enslaved, crushed and blighted; the spirit of Christianity would go
forth and _comfort_ them, but it would never occur to it to redress
a single one of those wrongs. It has remained unconscious of them.
To those wrongs, to men's right to be delivered from them, it was
by nature completely blind. In respect to justice, to right and
wrong, the spirit of Christianity is not so much immoral as amoral.
The notion was as alien to it as the notion of truth. Included in
its code was, it might be controversially alleged, an old formula,
"the golden rule," a commonplace of most literature, which was
popular in the East from China to Asia Minor; but that isolated
precept was never interpreted in the sense of justice. It meant
forgiveness, forbearing, kindness, but never mere justice, common
equity; those virtues were far too unemotional in aspect to appeal
to the religious enthusiast. The renunciation of life and all its
vanities, the casting overboard of all sordid cares for its
maintenance, the suppression of desire, prodigal almsgiving, the
consecration of a life, the value of which had disappeared in his
eyes, to charity and love, non-resistance, passive obedience, the
turning of the other cheek to an enemy, the whole riot of these
hyperbolic ethical emotions could fire the Christian consciousness,
while it remained utterly unmoved by every form of wrong, iniquity
and injustice (Dr. Falta de Gracia. Cited by Dr. R. Briffault, _The
Making of Humanity_, pp. 334-5.)
That, we may assume, will be one of the most striking consequences of
the displacement of Christianity in the social economy. There will be
less time wasted on what is called philanthropic work--which is often
the most harmful of all social labours--and more attention to the
removal of those conditions that have made the display of philanthropy
necessary. There will not be less feeling for the distressed or the
unfortunate, but it will be emotion under the guidance of the intellect,
and the dominant feeling will be that of indignation against the
conditions that make human suffering and degradation inevitable, rather
than a mere gratification of purely egoistic feeling which leaves the
source of the evil untouched.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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