Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If he was tainted with Ebionitic and Jewish spirit in reporting the teachings on wealth, how did he escape being tainted with the legal and narrow spirit of Jewish Christianity which must have saturated his supposed Ebionitic sources? As with the Old Testament prophets, the fundamental sympathies of Jesus were with the poor and oppressed. In the glad opening days of his preaching in Galilee, when he wanted to unfold his programme, he turned to the passage of Isaiah where the prophet proclaimed good tidings to the poor, release to the captives, liberty to the bruised, and the acceptable year of the Lord for all. Now, said Jesus, that is to be fulfilled. To John in prison he offered as proof that the Messiah had really come, that the helpless were receiving help, and the poor were listening to glad news. The Church has used the miracles of Jesus for theological purposes as evidences of his divine mission. According to the Synoptic gospels, Jesus himself flatly refused to furnish them for such a purpose to the contemporary theologians. His healing power was for social help, for the alleviation of human suffering. It was at the service of any wretched leper, but not of the doubting scribes. To get the setting of his life we must remember the vast poverty and misery of Oriental countries. It threatened to ingulf him entirely and to turn him into a travelling medical dispensary. It is often possible nowadays to detect the social studies and sympathies of a public speaker by an unpurposed phrase or allusion which shows where his mind has been dwelling. This is constantly true of Jesus. If he had not known how much a strayed sheep or a lost coin meant to the poor, he would not have told the anecdotes about their joy in recovering them. If he had not appreciated the heroic generosity of the poor, he would not have breathed more quickly when he saw the widow dropping her two mites in the temple treasury. He knew how large a share the lawyers get in settling an estate and how little is left for the widow. He knew how bitterly hard it is for the poor to set the judicial machinery of organized society in motion in their favor; hence he used the illustration of the widow and the judge. He knew the golden rule of “society”: dine those by whom you want to be dined. Those who most need a dinner are never asked to have a dinner. He suggested to his hosts a reversal of this policy, and he loved to think of the Messianic salvation as an actual reversal on a grand scale, in which the regular guests would be left out in the cold, while the halt and blind were gathered from the highways and hedges to enjoy the fat things.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  For instance, in the beatitudes of Matthew, Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the meek and the pure in heart. In Luke he cheers the socially poor, the physically hungry, and puts his meaning beyond question by following up his blessings on the poor with corresponding woes to the rich, the satiated, and the frivolous. Many critics doubt that Jesus taught as Luke reports him. They think that Luke drew this class of material from a Jewish-Christian source which was tainted with Ebionitic tendencies. I fail to be convinced by their arguments. The other evangelists report so much of a similar nature that the sections reported by Luke alone seem quite in keeping with the mind of Jesus. The material in question seems to bear the literary and artistic coinage of Christ’s intellect as much as any other material in the gospels. The “Ebionitic sections” run all through the narrative of Luke, so that they were not drawn from some brief document covering a small portion of Christ’s life. The critical suspicions seem to rest on a moral dislike for the radical attitude toward wealth taken by Jesus according to Luke, rather than on sound critical principles. But if it is a question of moral insight, we may fairly doubt who saw more truly, Jesus or the modern middle-class critics. An ascetic distrust of property and the property instinct very early affected the Christian Church after its transition to the Greek world, and it is important to be on the watch against any influence of this alien tendency on those who reported the sayings of Christ. But the radical teachings of Jesus are not ascetic, but revolutionary, and that distinction is fundamental. What is called Ebionitic is simply the strong democratic and social feeling which pervaded later Judaism. The probability is rather that the later reporters softened this social radicalism and spiritualized his thought, than that some Ebionitic followers of Jesus imported their social unrest into his spiritual teaching. In any case, Luke put his indorsement on this conception of Christ’s thought. He was the only writer in the New Testament, so far as we know, who was of Greek descent and character. He had a singular affinity for all that was humane, generous, heroic, and humanly stirring and touching, and he tells his stories with a distinct artistic note. Men like Stephen, Barnabas, and Paul were his heroes. To him alone we owe the parable of the good Samaritan, of the prodigal son, of the Pharisee and publican, and the story of the great sinner and the penitent thief. The socialist among the evangelists was also the one who has given us the richest expressions of the free grace of God to sinful men, without which our evangel would be immeasurably poorer.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  John was a true descendant of the prophets in denying that Jewish descent constituted a claim to share in the good time coming. He put the kingdom on an ethical basis. But it was still a social hope and it required social morality. According to our evangelists the work of John came to an end because he had attacked Herod Antipas for his marriage with Herodias. According to Josephus it was because Herod feared the great influence of John over the people and wanted to forestall a revolutionary rising under his impulse. The two explanations are not incompatible. Josephus had very direct lines of information about John and his intimation deserves the more weight because his book was written for a Roman audience and his general tendency was to pass with discreet silence the revolutionary tendencies in his people. Now Jesus accepted John as the forerunner of his own work. It was the popular movement created by John which brought Jesus out of the seclusion of Nazareth. He