"Now,
when Jesus heard these things, He said unto him, Yet
lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and
distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven: and come, follow Me."
WHEN Henry
Maxwell began to speak to the souls crowded into the
Settlement Hall that night it is doubtful if he ever faced
such an audience in his life. It is quite certain that the
city of Raymond did not contain such a variety of humanity.
Not even the Rectangle at its worst could furnish so many
men and women who had fallen entirely out of the reach of
the church and of all religious and even Christian
influences.
What did he
talk about? He had already decided that point. He told in
the simplest language he could command some of the results
of obedience to the pledge as it had been taken in Raymond.
Every man and woman in that audience knew something about
Jesus Christ. They all had some idea of His character, and
however much they had grown bitter toward the forms of
Christian ecclesiasticism or the social system, they
preserved some standard of right and truth, and what little
some of them still retained was taken from the person of the
Peasant of Galilee.
So they were
interested in what Maxwell said. "What would Jesus
do?" He began to apply the question to the social
problem in general, after finishing the story of Raymond.
The audience was respectfully attentive. It was more than
that. It was genuinely interested. As Mr. Maxwell went on,
faces all over the hall leaned forward in a way seldom seen
in church audiences or anywhere except among workingmen or
the people of the street when once they are thoroughly
aroused. "What would Jesus do?" Suppose that were
the motto not only of the churches but of the business men,
the politicians, the newspapers, the workingmen, the society
people--how long would it take under such a standard of
conduct to revolutionize the world? What was the trouble
with the world? It was suffering from selfishness. No one
ever lived who had succeeded in overcoming selfishness like
Jesus. If men followed Him regardless of results the world
would at once begin to enjoy a new life.
Maxwell never
knew how much it meant to hold the respectful attention of
that hall full of diseased and sinful humanity. The Bishop
and Dr. Bruce, sitting there, looking on, seeing many faces
that represented scorn of creeds, hatred of the social
order, desperate narrowness and selfishness, marveled that
even so soon under the influence of the Settlement life, the
softening process had begun already to lessen the bitterness
of hearts, many of which had grown bitter from neglect and
indifference.
And still, in
spite of the outward show of respect to the speaker, no one,
not even the Bishop, had any true conception of the feeling
pent up in that room that night. Among those who had heard
of the meeting and had responded to the invitation were
twenty or thirty men out of work who had strolled past the
Settlement that afternoon, read the notice of the meeting,
and had come in out of curiosity and to escape the chill
east wind. It was a bitter night and the saloons were full.
But in that whole district of over thirty thousand souls,
with the exception of the saloons, there was not a door open
except the clean, pure Christian door of the Settlement.
Where would a man without a home or without work or without
friends naturally go unless to the saloon?
It had been
the custom at the Settlement for a free discussion to follow
any open meeting of this kind, and when Mr. Maxwell finished
and sat down, the Bishop, who presided that night, rose and
made the announcement that any man in the hall was at
liberty to ask questions, to speak out his feelings or
declare his convictions, always with the understanding that
whoever took part was to observe the simple rules that
governed parliamentary bodies and obey the three-minute rule
which, by common consent, would be enforced on account of
the numbers present.
Instantly a
number of voices from men who had been at previous meetings
of this kind exclaimed, "Consent! consent!"
The Bishop
sat down, and immediately a man near the middle of the hall
rose and began to speak.
"I want
to say that what Mr. Maxwell has said tonight comes pretty
close to me. I knew Jack Manning, the fellow he told about
who died at his house. I worked on the next case to his in a
printer's shop in Philadelphia for two years. Jack was a
good fellow. He loaned me five dollars once when I was in a
hole and I never got a chance to pay him back. He moved to
New York, owing to a change in the management of the office
that threw him out, and I never saw him again. When the
linotype machines came in I was one of the men to go out,
just as he did. I have been out most of the time since. They
say inventions are a good thing. I don't always see it
myself; but I suppose I'm prejudiced. A man naturally is
when he loses a steady job because a machine takes his
place. About this Christianity he tells about, it's all
right. But I never expect to see any such sacrifices on the
part of the church people. So far as my observation goes
they're just as selfish and as greedy for money and worldly
success as anybody. I except the Bishop and Dr. Bruce and a
few others. But I never found much difference between men of
the world, as they are called, and church members when it
came to business and money making. One class is just as bad
as another there."
