119 PARADOX AND PIETY. concretely and not abstractly. "As ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Edison is devoted to one of the attributes of God-to might or power. God is the "Almighty," so He comprehends the might of electricity. Howard, John Brown, Wendell Phillips-all men and all women devoted to humanity are devoted to love i. e. "to God," for "God is love;" the scientist to truth-"to God," for God is truth. The man at his carpenter's bench is devoted to love; and so, too, all that toil for wife and children, whom they work to support. So, too, is God truly worshiped by the ministry-by all devoted earnestly and fearlessly to doing good, as was Jesus. "Let Christ be in you." (St. Paul.) But, devotion! Here is where all rests as on a foundation of granite, "native to the soil"a house builded on a rock. The moralist may show that gambling is a terrible vice-that it is generalan almost universal blight affecting society; but if men and women are not "devoted" the preaching is vain. Devoted to what? To the right. Men and women can love well-doing, as the millionaire loves money. A millionaire of good deeds is the man or woman who will live always. Washington was pre-eminently one-a millionaire of patriotism. Florence Nightingale, a millionaire of humanity. There is but one motive. I speak of men and women, not as now we see them, excepting forerunners, as was John the Baptist. Jesus called him "great." He was an enthusiast. There is but one sane motive and that motive is love-the only rational motive-love of righteousness-devotion to the good-to "doing good." Devoted! Few have been devoted to the good. Those who have been, cared not for riches. In society, conditioned naturally as society ever should be, the same opportunities to make a living are open to each. That is all that is sought-a living. In each home. under sane conditions, there is plenty, and much to spare for the disabled. We have gone afar from a natural state. We are in the midst of disorder. We must come back to nature before harmony will be restored. Why should any seek to gain wealth beyond a living? Only to help the helpless. If we, by indirection, take bread from others' mouths that we may pile the loaves on our own shelves, and that beyond our needs, natural and fair, we are not moral men; and immorality should not be tolerated by society. The man who does this should have the same treatment from society as the robber. He deserves the same. They are like criminal. But the idea that defines the antidote for immorality is wrapped up in the word DEVOTION. tion? What is devo It is objective. It ends in action. The devoted one's eyes are not shut and hands folded. He says: "My father worketh hitherto and I work." The man that lives not for a cause for which he would willingly die. as did Jesus and Stephen and Emmet and Vane and Lincoln and John Brown and the millions who have fallen in battle for liberty, lives not at all. He is not at all a man in the sense of one "alive." good. And no man ought to know any cause but the common His own individual welfare he should ignore, except bodily health, daily bread, and the blessings of home and family and friends and ing good." So (God) the preacher may not specifically denounce vice, as gambling. excepting to say that no man or woman of devotion to the good can indulge in any pastimes or pursuits not in harmony with But the preacher's office is to disciple; that is, and so to lead men and women to "take up the cross." The to me is the emblem of self-sacrifice. To "kneel before the is to accept Christ, not by word but deed; for "he that doeth his or her devotion. teach cross cross' righteousness is righteous." YE 81ST LESSON. Exploitation and Nomadism. These are outside of the legitimate are unparalleled evils, and greater do not exist. All the business of the national government is to place exploitation within proper bounds. The condition of nomadism is of supreme concern, not only to government, but to society. The abuse of the first is the cause of all the turmoil and consequent suffering that afflict mankind. The abuse of the second will bring in social demoralization and it will destroy civilization. Legitimate exploitation holds the individual to the task of cultivating so much of the earth's surface as will supply the natural and essential needs of himself and his dependents, and to the use of so much of her natural products as his and their wants naturally require. And every human being should have like opportunity; while nomadism and civilization are as antagonistic, the one to the other, as fire and water. The old saying, "a rolling stone gathers no moss,' expresses an important and far-reaching truth, moral as well as economic. As to exploitation: Its abuse is causing thousands to expire this day on the field of Muckden. The exploitation of the labor of the blacks by the whites caused the civil war in America and all the evils that grew out of slavery. Unjust exploitation is hell. But for this, the world would be heaven itself. The Kingdom of God will have been established on the earth and Jesus will have come the second time only when exploitation shall be held to its just limit. How soon will this consummation be reached? It will be when the majority of mankind have become sane. He is not sane who would reap where he has not sown. The sane man will accept no more than his just due. What is due to each? No more than nature demands. The rest is common. Beyond what one consumes, others must consume, or the product perish unconsumed. What others must consume is not and cannot be mine. And as to nomadism. It may be said that whoever goes about the world in pursuit of pleasure, or to obtain control of and dissipate what he has not justly earned by the labor of his own hands or brain is an enemy of the human race. A pastoral pursuit is not wrong; but it is not a pursuit of civilized men. No men become civilized but those who dwell in fixed habitations. And to