received John’s baptism as the badge of the new Messianic hope and repentance. His contact with John and the events at the Jordan were evidently of decisive importance in the progress of his own inner life and his Messianic consciousness. When he left the Jordan the power of his own mission was upon him. He took up the formula of John: “The kingdom of God has come nigh; repent!” He continued the same baptism. He drew his earliest and choicest disciples from the followers of John. When John was dead, some thought Jesus was John risen from the dead. He realized clearly the difference between the stern ascetic spirit of the Baptist and his own sunny trust and simple human love, but to the end of his life he championed John and dared the Pharisees to deny his divine mission. It seems impossible to assume that his own fundamental purpose, at least in the beginning of his ministry, was wholly divergent from that of John. In the main he shared John’s national and social hope. His aim too was the realization of the theocracy. Moreover, in joining hands with John, Jesus clasped hands with the entire succession of the prophets with whom he classed John. Their words were his favorite quotations. Like them he disregarded or opposed the ceremonial elements of religion and insisted on the ethical. Like them he sided with the poor and oppressed.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They were the moving spirits in the religious progress of their nation; the creators, directly or indirectly, of its law, its historical and poetical literature, and its piety; the men to whose personality and teaching Jesus felt most kinship; the men who still kindle modern religious enthusiasm. Most of us believe that their insight was divinely given and that the course they steered was set for them by the Captain of history. We have seen that these men were almost indifferent, if not contemptuous, about the ceremonial side of customary religion, but turned with passionate enthusiasm to moral righteousness as the true domain of religion. Where would their interest lie if they lived to-day? We have seen that their religious concern was not restricted to private religion and morality, but dealt preeminently with the social and political life of their nation. Would they limit its range to-day? We have seen that their sympathy was wholly and passionately with the poor and oppressed. If they lived to-day, would they place the chief blame for poverty on the poor and give their admiration to the strong? We have seen that they gradually rose above the kindred prophets of other nations through their moral interest in national affairs, and that their spiritual progress and education were intimately connected with their open-eyed comprehension of the larger questions of contemporary history. Is it likely that the same attitude of mind which enlarged and purified the religion of the Hebrew leaders would deteriorate and endanger the religion of Christian leaders? We have seen that the religious concern in politics ceased only when politics ceased; that religious individualism was a triumph of faith under abnormal conditions and not a normal type of religious life; and that the enforced withdrawal of religion from the wider life was one cause for the later narrowness of Judaism. Does this warrant the assumption that religion is most normal when it is most the affair of the individual? We have seen that the sane political programme and the wise historical insight of the great prophets turned into apocalyptic dreams and bookish calculations when the nation lost its political self-government and training. How wise is it for the Christian leaders of a democratic nation to take their interpretation of God’s purposes in history and their theories about the coming of the kingdom of God from the feeblest and most decadent age of Hebrew thought? We have seen that the true prophets opposed the complacent optimism of the people and of their popular spokesmen, and gave warning of disaster as long as it was coming. If they lived among the present symptoms of social and moral decay, would they sing a lullaby or sound the reveille?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  All other help lay in concentric circles about that redemption of the spirit and flowed out from it. No comprehension of Jesus is even approximately true which fails to understand that the heart of his heart was religion. No man is a follower of Jesus in the full sense who has not through him entered into the same life with God. But on the other hand no man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master. His relation to contemporary movements If we want to understand the real aims of Jesus, we must watch him in his relation to his own times. He was not a timeless religious teacher, philosophizing vaguely on human generalities. He spoke for his own age, about concrete conditions, responding to the stirrings of the life that surged about him. We must follow him in his adjustment to the tendencies of the time, in his affinity for some men and his repulsion of others. That is the method by which we classify and locate a modern thinker or statesman. The Christian movement began with John the Baptist. All the evangelists so understood it. John himself accepted Jesus as the one who was to continue and consummate his own work. Jesus linked John closely to himself. He paid tribute to the rugged bravery and power of the man, and asserted that the new religious era had begun with John as an era of strenuous movement and stir. “The Law and the prophets were until John; from that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and every man entereth violently into it.” Both Jesus and the people generally felt that in John they had an incarnation of the spirit of the ancient prophets. He wore their austere garb; he shared their utter fearlessness, their ringing directness of speech, their consciousness of speaking an inward message of God. The substance of his message was also the same. It was the old prophetic demand for ethical obedience. He and his disciples fasted and he taught them certain forms of prayer, but in his recorded teaching to the people there is not a word about the customary ritual of religion, about increased Sabbath observance, about stricter washings and sacrifices, or the ordinary exercises of piety. He spoke only of repentance, of ceasing from wrongdoing. He hailed the professional exponents of religion who came to hear him, as a brood of snakes wriggling away from the flames of the judgment. He demolished the self-confidence of the Jew and his pride of descent and religious monopoly, just as Amos or Jeremiah did.