Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
And when we go about setting things right I am not sure that we do not
mostly make them worse. I do not believe that it is the business of the
Church to set about the abolition of inequalities and the getting rid of
the distinctions between man and man. Apart from the waste of time due
to attempting the impossible, what would be gained? Pending the arrival
of the social millenium we need to do something; and that something, it
seems to me a mistake to assume must be social. "We must bring people
together": but what is gained by bringing people together when they do
not want to be together, and will not actually get together when you
force them into proximity. There is nothing more expressive of the
failure of well-meant activity than a church gathering where people at
once group themselves along the familiar lines and decline to mix,
notwithstanding the utmost endeavours of clergy and zealous ladies to
bring them together. The thing is an object lesson of wrong method.
Is there a right method? There must be, though no one seems to have
found it yet. There is in any case a right point of departure in our
common membership in Jesus Christ. Suppose we drop the supposition that
we make, I presume because we think it pious, that if they are both
Christians a dock labourer ought to be quite at home at a millionaire's
dinner party, or a scrub-woman in a box at the Metropolitan opera house.
Suppose we drop the attempt to force people together on lines which will
be impossible till after the social revolution has buried us all in a
common grave, and fasten attention on the one fact that, from our
present point of view, counts, the fact that we are Christians. Suppose
one learns to meet all men and all women simply on the basis of their
religion; when that forms the bond that unites us when we come together,
we have at once common grounds of interest in the life and activities of
the Body of Christ. Suppose the millionaire going down town in his motor
sees his clerk walking and stops and picks him up, and instead of
talking constrainedly about the weather or about business, he begins
naturally to talk to him about spiritual matters. Why could they not
talk about the Mission that has just been held, or the Quiet Day that is
in prospect? One great trouble, is it not? is that we fight shy of
talking to our fellow-Christians of the interests that we really have in
common and try to put intercourse on some other ground where we have
little or nothing in common. The things that should, and probably do,
vitally interest us, we decline to talk about at all. We are so stiff
and formal and restrained in all matter of personal religious experience
that we are unable to express the fact of Christian Brotherhood. The
fact that you smile at the presentment of the case, that you cannot even
imagine yourself talking about your spiritual experience with your clerk
or your employer, shows how far you are from a truly Christian
conception of Brotherhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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