Private property seems ingrained in the fiber of our civilization. The power which comes to a man from his possessions can, of course, be abused, like any other kind of power. Yet even this abuse, though it shows that the power of wealth must be restrained, does not prove that all possessions ought to be nationalized. Private property was sanctioned by the Hebrew foundation laws which said “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet.” The New Testament ratifies both those commandments.
The gospel puts a check on avarice by insisting on the moral claims of others; but the gospel never tells Lazarus that he may rob the rich man, either by fraud or by force. Whatever else Jesus Christ was, He was assuredly no leveller, abolishing personal possessions.
Our Lord has made all things new by coming as He came, by being what He was, by doing what He did. The Incarnation changed the axis of the world.
Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of Christ’s advent was this, that for our sakes He became poor. He took upon Him the form of a servant. His earthly life and surroundings form a great enduring object lesson concerning wealth and poverty. Christ was born in a stable as a poor woman’s child, with only a mother’s love to welcome Him, in order that He might not be marked out by rank or fortune among the sons of men. He came in such guise to prove that the poorest workhouse baby is just as dear to God as any little prince born in the purple of a palace.
His after-life at Nazareth carried on the lesson of its beginning. In that obscure town Christ grew up under a cottage roof. He was schooled into all the patient shifts and drudgeries of the poor. A narrow home has no privacy, so He went out on to the hillsides to find it. He chose His friends from among common people. In the end He borrowed a winding-sheet and a grave.
Those hands which the nails pierced had grown hardened with daily toil for daily bread. Those garments which the soldiers parted among them were a workman’s clothes. That thorn-crowned forehead was wet with the sweat of labor for many a year before His sweat was as it were great drops of blood.
To Christians, no details in the Gospels appear more affecting than those which reveal the literal hardness of our Lord’s earthly lot—how He hungered and made fruitless search for food, how He thirsted and begged a cup of cold water from a stranger, how the Son of Man had not where to lay His head. Here is the idea which has arrested and enthralled men—the thought of the unsearchable poverty of Christ.
And yet these facts of want and abasement impress us more, perhaps, than they weighed on our Lord Himself. For He always treated money as a kind of accident, of no real account. As He moved among men it never crossed His mind that the circumstance of their wealth or their penury made the smallest difference in God’s sight. The riches which Christ renounced and the poverty which He embraced are not to be reckoned in terms of “corruptible things, as silver and gold.” Compared with the passion of His divine love, nothing else on earth seriously matters.
Moreover it was not merely by example, but by precept as well, that Christ revealed the dignity and blessedness of a low estate. We get a glimpse into His own personal feeling in regard to wealth when we find Him face to face with the rich young ruler whom He loved. Into that man’s ear He whispered a counsel of perfection: “One thing thou lackest: go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and come and follow Me.”
That command was not laid, so far as we know, upon any other disciple. But the fact that Christ imposed it on one of the very few persons for whom He is said to have entertained a peculiar and individual affection surely betrays the light in which He Himself regarded riches. It is as though the Lord said: “Come and follow Me, and fare as I am faring. Hast thou great possessions? I, too, was rich; but for man’s sake I became poor.”
We cannot read the Gospels without perceiving that Christ recognized a certain value and virtue in poverty. In these days we pity it as the worst evil of life, we lay schemes to abolish it. But He lifted up His eyes on His disciples and said serenely, “Blessed are ye poor.” That benediction may be qualified—indeed, Christ qualified it Himself. Yet the fact remains that He associated spiritual treasure with those who are disinherited in this world. He saw how meekness and simplicity and detachment make their abode as a rule in humble dwellings. When He exhorted us to live on the lily and sparrow footing, He understood that a comfortable pension often creates the most deadening of all environments for the soul.
And when we turn to examine our Lord’s positive teaching, we are startled to find how often and how urgently He speaks about money. To begin with, He lays immense emphasis on one point. He declares again and again that the things which a man possesses serve as a subtle test and touchstone of character. We are entrusted with property because it forms part of our moral and spiritual discipline. It is a stewardship for which we must give strict and solemn account.
To be found faithful in the unrighteous mammon, in our dealing with material wealth, is one great guarantee of our fitness for the true riches. A man’s real self comes out in the way in which he thinks about his money, and talks about his money, and handles his money. It is astonishing how many of Christ’s sayings form a sermon on the text, “Take heed and keep yourselves from covetousness.”
Again and again He warns men against the dangers of wealth. Riches, He tells us, are a terrible responsibility, a cleaving entanglement and temptation. Two of His most searching parables, which shake the heart with fear, describe the doom of men who had great possessions. The vision of judgment shows us Lazarus comforted and the rich man tormented—so it appears—as the outcome and sequel of their respective misery and luxury on earth. And the prosperous farmer who plans to pull down his barns and build greater is ruined by success; he grows sleek and secularized in his prosperity, and wakes up in the unseen world a naked, bankrupt soul.