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If, therefore, the synoptic teachings of Jesus as we now have them are saturated with social thought, it is because such thought echoed the sentiment of the Jewish Christian community. In the preceding chapter I have declined to follow those scholars who ascribe much of the radical social teaching in Luke to Ebionitic, that is, to Jewish Christian influence. If it should be true that any part of that material is not due to Jesus, but to those who, in transmitting his thoughts, consciously or unconsciously infused something of their own social passion into them, Jesus would be relieved in part of the charge of radicalism, but the Jewish Christian Church would be dyed with a deeper scarlet. We have an interesting example of such an editorial intensification of the social animus. The “Gospel according to the Hebrews” was a very ancient gospel, which originated and circulated in Jewish Christian circles. Only a few fragments of it are preserved. One of them tells the story of the rich young ruler in this form.— “Said to him the other rich man, ‘Master, what good thing must I do to live?’ He said to him, ‘Man, do the law and the prophets.’ He replied, ‘I have.’ He said to him, ‘Go, sell all thou possessest and distribute it to the poor and come follow me.’ But the rich man began to scratch his head and it pleased him not. And the Lord said to him: ‘How sayest thou, I have done the law and the prophets? For it is written in the law: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; and see, many of thy brothers, sons of Abraham, are covered with filth, dying of hunger, and thy house is full of much goods, and nothing at all comes out of it to them.’ And turning he said to his disciple Simon, who sat by him, ‘Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ ” The point of our argument is this. The Jewish Christian communities were numerically and spiritually an important part of earliest Christianity. In many respects they most faithfully preserved the direct impress of Jesus, for they were the product of the same moral environment which had nurtured his mind.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It is impossible to make accurate comparisons of human misery, but it may well be that the conditions against which the moral sensibility of the prophets revolted could be equalled in any modern industrial centre. And the same sins ought to seem blacker nineteen centuries after Christ than eight centuries before Christ. Our prophetic books contain constant reference to the “false prophets.” These were not the preachers of an idolatrous religion, but men who claimed to deliver the word of Jehovah. Neither were they always conscious liars. They were the mouthpiece of the average popular opinion, and they drew their inspiration from the self-satisfied patriotism which seemed so very identical with trust in Jehovah and his sanctuary. They were apparently the great majority of the prophetic order; the prophets of our Bible were the exceptional men. The “false prophets” corresponded to those modern preachers who act as eulogists of existing conditions, not because they desire to deceive the people, but because they are really so charmed with things as they are and have never had a vision from God to shake their illusion. The logic of events proved to be on the side of those great Hebrews who asserted that black is really black, even if you call it white, and that a wall built with untempered mortar and built out of plumb is likely to topple. Because history backed their predictions, they are now in the Bible and revered as inspired. It is well to note, however, that the prophets took no vindictive pleasure in prophesying evil, as some modern prophets enjoy beating the broom of God’s vengeance about the ears of the people. While Jeremiah was foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem, his heart was breaking. It is significant that as soon as the disaster had come, the tone of prophecy changed. At long as the people were falsely optimistic, the prophets persisted in destroying their illusions. When the people were despairing, the prophets opposed their false hopelessness. On the ruins of the temple Jeremiah foretold its restoration, the return of the people, and a new era for his desolated country. As soon as the news of the destruction of the temple reached Ezekiel in exile, his threats changed to comfort and promises. This was not instability; it was loyalty to facts and hostility to illusions. Because they believed in the immutability of the moral law, they had to tremble at any departure from it, but they could also feel its unshaken strength under their feet when all things went to pieces about them. These pessimists were really profoundly and magnificently optimistic.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  He refused to summon the twelve legions of angels either to save his life or to set up the kingdom by slaying the wicked. John the Baptist had expected the activity of the Messiah to begin with the judgment. The fruitless tree would be hewn down; the chaff would be winnowed out and burned; and there was barely time to escape this. Jesus felt no call to that sort of Messiahship. He reversed the programme; the judgment would come at the end and not at the beginning. First the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, and at the very last the harvest. Only at the end would the tares be collected; only when the net got to shore would the good fish be separated from the useless creatures of the sea. Thus the divine finale of the judgment was relegated to the distance; the only task calling for present action was to sow the seed. The popular hope was all for a divine catastrophe. The kingdom of God was to come by a beneficent earthquake. Some day it would come like the blaze of a meteor, “with outward observation,” and they could say: “Lo, there it is!” We have seen that the prophetic hope had become catastrophic and apocalyptic when the capacity for political self-help was paralyzed. When the nation was pinned down helplessly by the crushing weight of the oppressors, it had to believe in a divine catastrophe that bore no causal relation to human action. The higher spiritual insight of Jesus reverted to the earlier and nobler prophetic view that the future was to