Let us apply to ourselves the lesson that they teach. Let us beware of drawing hard and fast the line of our own limitations. Trust the impulsive leap of heart which tells you, when you read the life of Agassiz or of Living stone, that you too might be a devotee of science or an enthusiastic missionary. Expect surprises out of the bosom of a life which God made, and which you whom He has set to live in it only half realize, — as a tenant who came but yesterday into a palace only half knows the mystery and richness of the great house where he has been sent to live.

Now all of this applies, I think, exactly to the subject of which I want to speak to you. Here comes the demand that every man should be the keeper of his brother-man. That means, that whatever may be the care which a man takes of his own life, however he watches it and tends it, he has not done his duty, he has not filled out his existence, unless he also has, just as far as he possesses the ability and chance, watched and protected and helped the lives of other people.

Now what shall we say of that demand? It seems to me that until we think carefully about it, we have no idea of what multitudes of people there are to whom such a demand, made definitely of them, must and does seem absolutely preposterous and absurd. They may feel that somebody ought to do it, that there are people for whom it is possible and altogether right that they should go burdened with the care for others, just as there are people to dig the ditches and to build the fences, but for them it is totally out of the question, as totally unreasonable as to ask them to take the shovel in their hands.

Meet one of our gilded youth upon the street, one of those boys who was born and has grown up in luxury, and has never had any self-control asked of him except that he should not complain of the monotony of luxury in which he lived. Stop him an instant and point him to a poor, wretched cripple toiling along under a heavy burden, with poverty in every line of his poor, haggard face. Ask your bright, glittering young friend what it means that that poor creature is so poor, and why he should not in some way help him? and there is something infinitely sad and touching in the transparent honesty with which he looks you in the face and tells you that it is no affair of his. Perhaps he does remember that somewhere there is a charity bureau to which the poor creature might be sent. Perhaps he vaguely fumbles in his brain to find some remnants of what he distantly remembers to have been taught in college about the political economy of pauperism; but that it is his business to undertake 12o MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

personally, with thought and care, the relief of that poor sufferer! — you might as well tell him that it is his place to go and find the sources of the Nile.

Stand at the door of a fashionable club-house and call for recruits, earnest and self-sacrificing, in the work of political reform, or the freeing of slaves, or the repressing of intemperance, — why! I can hear even now, as I stand here, the empty, noisy laughter that comes back in answer to your summons. Nay, lift up your voice in a much nobler place. Cry aloud in the halls of learning, talk to the student at his desk and tell him how hosts of his fellow-men want the crumbs from his table, want the inspiration of his teaching presence; and what a blank unconsciousness is in his eye as he turns back to his problem, wondering how any man could dream that he ought to even feel, in his sublime search for absolute truth, the base and elementary needs of this ignorant multitude, whose very crude craving after knowledge shows how little they really know of what learning is.

Do you recognize these people whom I thus describe? Are they not real? Are they not common? Are they not specimens of many others? And what does the existence of such people mean? Does it not mean that there are in the world very many intelligent people who do not in the least believe that they have any responsibility for other people? Somebody has, they think. There are the ministers. There are the managers of philanthropic institutions. There is the “benevolent public.” But they have no such responsibility. They are nobody’s keepers but their own.

Such a condition of things, such a wide-spread conception of life which robs the world of so much strength and helpfulness, is certainly most significant and demands our thoughtful study. And the first thought which it suggests is this: that men have been too apt to think of helpfulness to their brother-men as an accidental privilege or an exceptional duty of human life, and not as a true and essential part of humanity, without whose presence humanity is not complete. See what I mean. A beautiful voice is an exceptional privilege of a few extraordinary people among mankind. He who finds it in himself thinks of it, according as he is devout or undevout, as a gracious gift of God or as a happy accident. In either case it is a personal and special thing. It does not belong to this man because he is a man, in very virtue of his manhood. Other men are destitute of it, and cannot sing any more than the stone upon the hillside, and yet they are as truly men as he. But a man has two arms, and the feeling about them is immediately and intrinsically different. They are not the exception. They are the constant human rule. It is not a privilege to have them. The man who is without them, the man who has one arm or none, — he is the exception. He is, just in that degree, just to that extent, deficient in his humanity. He is not a total man; he is a fragment or a monster. The loss may have come nobly, by some great self-exposure which it was glorious for him to make; nevertheless, he has suffered a detraction from the completeness of his humanity, and is partly not a man.

