[1] As in the judicial privileges of the Baron of Bradwardine and his likes.
[2] The hereditary executioner in Maurus Jokai’s novel, _Die schöne Michal_.
In both of these extreme cases individuality is minimised. In the former the individual does not pretend to any high capacity. In the latter he pretends to a considerable capacity, but this being cut apart from the principle of the whole, and pretending to be everything in itself to exist absolutely or for its own sake has lost the connection which gave it value, and becomes a mere pretension.
There is a strange and sad institution in which, it may be suggested, the two extremes of error are combined. This is the institution of “the { 317} poor” as a class, representing, as an ethical idea in the modern mind, a permanent object of compassion and self-sacrifice. “Poverty,” it has been said, “has become a status.” The “déclassés” have become a social class, with the passive social function of stimulating the goodness of others. [1] Let any one consider carefully, from the point of view which regards ethical ideas as an embodiment of human or social purposes, the offertory sentences of the Church of England. It is needless to press the criticism, for no one would be likely to deny that here we have ideas gathered from other soils and climates, and rightly applicable only in the spirit, but not in the letter. “Give alms of thy goods, and never turn thy face from any poor man; and then the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee.” “He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord, and look, what he layeth out it shall be paid him again.” The victims of misfortune in a small community, under strict regulations, as were the Jews, for the promotion of industry, are one thing. The recognition of a class marked by _the function of dependence_--to use a contradictory expression--in a vast community whose industrial organisation rests on the individual will, is another thing. The idea of pity and self-denial, inherited, I presume, largely from the Jewish scriptures as also from the New Testament, has tended, in the modern world, to become mechanical, and combine with a false class-conception. All who know the inner life of evangelical Christians a { 318} generation ago will admit that, among earnest persons of this type, the notion of the tithe--the devotion of one tenth or more of the income to purposes of religion or benevolence--had been inherited as a guiding idea, representing an end valuable _per se_, almost according to the letter of the offertory. I am not suggesting any vulgar charge of other-worldliness, but recalling a genuine conviction that the surrender of a portion of income to a less fortunate class of the community was in itself desirable and a religious duty.