grow out of the present by divine help. While they were waiting for the Messianic cataclysm that would bring the kingdom of God ready-made from heaven, he saw it growing up among them. He took his illustrations of its coming from organic life. It was like the seed scattered by the peasant, growing slowly and silently, night and day, by its own germinating force and the food furnished by the earth. The people had the impatience of the uneducated mind which does not see processes, but clamors for results, big, thunderous, miraculous results. Jesus had the scientific insight which comes to most men only by training, but to the elect few by divine gift. He grasped the substance of that law of organic development in nature and history which our own day at last has begun to elaborate systematically. His parables of the sower, the tares, the net, the mustard-seed, and the leaven are all polemical in character. He was seeking to displace the crude and misleading catastrophic conceptions by a saner theory about the coming of the kingdom. This conception of growth demanded not only a finer insight, but a higher faith. It takes more faith to see God in the little beginnings than in the completed results; more faith to say that God is now working than to say that he will some day work.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  No true prophet will copy a prophet. Their garb, their mannerisms of language, the vehemence of their style, belong to their age and not to ours. But if we believe in their divine mission and in the divine origin of the religion in which they were the chief factors, we cannot repudiate what was fundamental in their lives. If any one holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental; or that it is purely personal; or that God is on the side of the rich; or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray; he must prove his case with his eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is with him. For the ordinary reader who may wish to follow up the subject, I know no book more generally accessible and more delightful than the two volumes in the “Expositor’s Bible” on “The Book of the Twelve Prophets,” by George Adam Smith; especially the introductory chapters in each volume. I think it is only honest to state that the Old Testament has never been my professional specialty and the foregoing discussion lays no claim to authority. Doubtless the expert student will notice inaccuracies in detail. But if he differs in fundamentals, the difference is not likely to be due to such minor points of information, but to his general conceptions of history and religon. CHAPTER III THE SOCIAL IMPETUS OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY T o what extent were the social aims of Jesus seized and carried out by the Church which called itself by his name? Did his early followers have the same all-embracing and lofty conceptions of the kingdom of God, the same passionate love for justice, and the same humane tenderness and brotherly freedom which make the soul of Jesus the luminous centre of our moral and spiritual world? It would be miraculous if they had. “What hand and brain went ever paired?” There is a gap even between the ideal cherished by any lofty mind and the realization which he can give to it in his own action. There are few men who maintain their first love unchilled to their colder age and their early purposes untarnished by policy and concession to things as they are. But as soon as the thoughts of a great spiritual leader pass to others and form the animating principle of a party or school or sect, there is an inevitable drop. The disciples cannot keep pace with the sweep of the master. They flutter where he soared. They coarsen and materialize his dreams. They put their trust in forms and organization where he dared to trust in the spirit. They repeat his words, but they make mere formulas of his prophetic figures of speech. They may join the Order of St.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They never doubted the ultimate victory of Jehovah, of his righteousness, and of his people. The time may come in our own country, when the smiling optimists will be the most frightened and helpless of all, and when the present “pessimists” will be the only ones who have any hopes to cheer and any clear convictions to guide. The great prophets whom we revere were not those whom their own age regarded most. They were the men of the opposition and of the radical minority. They probably had more influence over posterity than over their own generation. Their attacks on existing conditions brought dangerous attacks upon them in return. A later day can always study with complacency the attacks made on the vested interests in a previous epoch, and the championship of eternal principles always seems divine to a generation that is not hurt by them. Jesus summed up the impression left on him by Old Testament history by saying that prophets have no honor in their own country and in their own generation. It is always posterity which builds their sepulchres and garnishes their tombs. The Hebrew prophets shared the fate of all leaders who are far ahead of their times. They did not themselves achieve the triumph of their ideas. It was achieved for them by men who did not share their spirit, and who insensibly debased their ideals in realizing them. The ethical monotheism of the prophets did not become common property in Judah till the priests and scribes enforced it. That is part of the Divine Comedy of history. The Tories carry out the Liberal programmes. The ideas preached by Socialists and Single Taxers are adopted by Populists, radical Democrats, and conservative Republicans successively, and in coming years the great parties will take credit for championing ideas which they did their best to stifle and then to betray. It is a beneficent scheme by which the joy of life is evened up. The “practical men” and conservatives have the pleasure of feeling that they are the only ones who can really make reforms work. The prophetic minds have the satisfaction of knowing that the world must come their way whether it will or not, because they are on the way to justice, and justice is on the way to God. Summary Here then we have a succession of men perhaps unique in religious history for their moral heroism and spiritual insight.