When our Lord singles out one among all the principalities and powers of evil as a Christian’s deadliest foe, He tells us peremptorily, “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon”—not Astarte, nor Moloch, but Mammon.
Let us frankly confess that among Christ’s hard sayings none are so difficult to understand and carry out as certain parts of His teaching in regard to money. The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, which seems to forbid litigation and war and taking oaths, leaves just as little room, apparently, for the pursuit of gain. Here we cannot even attempt to indicate how that Sermon may be harmonized with the complicated problems of human affairs. But at least it is plain that human nature, as we know it in our daily relationships, still needs the warning which our Lord uttered so sternly and so often against the love of wealth.
Money may become a blessing, and the instrument of things better still. It can bestow leisure, and freedom from anxiety, and opportunities to travel and to choose friends, and power to accomplish large practical good. But we discover too often that money creates a shrivelled nature, a corroded conscience, a self-centered soul.
It is true, indeed, that the deadly sin of covetousness can rankle in those who are poor. A cobbler may be niggardly and envious. A wealthy capitalist may be generous and simplehearted, by the grace of God. Yet there comes a special danger lest, if riches increase, we set our hearts upon them. As you watch your old friends prospering, do their characters generally seem to escape deterioration?
Men’s besetting sins are said to vary with their age. The characteristic temptation of youth is sensuality; in middle life it is ambition; in advancing years it is avarice. Elderly men have had more time to accumulate money; but it is melancholy to observe how many people become close-fisted as they grow old.
Have we not known such persons in the Christian Church—fervent and prayerful and kindly, but unable, it seems, to part with money? It may be said that our Lord was preaching to those to whom covetousness has always been a national vice. But are modern Englishmen and Scotsmen and Americans free from the greed of gain? How many businessmen go on slaving to grow richer, for the mere pleasure of possessing what they will never spend?
Gambling, again, depends for its chief interest on its appeal to the love of money, and our two great public gambling halls, the race course and the Stock Exchange, are more crowded than ever.
The gravest political peril which threatens modern nations arises not from Socialism, but from organized rings of financiers. Within living memory there has been an enormous multiplication of wealth, and of the enjoyments which wealth procures. The world is far more with us today than perhaps at any other time. For multitudes of people material comforts and luxuries form the supreme object of care. But Christ warns us that a man who depends on the luxuries of this life for his happiness is spiritually impoverished.
As a witness to the ethical urgency of our Lord’s words about riches and poverty, we may quote the testimony of one who claimed no place among believers. Professor William James, however, spoke with all the more authority because he realized what Mammon means in America.
When one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join in the general scramble and pant with the moneymaking street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant…The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
Every generation has a characteristic blind spot on its retina. What we most need is to recover this aspect of Christ’s example and teaching which we neglect and ignore because it seems so incongruous with the spirit of the age. When modern Christians regain their Lord’s point of view with regard to money and begin to look at it with His eyes, a wonderful change will come about. We shall not then find it difficult to appreciate a saint in shabby clothes, or to give him a chief place in our synagogue, even though he may work six days a week at a carpenter’s bench, like his Master.
The Church at present concentrates much of its energies on raising funds.
We are tempted to measure ecclesiastical success in terms of hard cash. When we speak of influential Christians, we mean the persons who give the largest donations. But the real potency of the Church depends on something utterly different. Christ’s cause has never yet stood still for sheer lack of funds.
If our Lord came among us now and found His disciples so busy with schemes for raking shekels into His treasury, so eager to mend the world by making everybody more comfortable and prosperous, He would say, “Ye are careful and cumbered about many things: but one thing is needful—and that one thing is not comfort, it is not money.”
One saint is far more potent for the highest good than many millionaires. “By his habitual communion the saint adds to the everlasting treasure of all who are united in the Body of Christ. And the least of his words or actions may be of more vital effect in the world than the life’s labor of any of the herd of benevolent people who are busied about much serving.”
Even worldly men cannot help paying secret homage to the beauty of unworldliness. There is an irresistible charm about Lacordaire’s ideal of “a great soul in a small house.” If we try to recall the individuals who have exerted the most profound and spontaneous personal influence, we think of men who were alike in the supreme grace of detachment: they simply did not care about money.
That is a true instinct which makes us all feel thankful whenever we hear that some eminent and saintly Christian has been content to die poor. The right attitude of soul with regard to riches is higher than renunciation.
When two people fall in love, they often become gloriously indifferent about money. Of course we know that we—and they—must think about material things to survive in a world like this. But how we gauge material things as compared to true spiritual riches shows whether we agree with the Master or not. The love of Christ can constrain us to think as He thinks and to feel as He feels about the world’s golden prizes—not grudgingly, but with the glad detachment of those whose heart and treasure are somewhere else. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt. 6:20-21).