forsake fixed homes, except in pursuit of health, or as the wandering Arab, for subsistence, or to gain knowledge,-is decadence. It is going backwards a long way toward savagery. Those who rush to watering places in summer and to Florida in winter-able-bodied peopleare to be classed with those good-for-nothing troopers who in time of battle skulk-the flotsam of society's wreck-a true figure of speech. The only proper place at all times for all men and all women is at home-except when duty forces them abroad. Volumes might be filled with illustrations of this truth. Exploitation and nomadism-the two monstrosities of evils-must be held encaged like two savage beasts. What is the chief purpose and aim of political action? It is to hold in leash the hellhound exploitation. And of nomadism we may say truly that the tramp evil is a harmless pug of the social household compared with the hyena of the jungle (home-destruction and demoralization) following in the wine-and-beer-bottle-strewed path of the globetrotters and golf-and-automobile-crazed victims of the demon wealth, who run hither and thither in search of pleasure. They are the froth and foam -skimmings of the boiling cauldron of society. They are remembered only through the denunciations they have called forth from reformers. The New Testament is full of the anathemas of the Great Teacher and of His co-laborers against this detestable class of goodfor-nothing people. How scathing a rebuke is administered them by * EXPLOITATION AND CO-OPERATION. 121 the Apostle James: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton," etc. (Read, James, v.) If all Americans were nomads of wealth, spending their time as the nomads of wealth do spend theirs, and devoid of public spirit as these rich are, and shirking duty as they do shirk theirs' the American race would die out soon, as did the race of luxurious Romans, and as is confessedly the original race of New Englanders dying out "the old native American families,' as President Roosevelt denominates them-the birth-rate below the deathrate, race suicide the inevitable result, and not poverty the cause but the contrary. YE 82ND LESSON. Exploitation and Co-Operation. It may be discovered by and by that Russia was fighting for the supremacy of Europe over Asia. Unless we substitute co-operation for exploitation the Pacific ocean will become an Asiatic sea, the white race practically perish from the earth and Europe go the way that the empire of Rome went and from the same cause. England sent two hundred thousand of her best young men, the flower of the land, to fight the Boers. Eighty thousand Chinamen have, since the war ended, been imported into South Africa to work the mines for the benefit of British capitalists. At the same time the many toilers of England have no work, and fully thirty per cent of the people of England have become paupers. Now, if the British government had installed two hundred thousand or more of her stalwart Workers in co-operatively working the South African gold mines, diamond mines, iron mines, copper mines, coal mines, etc., and had placed a million of her sons on the lands of Rhodesia, Transvaal, etc., to make farms, expending as much money in establishing those industries as she did in fighting the Boers, and had gone on to install the co-operative order of production and labor in all lines of industry and business at home and wherever her flag floats-all Christendom uniting to do the same and so make an end to exploitation, then Would the prestige and power of the European race survive and beyond measure increase to the end of time. The power of Europe is nullified, as was that of ancient Rome, by the many being practically dependent on the few for subsistence. The enrichment of a class is alone considered by governments and exploitation by capitalists is all that is known the world over. is no There ground for patriotism to stand upon. As the Roman empire was overrun by hordes of Barbarians, so may Europe and America be overrun by Asiatics, and England forced out of India. people are awakening to newness of life. The Asiatic There is nothing at all to European race before they A few multi-million- have secured their inalienable rights at home. in the The European arm, and only effeminacy on her side, and despair. strength of a nation rests only in the hearts of her people; her weakness in the insatiable greed of the few. A race demoralized as are the English, as are the Americans, as are the French, as are the Russians, and as are all of European blood. by their habits of inebriety, by their tolerance of a system of social economy reducing the ninety and nine to hopeless poverty and dependence, with no homes of their own, and they tributaries of the men enriched by franchises and direct governmental favoritism, I say that such . on the wall: "Weighed in the balance and found wanting." The greed that possesses the race will in a few years—a half a millennium at most-deplete the earth of minerals, coal especially, and of most importance; and what will be left to preserve mankind from extinction? "But this is rank pessimism," one says; "there will be discoveries that will render coal and other minerals nonessential." "No," I answer, "discoveries and inventions increase the waste. See what the invention of steam power has done-steam navigation of the ocean especially-burning up the coal supply of the world-sending battle ships hither and thither on fool's errandsand no less the waste by electric power. This waste must be in some way curbed. What better to this end than disarmament, and the scuttling of all ships of war? And this will result when labor shall rule, as soon it will. A grand social movement has already begun, in line with the economic, resulting from invention of labor-saving machinery, steam and electric power-the harmonizing of conditions to suit the democratic ideals of the later age. It may be defined "co-operation versus exploitation." The seed of this