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Thus the same historical catastrophe which wrecked the faith of others lifted the prophets to a higher faith. Their religion became international in its horizon and more profoundly ethical. Had their piety previously been narrow in its outlook and ritual in its character, it would now have suffered shipwreck. The Assyrian riddle would have been insoluble. Because they were men of large interest, new occasions under the inspiration of God were able to teach them new duties and new truths. They added new terms to the synthesis of truth. Their new faith at first seemed to the people a blasphemous denial of religion. When the events which they had foretold were actually fulfilled, the prophetic books became the support and stay on which popular religion slowly climbed to new life. We are often told that ministers who concern themselves in political and social questions are likely to lose their spiritual power and faith. Professor George Adam Smith, in discussing the development of prophetic religion, says on the contrary: “Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid. Wed it to patriotism, it lives in the open air, and its blood is pure.” I do not think so sweeping a generalization about purely private religion is just. But those who hold that the flower of religion can be raised only in flowerpots will have to make their reckoning with the prophets of Israel. The very book on which they feed their private devotion and that entire religion out of which Christianity grew, took shape through a divine inspiration which found its fittest and highest organs in a series of political and social preachers. It is safe to say that the “ethical monotheism” which has been Israel’s invaluable contribution to the religious life of humanity, would never have developed and survived if the prophets had from the outset limited their religion in the way in which we are nowadays advised to limit it. The later religious individualism That virility and humaneness of the prophets and that capacity for growth which stir our enthusiasm were largely due to the breadth and inclusiveness of their religious sympathy and faith. All the world was God’s field; all the affairs of the nation were the affairs of religion. Every great event in history taught them a lesson in theology. This type of religion was destroyed when the national life itself was destroyed by the foreign conquerors. The nation had been the subject of prophecy, and now the nation as such was blotted out.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In a non-capitalistic community loans would usually be asked only to relieve need and therefore no advantage was to be taken of a neighbor’s necessities by making his distress profitable. Interest was forbidden, so that debt could not breed more hopeless debt. This also counteracted the tendency to inequality in mobile capital. If an Israelite through debt or misfortune became slave to another, he was not a pariah, but was still to be treated as a member of the family, with a right to share in the family feasts. His servitude was not to become perpetual and when its term was over, he was to be loaded with gifts that he might have a start in shifting for himself. A fugitive slave was to be protected. Israel had no “Fugitive Slave Law.” There is no record of any slave riots or of any burning slave question in its history. Thus the Law, like the preaching of the prophets, manifests a striking sympathy for the poorer classes and an unflagging respect for their equal humanity. The manhood of the poor was more sacred to it than the property of the rich. In this fundamental attitude the Hebrew Law differs widely from the Roman Law, which was formulated in a despotic State and amidst a flagrant monopoly of wealth, and is responsible for much of the excessive reverence for private property rights in our Western civilization. Some of the laws were purely ideal conceptions. The Year of Jubilee provided for a universal shake-up and a new start all around every fifty years; it was to restore the slave to liberty and the peasant to his land, and lift to the saddle again those families that had been thrown by a stumble in some gopher-hole of misfortune. We know that this beautiful scheme remained a Utopia which even post-exilic zeal for the Law managed to disregard. Other laws were set aside by the ruthlessness of the strong. Only those were likely to be really effective which were firmly based on ancient custom. But in any case these were the ideals of social life that lived in the nobler hearts of Israel, and these ideals either created the prophetic convictions, or they were the product of the prophetic preaching. We rightly hold that social ideals of such moral value could grow only out of a religious life of high value. But the reverse is also historically true: that the high religious life of Israel could develop only within a nation that cherished and maintained such social ideals. We have seen that the religion of the prophets was not the quiet devoutness of private religion.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It was not individual property, but clan and family property. There were various provisions to protect the right of the family to its ancestral holding and to prevent any permanent alienation. If land was sold under stress of need, it could be purchased back under favorable terms. In an agricultural community and before the introduction of machinery in farming the land is by far the most important means of production. It is one of the highest problems of statesmanship how to plant and root the people evenly and wisely in the land. If the land is owned by the men who till it, there is social health and strength. If it is owned by wealthy proprietors and tilled by landless agricultural laborers, a curse is on the people. All the provisions of the Hebrew Law were meant to counteract the separation of the people from the land. It sought to prevent the growth of great estates and a landed aristocracy on the one side, and the growth of a landless proletariat on the other side. Every seven years the fields were to lie fallow (probably in rotation) and their untilled harvests were to belong to all alike, like the berries that grow along our country roadside or in our forests. Of course the poor were benefited most by such liberty to picnic. When the grain, the grapes, and the olives were harvested, the poor had the right to glean, and the owner was forbidden to be too careful in harvesting the corners or to go over the vines and trees a second time. A hungry man passing through the fields was always free