BY T. J. HEBBLEWHITE.
IV.
If two so-called truths clash with each other and involve a contradiction both may be — one inevitably must be— false. There can be no discordance between veritable truths, find them where we will. Truth is one and indivisible. Sacred and secular are purely arbitrary distinctions which, in relation to the whole circle of truth, have only a merely subjective existence. Truth is always sacred. Whenever a fact—not a conjecture, a clever hypothesis, or a guess, but a solid, thoroughly verified fact, proved by all the laws of evidence and by every possible form of analysis— is discovered, whether embedded in the rocks or careering with the stars, it takes its own appointed place naturally in the growing and mystical mosaic of realities; and there is "one music as before, but vaster." We are justified in suspecting anything that is out of harmony with the unity of Nature. All our researches go more and more to prove the existence of "one God, one law, one element, and one divine far-off event to which the whole creation moves" — a thought which Tennyson in the last stanza of his immortal "In Memoriam" borrowed from Bishop Butler's "Analogy," that work on which successive generations of budding theologians have tested their intellectual teeth. Butler could find no answer to the mysterious enigma of life but that it was a course of probation, an answer that is quite unsatisfying to contemporary thought.
Now we are able to perceive where even political economy, "the dismal science," as Carlyle termed it, comes into necessary and inevitable relation with Christianity. They both profess to teach truths that lie beyond the reach of challenge. If the so-called truths are complementary, if they harmonise with each other in essentials, we have at least presumptive evidence that both systems are based on truth. If, however, they flatly contradict each other in vital principles and meet in strident and irreconcilable conflict, then the inexorable laws which govern human consciousness and reason will compel us to reject the one or the other in keeping with the preponderance of evidence or the relative degree of probability. Apply this unerring test wherever the injunctions and precepts of Christianity come into antagonism with the common, material, everyday life the laws of which orthodox political economy professes to have reduced to a system and a science, and you are at once on the horns of a dilemma.
What has Christianity—the pure, simple, loving evangel that fell from the lips of Him who spake as never man spake, and who in His life and in His office "wrought with human hands the creed of creeds"—not the much more pretentious and disputatious paraphrase of St. Paul — to say to the common people, the seething masses?
"Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on . . . Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Are ye not much better than they?" What is actual life? A veritable hell to millions. Only by anxious thought, by agonising exertions, by savage tramplings on the weaker and by desperate clingings to the skirts of the stronger, can a crust be won. "No thought for the morrow!" Life to those on the mud-sills of modern civilisation is one perpetual round of anxious thought, one unending struggle with a seemingly remorseless destiny, the life of a beaten and goaded and uncared-for beast of burden — without its compensating lack of reason. Nay, many a pampered beast would reject with supercilious uplifting of the nose what human beings, with immortal souls we are taught to believe, fight savagely with each other to obtain. Ah, me! reverend brother, with the flush of ordination still fresh on your cheeks, reconcile the sweet, alluring precept with the harsh and cruel reality if you can.
Political economy could have foretold it all, down to little details —has so done, in fact. So many must go under in the pitiless struggle. Vae victis! So many pure girls must end all in the "dark-flowing river" or go to swell the army of prostitution. Some fifteen or twenty thousand — that is the average annual maiden tribute to the modern Babylon of London alone —the necessary number of recruits to maintain the plague-stricken army of a hundred thousand or more up to its full strength! So many men must be driven to the rope or the revolver, or embark on careers of crime. It has all been calculated to a vulgar fraction or a decimal point; and there are the carefully verified returns periodically issued from the different registrars' office as ocular demonstration. Physical and social science looks on undisturbed, nay, with much interest even, for are not these wonderfully constant averages confirmatory of the theory that a new science is being firmly established—the science of sociology? Christianity says that the widow and orphans are God's especial care. If the widow and orphans are units in that submerged aggregate you will probably find them making match-boxes in some squalid, distempered garret, and for a wealthy company, at something like two-pence-halfpenny per gross (twelve dozen boxes), supplying out of that splendid guerdon and largesse their own paste, fuel for drying, and hemp, or earning a lost dog's precarious pittance of three-farthings an hour with the needle, fashioning, with grimmest irony, as the Rev. G. S. Reaney told us a couple of decades ago, "lawn aprons, elaborately frilled, at 5½d per dozen."
O, the pity, the shame, the brutality, the revolting injustice, and humanity of it, while many, unworthy any honest woman's love or any honourable man's respect, wallow, like hogs, in unearned luxury! Conning over some old notes which I made during my investigations into the social problem in all its bearings and phases I find, on the authority of the Rev. S. A. Burnett, that out of 500,000 inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets, in London, within rifle shot of palaces replete with splendour, "eighty nine thousand nine hundred and twenty are too poor to live." That was long ago, and things now are worse. "Take no thought for the morrow !" while the innocent, unoffending little children, whom Christ called unto Him as types of the Kingdom of Heaven, are crying for bread, and the gaunt widow is working herself into the grave in a fruitless endeavour to live! Ah, me! Congresses and Synods, reconcile the precept with the ghastly reality—if you can!
The political economy tacitly accepted by the Churches coolly explains it all from Alpha to Omega. Demand and supply, competition, over-production, under-consumption, rash speculation, tight money, and so forth. Physical science, with its fingers between the pages of Darwin, also explains it to its own complete satisfaction. An interesting phase of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest! Even the Churches, or an influential section of them, driven by wild tauntings into speech, swear a truce with Darwinism and atheism, and venture their own tentative and inexpressibly horrible speculative interpretation, blind to the stultification it involves — the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, and "the poor ye have always with you," mostly changed into "the poor ye SHALL always have with you." The great Pan-Anglican Congress which met last year in England from all parts of the world is understood to have had within its purview all the vexed issues of the time. We would like to see what conclusion was arrived at on this paramount issue of the absolute divergence between the doctrines of the orthodox economic science the Church tacitly accepts — or does not attack —and the essential doctrines of the gospel, in the matter of earthly relationships and affairs. The two are utterly incapable of being brought into harmony, just as much as are honesty and dishonesty, morality and immorality, health and sickness, light and darkness.
Which collection of doctrines are we to take to our bosoms? We cannot take both, notwithstanding the complacent example of the Church. At least, I cannot; there may be others more accommodating.
The objection may be urged that scepticism is not confined to the classes who are most heavily subjected to the pressure of poverty and who experience most bitterly the knoutings of a brutalising industrial competition, but is to be found equally prevalent amongst the comfortably situated and the well-to-do. It is an apt and ingenious argument, but it altogether misses the mark. The objection is imaginary rather than real, and springs from a confusing of thought. Surely it is not necessary to a belief in the existence of small-pox that every person should be attacked by it. Half-a-dozen authenticated cases are ample evidence for the College of Surgeons, and half-a-hundred are sufficient to shake the doubts of the most incredulous.
It is not essential that every man should be crushed under the wheels of Juggernaut before he is willing to admit that Juggernaut exists. It is enough that in every large nation, whatever its fiscal policy or form of political government, there are great masses to whom life is a veritable scourge, and that the habitual conditions of that life, fully in accordance with the approved conclusions of the accepted political economy, are flatly contradictory of the passages I have quoted for comparison. Brought face to face with this, the seemingly formidable objection falls to the ground. The question is really one of evidence.
Goulburn Evening Penny Post (NSW : 1881 - 1940), Saturday 23 January 1909, page 6
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