I feel sure that this theory of life would commend itself to the poor, that it would be morally advantageous to the rich, and that it would be politically useful to the State. There has been too prevalent a habit—among those believers especially who ignore Satan and attribute all things to God—of taking for granted that the social inequalities and miseries of the lower classes which have come down to us from feudal and non-Christian times, can never pass away. I remember once in my boyhood how, when I represented to a farmer that the condition of his labourers was not a happy one, he met me with a text of Scripture, “The poor shall never depart out of the land;” and that seemed to him to leave no more to be said. It is this provoking acquiescence of the comfortable classes in the miseries of the suffering classes, which irritates the latter into a disbelief of the religion that dictates so great a readiness to see in the miseries of others a divinely ordained institution.
The time will soon come (1885) when the very poor will demand a greater share in the happiness of life; and the question will arise whether they can be helped to obtain this by their own individual efforts or by the co-operation of those of their own class, or by the State, or by the Church. Caution must be shewn in trying experiments with nations; but as some experiments will assuredly have to be tried, it is most desirable in this crisis of our history that the Church at all events should faithfully follow Christ by regarding physical evil, not as a law of fate, but as a device of Satan. If, by descending a step or two lower in the scale of comfort, the comfortable classes could lift the very poor a step or two higher, the Church ought not to help the rich to shut their eyes to their obvious duty by giving them the excuses of such texts as “The poor shall never depart out of the land,” or, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Poverty is often a good school: but penury is distinctly an evil; and the Church should regard it as an evil not coming from God, and should make war against it, and teach the poor not to acquiesce in it. The Gospel of Christ would be made more intelligible to the poorer classes than it has been made for many centuries past, if it could be preached as a war against physical as well as moral harm. Such a crusade would call out and enlist on the right side all the combative faculty in us; it would inspire in us a passionate allegiance towards Christ, as our Leader, desiring, asking, yes, and we may almost say, needing our help in a real conflict in which His honour as well as our happiness and highest interests are at stake; it would attract the co-operation of all faculties in the individual, of all classes in the country. In other words the theory would work; and so far as a religious theory works, so far have we evidence, present and intelligible to all, that it contains truth.