to eat of grain or fruit. These provisions doubtless were based on ancient customs, which in turn were remnants of primitive communism in land, a lingering recognition that the entire community has rights in the land which limit those of the individual owner. This right of the hungry man to help himself was not like the coin flung to a beggar in pity. It was the claim to joint-ownership. It was his right. There is a fundamental moral distinction between the two things. The laborer was to be paid at sundown. That recognizes the importance of prompt payment of wages, for which modern labor legislation has had to contend. The principle for which the Eight-hour Movement and the Early-closing Movement now agitate was embodied in the Sabbath law. The Decalogue emphatically throws the protection of that law over those whose labor-force was most in danger of being exploited, the slaves, the immigrant stranger, and the beasts of burden. It was quite within the bounds of human nature for the frugal farmer to send them to work, while he sent himself to rest; hence they are especially enumerated. The earliest form of the Sabbath law is the most purely humane in its wording: “that thine ox and thine ass, and the son of thy handmaid, and the sojourner may be refreshed.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  During the classical times of prophetism they always dealt with Israel and Judah as organic totalities. They conceived of their people as a gigantic personality which sinned as one and ought to repent as one. When they speak of their nation as a virgin, as a city, as a vine, they are attempting by these figures of speech to express this organic and corporate social life. In this respect they anticipated a modern conception which now underlies our scientific comprehension of social development and on which modern historical studies are based. We shall see that it was only when the national life of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual life and lost the large horizon of public life. The prophets were public men and their interest was in public affairs. Some of them were statesmen of the highest type. All of them interpreted past history, shaped present history, and foretold future history on the basis of the conviction that God rules with righteousness in the affairs of nations, and that only what is just, and not what is expedient and profitable, shall endure. Samuel was the creator of two dynasties. Nathan and Gad were the political advisers of David. Nathan determined the succession of Solomon. The seed of revolutionary aspirations against the dynasty of David was dropped into the heart of Jeroboam by the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh. Some of the prophets would get short shrift in a European State as religious demagogues. The overthrow of the dynasty of Omri in the Northern Kingdom was the result of a conspiracy between the prophetic party under Elisha and General Jehu, and resulted in a massacre so fearful that it staggered even the Oriental political conscience. On the other hand the insight of Isaiah into the international situation of his day saved his people for a long time from being embroiled in the destructive upheavals that buried other peoples, and gave it thirty years of peace amid almost universal war. The sufferings of Jeremiah came upon him chiefly because he took the unpopular side in national politics. If he and others had confined themselves to “religion,” they could have said what they liked. Our modern religious horizon and our conception of the character of a religious leader and teacher are so different that it is not easy to understand men who saw the province of religion chiefly in the broad reaches of civic affairs and international relations. Our philosophical and economic individualism has affected our religious thought so deeply that we hardly comprehend the prophetic views of an organic national life and of national sin and salvation. We usually conceive of the community as a loose sand-heap of individuals and this difference in the fundamental point of view distorts the utterances of the prophets as soon as we handle them.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They lived in the open air of national life. Every heart-beat of their nation was registered in the pulse-throb of the prophets. They made the history of their nation, but in turn the history of their nation made them. They looked open-eyed at the events about them and then turned to the inner voice of God to interpret what they saw. They went to school with a living God who was then at work in his world, and not with a God who had acted long ago and put it down in a book. They learned religion by the laboratory method of studying contemporary life. Consequently their conception of God and of God’s purposes was enlarged and clarified as their political horizon grew wider and clearer. The first rise of widespread prophetism of which we have any record in Israel was historically connected with the raids and invasions of the Philistines (about 1020 b.c. ). Against their united and disciplined forces the scattered tribes were helpless. The national calamity created a religious revival. We catch glimpses of bands of prophets moving about in rhythmical processions, with music and song, spreading a contagious religious ecstasy. In Samuel the popular emotion found a practical, statesmanlike expression. The result was the election of the first king, the most important step toward organized national unity. As in the case of the American colonies and of the German States, the pressure of a great war was the only force sufficient to crystallize the loose ingredients of Israel into a nation. But the same national crisis which created the kingship also inaugurated the higher career of the prophetic order. There had been prophets in Israel before; they were a religious phenomenon common to all the Semitic peoples. But they had been mainly soothsayers, using their clairvoyant powers for any one who needed them and paid them for their service. Their ecstatic raptures and their predictions had not been based on any fundamental moral convictions. The patriotic enthusiasm of the uprising against Philistine domination began to lift the prophets clear of the function and the magical implements of soothsaying, and cut them loose from ceremonial ritual in general. These functions now fell to the priests. This was “probably the very greatest relief which prophecy experienced in the course of its evolution.” Henceforth they were free to take that independent or hostile attitude to ritual religion to which we have referred, and their predictions henceforth were national in scope and based on fundamental moral laws and convictions. Thus patriotism was the emancipating power which set the feet of the prophetic order on that new and higher path which was destined to lift them far above the soothsayers of other nations with whom they started on a common level. That religious passion which had turned against a foreign invader was equally ready to turn against the domestic oppressors of the people.