Here, then, there are two kinds or classes of possessions, and you see the difference between them. One of them is a peculiar privilege. The other is a test and proof-mark of humanity. Not to have the beautiful voice is to lack a lovely ornament and decoration of the life; not to have two arms is to lack a portion of the life itself.

And now is it not true that a large part of the trouble, in this matter of men’s helpfulness to their fellow-men, has come from the fact that helpfulness to brother-man has been put into the wrong class? It has seemed to be like the beautiful voice, a special, splendid privilege and gift; not like the two arms, a test and proof-mark of humanity. The man who had it has seemed to be something more, in stead of the man who did not have it seeming some thing less than man. Often and often the man who never dreamed of anything for himself except a selfish life has gazed with honest admiration on the men who could not rest until their brethren’s need had been relieved; but it has been as the snake might watch the eagle soaring in the sky, or as you and I might listen to the singing of an angel, — never stirred either to shame or emulation by it, because it all came by a power which we did not possess.

Suppose all that were altered. Suppose you and I really knew that in us, too, as a true part of our humanity, there was the angelic power of song; suppose the selfish man really believed that for him to be selfish was as true a loss of the completeness of his manhood as it would be for him to be lame or dumb; would not the whole aspect of the case be different? Would not the rule and the exception have changed places? Now, not the wonder and the praises and the garlands for the rare servant of his brethren, but the pity and the shame and the sense of loss for him who dared to live for himself alone, and leave his brethren unhelped. Now, not the mean and stingy question, “Why?” but the generous demand, “Why not?”

Sometimes, when we think how some one change would regenerate the world, we grow buoyant with hope, for it seems as if that one change might come to-day. But then, when we think how vast that one change is our hearts almost despair, for it seems hopeless. But this change Is not hopeless. That men should come some day actually and practically to believe and feel that a man who takes none of the responsibility of other men’s lives upon himself is a fragment of a man — that is not hopeless. There are some men, and not a few, who believe and feel that to-day, and who are trying to complete themselves, — not to win an extra-human ornament and grace, but to complete their human selves in sympathy and brother-help. I think that very often, in the most selfish man, there must sometimes come, with the recognition of his uselessness, a blind thrill of dimly realized imperfection, as sometimes the man born without arms must feel the arms to which he has a human right trembling and craving life in his poor, maimed shoulders. And I believe that the constant impossibility of thinking of God without thinking also of the necessity of care for man as a true part of His nature, does keep alive in some degree the sense, and does prepare for the time when the sense shall become universal, that man without the acceptance of responsibility for his brethren is only a fragment of a man.

How we always come back to the same truth! Man must think better of himself, not worse, — must see the essential glory of his human nature to be more and not less rich and splendid than he sees it now, before he can be his best.

It seems to me that one of the great indications of the fact that helpfulness of man to man is a true part of our human nature, and not a mere addition to it, appears in our constant experience of the impossibility of avoiding some sort of influence upon our brethren. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” you say, when some one points out to you that another man beside you is going to his ruin, and begs you to save him, — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” you reply and turn away in scorn. There might be some small show of reason in it if you could turn away entirely, if it were possible for you to shut a wall around your life so that it could have no possible influence on his. But when you try it, you find how impossible that is. Little by little you learn that you must have something to do with your brother, with your brethren.

The sense of that, when it has once taken possession of a man, makes life so solemn! There is nothing that you can do which does not make it either harder or easier for other men to live, and to live well. The little circle which your eye can trace is such a small part of your influence! Deeds which you seem to have nothing to do with are really the results of the things you have done and been.

Here is a poor suicide, who, in a frantic moment in some wretched room to-day, does that most cowardly and miserable sin, and with the pistol or the poison flees from the post where God had put him. You never saw the man. He never heard of you. Have you anything to do with his miserable dying? If you have cheapened life; if you by sordidness and frivolity have made it seem a poor instead of a noble thing to live; if you have consistently given to life the look of a luxury to be kept as long as it is pleasant, and to be flung away the minute it be comes a burden, instead of a duty to be done at any cost, with any pains, till it is finished; if this has been the meaning of your life in the community and in the world, then you most certainly have something to do with that poor wretch’s death. You helped to kill that suicide.