movement was sown in Palestine nearly nineteen hundred years ago-a "grain of mustard seed." Christianity means social as well as moral betterment a new social order, of which the Pentecostal church was the epitome. YE 83RD LESSON. Christian Cosmopolitanism. "The world is my country," said the world-patriot, Thomas Paine. All religions are mine, I say;-but above all the Christian religion as defined in the New Testament and crystallized into institution by the Pentecostal disciples. It shines the great sun in mid-heaven. Now, if one say the society that "had all things common" was no other than the third Jewish sect mentioned by Josephus in such magnificent terms of praise-an outcome or, rather, culmination of Greek philosophy (as was the Minerva of the Parthenon and the Jupiter of Olympia the culmination of Greek art) the highest conception possible of the human mind, of sociology as well as of aesthetics-what is lost? It appears that those most ready to impale, or crucify, or burn at the stake (figuratively speaking) those who do not hold to a special sort of supernatural "inspiration," but believe all truth inspired since God, is truth, are the most ready to ignore both the "inspired" word and to trample the example set by the first church, under their unhallowed feet. In what respect is the modern church or the church since the days of Constantine (Catholic, Greek and Protestant) like the Pentecostal society? In no respect whatever. What is the church of today? It is an organization devoted to the support of a caste whose occupation is intellectual-the delivery of discourses mainly. What is the nature of their discourses? That is determined most generally by the demand of the pews. The discourses, as a rule, are designed to "tickle the ears of the groundlings." Take, for instance, the Unitarian denomination. It is a literary guild. All the rest a very little different, the Salvation Army the principal exception. Say, reader, what church is devoted to the end the Pentecostal church had in view except, to a slight degree, the Salvation Army; that is to say. social equality and the abolition of poverty and vice? Not one of prominence, if any at all. There are at least a hundred thousand clergymen in the United States-as many as soldiers in our regular army, one to every eight hundred of our people-a mighty array of the most learned and influential for good, if only they labored for the common welfare, as did the teachers of the first church who re UNIVERSAL ALTRUISM. 123 linquished all for the common weal, and not only they but the laity did the same, and that for holding back a portion Ananias lost his life. The only reason why the church of today ought to be preserved at all is the hope that it may change and become more useful-more "Christian;" that is to say, more like what it was in the beginning. The Greek church, with the Czar at its head-what good is it to Russia? A city of churches in America (all our cities are overhurdened with them as a rule) is a Sodom of wickedness. The police and mayors of all American cities would starve to death, we must believe, if they did not have under their protecting care a large army of abandoned women, hundreds of gambling and drinking hells, pool rooms, etc., that pay monthly "mulct tax." And this statement is not an exaggeration, but it is positively and literally true, as all men know. Why call ourselves a "Christian people" when we are not any more Christian than was Rome under Nero? Such drunkenness was never known to demoralize Rome in that day as is found in every American city now-and worse, too, in the cities of "Christian England," and how much better in any city in Europe? And the tobacco curse America inflicted on the world. It was gotten from savages of the stone age-the red Indians of the wilds. Does the church oppose this? No. Christianity, in the beginning, was builded upon a philosophy true and transcendantly sublime, as were also Buddhism and Confucianism. But the Christian order departed farther from the ideal of its founders than did those other great and more ancient orders, and it became a more gross superstition, and is, in many respects, so todayif the primitive Apostolic church of Jerusalem be taken for "Christian" and as the standard in comparing the present with the past. The churches of today are like the shells inhabited by hermit crabs-the original life gone out of them. The ideal presented in the New Testament is non-existent in the present church and the hermit-crab of mediaeval superstition occupies its place. And this is true. "I will make thee fishers of men," said Jesus. But the particular class of fishes sought to be hooked today by the high-salaried clergy are. like the one we read of in the Arabian Nights, that had a diamond in its stomach. To what particular practical good is the church at present devoted? Little that is effective. A prominent clergyman's name was signed by his own hand, I am credibly informed, to the petition for liquor hells in Des Moines-pastor of the most aristocratic congregation in the city! Is this, then, the high-water mark of twentieth century Christianity and a clear indication that the second coming of the Christ is near at hand? YE 84TH LESSON. Universal Altruism. Does not the New Testament show explicitly that the one fundamental aim of its authors was to present to the view of mankind the ideal Christian commonwealth?--the Kingdom of Heaven?-the New Jerusalem?-which on the day of the Pentecost was visibly inaugurated on this, our planet, and which I have believed, and do still believe, is yet destined to become universal,-the United States of the World, in which all things will be common, and distribution will be made to all men according as every man has need, in a Christian way (and not Pagan, as is now done by our overseers of the poor) lifting all men out of the sloughs and quicksands of selfishness, poverty, intemperance, idleness, immorality, ignorance, superstition, op |