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  Also, in the present day just as much as in the past, we see society constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones. If it happens to fall in love with a man and if it thinks it has found in him the principal aspirations that move it, as well as the means of satisfying them, this man will be raised above the others and, as it were, deified. Opinion will invest him with a majesty exactly analogous to that protecting the gods. This is what has happened to so many sovereigns in whom their age had faith: if they were not made gods, they were at least regarded as direct representatives of the deity. And the fact that it is society alone which is the author of these varieties of apotheosis, is evident since it frequently chances to consecrate men thus who have no right to it from their own merit. The simple deference inspired by men invested with high social functions is not different in nature from religious respect. It is expressed by the same movements: a man keeps at a distance from a high personage; he approaches him only with precautions; in conversing with him, he uses other gestures and language than those used with ordinary mortals. The sentiment felt on these occasions is so closely related to the religious sentiment that many peoples have confounded the two. In order to explain the consideration accorded to princes, nobles and political chiefs, a sacred character has been attributed to them. In Melanesia and Polynesia, for example, it is said that an influential man has mana , and that his influence is due to this mana . [689] However, it is evident that his situation is due solely to the importance attributed to him by public opinion. Thus the moral power conferred by opinion and that with which sacred beings are invested are at bottom of a single origin and made up of the same elements. That is why a single word is able to designate the two. In addition to men, society also consecrates things, especially ideas. If a belief is unanimously shared by a people, then, for the reason which we pointed out above, it is forbidden to touch it, that is to say, to deny it or to contest it. Now the prohibition of criticism is an interdiction like the others and proves the presence of something sacred. Even to-day, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  First of all, it should be recognized that the theorists of animism have rendered an important service to the science of religions, and even to the general history of ideas, by submitting the idea of the soul to historical analysis. Instead of following so many philosophers and making it a simple and immediate object of consciousness, they have much more correctly viewed it as a complex whole, a product of history and mythology. It cannot be doubted that it is something essentially religious in its nature, origin and functions. It is from religion that the philosophers received it; it is impossible to understand the form in which it is represented by the thinkers of antiquity, if one does not take into account the mythical elements which served in its formation. But if Tylor has had the merit of raising this problem, the solution he gives raises grave difficulties. First of all, there are reservations to be made in regard to the very principle which is at the basis of this theory. It is taken for granted that the soul is entirely distinct from the body, that it is its double, and that within it or outside of it, it normally lives its own autonomous life. Now we shall see [107] that this conception is not that of the primitive, or at least, that it only expresses one aspect of his idea of the soul. For him, the soul, though being under certain conditions independent of the organism which it animates, confounds itself with this latter to such an extent that it cannot be radically separated from it: there are organs which are not only its appointed seat, but also its outward form and material manifestation. The notion is therefore more complex than the doctrine supposes, and it is doubtful consequently whether the experiences mentioned are sufficient to account for it; for even if they did enable us to understand how men have come to believe themselves double, they cannot explain how this duality does not exclude, but rather, implies a deeper unity and an intimate interpenetration of the two beings thus differentiated. But let us admit that the idea of the soul can be reduced to the idea of a double, and then see how this latter came to be formed. It could not have been suggested to men except by the experience of dreams.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In Christianity, faith in the future life has to some extent subdued the demand for social justice, as we shall see later. The absence of this belief in Hebrew religion served to make the desire for earthly prosperity more direct and impatient, and belief in the divine justice lent religious sanction to the demand for economic justice. The full strength of the humane social conceptions prevailing in Israel can be gauged only if we draw the Law into our discussion. We do not turn away from the prophets when we turn to the Law. According to the old interpretation, the entire Law contained in the Pentateuch was given by Jehovah to Moses and thus from the birth of the nation formed the foundation on which its whole life rested. In that case the prophets drew their ideals from the Law and their preaching was but a summons to the people to obey it. According to the modern critical interpretation only a small part of the Law was of very ancient origin. The Book of Deuteronomy was the outgrowth of prophetic ideas and agitation in the seventh century before Christ. The other portions of the Law did not originate till the Exile or after it, when the life of Judah had been long and deeply saturated with the teaching of the prophets. Thus