Here is this poor soul in its trouble feeling about for God, unable to find Him, almost driven to de spair for lack of faith. Have you anything to do with that? How can you have? You never temp ted or disturbed his faith. You never talked scepticism to him. You never told him what a childish superstition you thought it to believe in God. But what then? If you have lessened and lowered the world’s faith by your base worldliness or wanton refusal to acknowledge spiritual forces in your own life, then you have poisoned the air which this poor soul has breathed, and it is dying of your poison.

Here is a social tragedy, — one of those awful crashes which come to a household when purity, which is the soul of household strength, is gone, and the poor wretched body it has left goes all to pieces at the first temptation. You never played the tempter there. You never struck the pillars of that house with the fire of your lustful passion. No, but you have made the atmosphere in the midst of which that house must stand a little heavier with corruption through the sort of life that you have lived. You have made it by your life a little easier for a man to wrong a woman, or for a woman to disgrace her womanhood. These are the terrible necessities by which we are all beset and surrounded. I say, “I will do neither good nor evil to my brethren. I will just live my own life.” And the eternal compulsions of the universe laugh me to scorn. As well might one ray of the sunlight turn its radiance black, and think to darken nothing but itself. As well might one wave in the flowing river think that it could turn itself backward up the stream and make no confusion. It cannot be. You must do good or evil in this world. To say that you will do no good is to declare yourself the enemy of the human race.

It is also ours to accept the gracious side of the same truth. If no man can be wicked and not do harm, so no man can be brave, strong, truthful, and generous, without doing good. That we ought never to forget. We need it constantly for encour-MY BROTHER S KEEPER I2/

agement and strength. I said that if you cheapened life on you rested something of the responsibility of the suicide whom you never saw; and if you brought down the standard of social life, you had something to do with the mischief that comes in a household of which you have never heard. Is it not also true that, if you do anything to lift life and make it more precious, you are in some true sense the “keeper” of any poor tempted soul who is saved from his sin by virtue of the sense of the preciousness of life which gathers round him, and sustains or shames him in his need? Here is a man all in de spair. He is ready for anything. Murder, suicide — nothing seems to be too desperate for his recklessness. If he had lived three centuries ago he would have taken to the highway and robbed or killed, regardless of other men’s lives or of his own. Be as cynical as you will about the condition of your own time and land, you must own that there is a vast, solid influence at work to keep a man back from such desperation now. That influence is made up of the aggregate goodness of all good men. Apart from and beyond the special persuasions of personal friends, remonstrating by word and example against his sins, there is for every wicked man a great protest of all the goodness in the world, pleading, rebuking, urging, tempting him to righteousness. To that great protest every good deed of every most insignificant good man or woman makes its contribution. The boy or girl at school, the housekeeper about her quiet tasks, the laborer in his enforced obscurity, the clerk at his desk of routine, the sewing-girl, the errand-boy, — not one of them can do his duty faithfully and not make duty easier for all men everywhere; for the President in the White House and the philosopher in the midst of his great books. Not one of them but is his brother’s keeper.

Perhaps that is all true, you say, but what be comes of the elements of intention and self-consciousness? Does not this last doctrine bring the whole matter back into the region of selfishness again? I try to be good and pure for my own sake, because so I best complete my own life and gain its best results and am most happy — because so my own soul is saved; and then, incidentally, without my meaning it, some other men are helped in their temptations by my struggle. I am glad to know that my life, so far as it has been good, has had any such power, but, since I did not mean it, have I not been wholly selfish? Have I been my brother’s keeper in any sense save that in which the unconscious air has fed him and the song of the unthinking bird perhaps has lightened his despondency and made him glad?

It is a natural question. But what if there should come to us out of our experience another know ledge, — what if we should find that our lives are so closely bound up with our brethren’s that we cannot thoroughly do our duty by ourselves unless we have them and their service in our minds? What if we learn that our personal problems get their clearest light and our personal struggles their most persistent strength when we are caring that the world should come to righteousness? What if then we should do our duties distinctly as a contribution to the influence which is to save the world? Is that impossible? I do not necessarily need to see exactly where my influence for good will tell.

