Massachusetts -- Fiction; Working class -- Fiction
“It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to
judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to
right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The
lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on
either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast
organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are
taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone,
and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little
shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in
which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small
dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their
weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the
fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more
betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall
together as brothers; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon
ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance
which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition;
_they eliminate_ one element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But
woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on
to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success
is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be.
Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable
than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works
affirm Him. There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of
the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it.
If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that
questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of
Christendom inspire. So far from dreading such misgiving as comes from
contemplating the disparity between the Church's profession and her
performance, I welcome it as another resurrection and a new life.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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