on the one hypothesis the Law created the prophets; on the other hypothesis the prophets created the Law. In either case the relation is very close and causal. For any thorough discussion of the social ideals embodied in the Law it would be necessary to decide between these two hypotheses. For our purpose it is sufficient to point out that the Law and the prophets are a deposit of the same strong current of historical life, related to each other as cause and effect. The Law, of course, recognized such fundamental customs and institutions of primitive Oriental civilization as slavery, polygamy, and blood-revenge. In so far as it gives formal sanction to these institutions, it drops below the conceptions of human rights to which we have now attained. But its general drift and purpose, its regard for the rights of the poor, and its tenderness even for their finer feelings of self-respect are so noble and humane that one cannot study the social features of the Hebrew Law without a thrill of sympathy and admiration. By swift moral intuition, by the instinct of human fellow-feeling under the impulse of religious faith, regulations were conceived there which anticipated and outran the rudimentary protective legislation of our day. We shall glance at a few points only. The land belonged to Jehovah, the national god. That is only another way of saying that it belonged to the community.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  They are considered to have exercised superhuman powers while alive. To them is attributed all that is grand in the history of the tribe, or even of the whole world. It is they who in a large measure made the earth such as it is, and men such as they are. The haloes with which they are still decorated do not come to them merely from the fact that they are ancestors, that is to say, in fine, that they are dead, but rather from the fact that a divine character is and always has been attributed to them; to use the Melanesian expression, it is because they are constitutionally endowed with mana. Consequently, there is nothing in these rites which shows that death has the slightest power of deification. It cannot even be correctly said of certain rites that they form an ancestor-cult, since they are not addressed to ancestors as such. In order to have a real cult of the dead, it is necessary that after death real ancestors, the relations whom men really lose every day, become the object of the cult; let us repeat it once more, there are no traces of any such cult in Australia. Thus the cult which, according to this hypothesis, ought to be the predominating one in inferior societies, is really nonexistent there. In reality, the Australian is not concerned with his dead, except at the moment of their decease and during the time which immediately follows. Yet these same peoples, as we shall see, have a very complex cult for sacred beings of a wholly different nature, which is made up of numerous ceremonies and frequently occupying weeks or even entire months. It cannot be admitted that the few rites which the Australian performs when he happens to lose one of his relatives were the origin of these permanent cults which return regularly every year and which take up a considerable part of his existence. The contrast between the two is so great that we may even ask whether the first were not rather derived from the second, and if the souls of men, far from having been the model upon which the gods were originally imagined, have not rather been conceived from the very first as emanations from the divinity.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Primitive religions consisted mainly in the worship of the powers of nature. Each tribe worshipped its local tribal god, who dwelt in some gloomy ravine or on some mountaintop and sent rain and fertility to his people when he was pleased, or drought and pestilence on crops and herds when he was offended. Like every other despot, the god must be kept in good humor by valuable gifts and prayers, offered in the right places, in the right manner, and by the duly qualified persons. If the sacrifices were neglected, the god was sure to be angry and then had to be propitiated by redoubled offerings, incantations, and dances. There was always some connection between religion and morality. It was always understood that the tribal god had instituted the tribal customs and was displeased with any violation of them. But the essential thing in religion was not morality, but the ceremonial method of placating the god, securing his gifts, and ascertaining his wishes. He might even be pleased best by immoral actions, by the immolation of human victims, by the sacrifice of woman’s chastity, or by the burning of the first-born. In the primitive life of the Israelitish tribes the religion of the common folk was probably much of this kind. Jehovah was the tribal god of Israel. Fortunately he was stronger and more terrible than the gods of the neighboring tribes, so that he was able to drive them out and give their land to his own people, but he was not fundamentally different from them and they were believed to be quite as real as Jehovah. There were certain forms of moral evil which he hated and certain social duties which he loved and blessed, but the surest way of remaining in his favor was to sacrifice duly and plentifully. If a man had offended against his fellow or his tribe, Jehovah would forgive when the rich smell of burnt meat filled his nostrils. Against this current conception of religion the prophets insisted on a right life as the true worship of God. Morality to them was not merely a prerequisite of effective ceremonial worship. They brushed sacrificial ritual aside altogether as trifling compared with righteousness, nay, as a harmful substitute and a hindrance for ethical religion. “I desire goodness and not sacrifice,” said Hosea, and Jesus was fond of quoting the words. The Book of Isaiah begins with a description of the disasters which had overtaken the nation, and then in impassioned words the prophet spurns the means taken to appease Jehovah’s anger. He said the herds of beasts trampling his temple-court, the burning fat, the reek of blood, the clouds of incense, were a weariness and an abomination to the God whom they were meant to please. Their festivals and solemn meetings, their prayers and prostrations, were iniquity from which he averted his face. What he wanted was a right life and the righting of social wrongs: “Your hands are full of blood.