Some poor wretch appeals to my sympathies, and I am a brute if I will not reach down and pluck him out of any mire into which he has fallen. But surely the great wicked, needy world is not less pathetic than the single needy soul. Even more heroically unselfish than he who offers his example to a single tempted soul is the man to whom the whole world is always calling “Be pure!” “Be true!” “Be brave!” and who is pure and true and brave for the world’s sake as well as for his own. Back and forth between the world and himself flow the great tides of influence. He keeps the world and the world keeps him. He and the world make one complete system of advancing holiness. It is the experience of Jesus — “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” and “The glory which Thou hast given me I have given them.”

There is no subject with regard to which we feel so strongly as with regard to this — that if all men would do what a few men are doing the world would almost come at once to its salvation. It is a melancholy thing to see how limited is the working of the impulses which, if they could be made universal, would fill the world with light and power.

Look at this matter of care for fellow-man. In the community it appears as public spirit. How few men after all are public-spirited! How many men, with the best principles in the world, are just as hopeless as so many stones or trees for any great public interest! A public charity is to be established or to be put upon a strong foundation; a great improvement to the beauty of the city is demanded; a gross wrong or injustice needs to be rebuked; an old, stagnant condition of things must be disturbed and broken up; — how any of us can tell the men who are to do it! How, the moment other men’s names are mentioned, we instantly turn aside, or shake our heads and say, “Oh, no! There is no use in applying to them.” Why not? Are they immoral? No, indeed! Are they opposed to the public good? Are they monsters who want the evils of bad government perpetuated, and who hate progress and improvement? No, indeed! None of these things! Simply they think it is no work of theirs. They keep their own souls clean, and all besides seems to be something superfluous and extra, something which it would be a gratuitous piece of enterprise for them to undertake. What a strange delight there is (showing how exceptional that is which ought to be so familiar) when any new young man among our citizens does some notable act which shows that thenceforth he is ready to be counted among those who hold themselves responsible for the way in which things are going in their town. How few there are, when one more counts so mightily and wins such enthusiastic welcome!

The same thing is true in the Church. ‘The pillars of the Church,” we say, as if the Church were a great mass of inert atoms held up in place by a few sturdy columns on which the whole weight rested. The ideal Church is simply winged humanity — humanity with the pinions of faith all spread and moving on with one great total impulse to the realization of the divine life for man. One’s whole soul glows while he thus thinks of it; and then he turns back and sees — what? A handful of men and women who give nine tenths of the Church’s contributions; a handful of men and women of intellect and piety who are willing to teach the Church’s children and sit in the houses of the Church’s poor; a handful of men and women who do the Church’s thinking, and really grapple with the problems in which every true man who thinks honestly and seriously makes the puzzled life of other men more clear; and then a great host of men and women who never get beyond the thought that the Christian Church is made to save their souls, and that they have joined the Christian Church purely for their souls’ salvation.

Your soul! What is your soul? What is it worth? Is it worth all this, all that the Bible tells us of, all that Christ has been and is? Ah, yes, no doubt it is. That soul of yours is precious beyond anything that you can guess. All that Christ did, all that Christ is, nothing less than that is necessary for your soul’s salvation. But, all the more because it is so precious, what a shame it is that it is not pouring its power and value into the Church’s life and finding its own salvation in saving the souls of other men!

The same is true everywhere. I go into any school or college in the land, and I know perfectly well what I shall find, — a great many good consciences, a great many boys of high standards, and of pure lives, and an almost total absence on these students’ parts of any notion that they have any duty as regards the low tone, the falsehood and impurity, the frivolous or degraded dissipation which surrounds them. To keep their own souls pure, and let the college and their fellow-students go their way, — that is the most they dream of. That is where the student’s faith goes, and often his integrity goes with it. They are not used, and so they grow corrupt. They are selfish, and so they are weak. Oh, if the men who mean right for them selves would only energetically mean right for the world, should we not almost see to-day the coming of the Son of Man!

Let me go back and close where I began. It is once more the earliest world, outside the gates of Eden. Abel lies dead upon the ground, and Cain is fleeing red-handed from the murder. But there is a third presence there. God is there. It is His voice that asks, “Where is Abel thy brother?” And what a right He has to ask! It is the Father asking for His murdered child!

Is not this the great final truth about it all — that within the Fatherhood of God we are to know — there only can we fully know — our brotherhood to one another? We neglect our brethren because we are so far from our God. Within His love, surrounding us like the elemental life in which alone our souls can live, may we all learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to forget ourselves in serving them!