Christian name, while it is voided of all power for good or possibility
of continuance. Where charity is gone, intellectual capacity, effectual
power, and even justice itself become, not energies of good, but potent
contributions to evil. Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of
contemporary civilization? Does it manifest itself with power today in
the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest,
between nation and nation? If not, then we have forfeited the name of
Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its
enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once
consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an
acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution.
I am not charging any class or any interest or any people with exclusive
apostacy. In the end there is little to choose between one or another.
Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the
industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than
the nominal religionist. Nor am I charging conscious and willful
acceptance of wrong in the place of right. It is the institution itself,
industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and
derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to
condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery
be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined. Charity,
that is to say, fellowship, generosity, pity, self-sacrifice, chivalry,
all that is comprehended in the thing that Christ was, and preached, and
promulgated as the fundamental law of life, cannot come back to the
world so long as avarice, warfare and hate continue to exist, and
through Charity alone can we find the solution of the industrial and
economic problem that _must_ be solved under penalty of social death.
V
THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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