Cries of
"That's so!" "You're right!" "Of
course!" interrupted the speaker, and the minute he sat
down two men who were on the floor for several seconds
before the first speaker was through began to talk at once.
The Bishop
called them to order and indicated which was entitled to the
floor. The man who remained standing began eagerly:
"This
is the first time I was ever in here, and may be it'll be
the last. Fact is, I am about at the end of my string. I've
tramped this city for work till I'm sick. I'm in plenty of
company. Say! I'd like to ask a question of the minister, if
it's fair. May I?"
"That's
for Mr. Maxwell to say," said the Bishop.
"By all
means," replied Mr. Maxwell quickly. "Of course, I
will not promise to answer it to the gentleman's
satisfaction."
"This
is my question." The man leaned forward and stretched
out a long arm with a certain dramatic force that grew
naturally enough out of his condition as a human being.
"I want to know what Jesus would do in my case. I
haven't had a stroke of work for two months. I've got a wife
and three children, and I love them as much as if I was
worth a million dollars. I've been living off a little
earnings I saved up during the World's Fair jobs I got. I'm
a carpenter by trade, and I've tried every way I know to get
a job. You say we ought to take for our motto, 'What would
Jesus do?' What would He do if He was out of work like me? I
can't be somebody else and ask the question. I want to work.
I'd give anything to grow tired of working ten hours a day
the way I used to. Am I to blame because I can't manufacture
a job for myself? I've got to live, and my wife and my
children have got to live. But how? What would Jesus do? You
say that's the question we ought to ask."
Mr. Maxwell
sat there staring at the great sea of faces all intent on
his, and no answer to this man's question seemed for the
time being to be possible. "O God!" his heart
prayed; "this is a question that brings up the entire
social problem in all its perplexing entanglement of human
wrongs and its present condition contrary to every desire of
God for a human being's welfare. Is there any condition more
awful than for a man in good health, able and eager to work,
with no means of honest livelihood unless he does work,
actually unable to get anything to do, and driven to one of
three things: begging or charity at the hands of friends or
strangers, suicide or starvation? 'What would Jesus
do?'" It was a fair question for the man to ask. It was
the only question he could ask, supposing him to be a
disciple of Jesus. But what a question for any man to be
obliged to answer under such conditions?
All this and
more did Henry Maxwell ponder. All the others were thinking
in the same way. The Bishop sat there with a look so stern
and sad that it was not hard to tell how the question moved
him. Dr. Bruce had his head bowed. The human problem had
never seemed to him so tragical as since he had taken the
pledge and left his church to enter the Settlement. What
would Jesus do? It was a terrible question. And still the
man stood there, tall and gaunt and almost terrible, with
his arm stretched out in an appeal which grew every second
in meaning. At length Mr. Maxwell spoke.
"Is
there any man in the room, who is a Christian disciple, who
has been in this condition and has tried to do as Jesus
would do? If so, such a man can answer this question better
than I can."
There was a
moment's hush over the room and then a man near the front of
the hall slowly rose. He was an old man, and the hand he
laid on the back of the bench in front of him trembled as he
spoke.
"I
think I can safely say that I have many times been in just
such a condition, and I have always tried to be a Christian
under all conditions. I don't know as I have always asked
this question, 'What would Jesus do?' when I have been out
of work, but I do know I have tried to be His disciple at
all times. Yes," the man went on, with a sad smile that
was more pathetic to the Bishop and Mr. Maxwell than the
younger man's grim despair; "yes, I have begged, and I
have been to charity institutions, and I have done
everything when out of a job except steal and lie in order
to get food and fuel. I don't know as Jesus would have done
some of the things I have been obliged to do for a living,
but I know I have never knowingly done wrong when out of
work. Sometimes I think maybe He would have starved sooner
than beg. I don't know."
The old
man's voice trembled and he looked around the room timidly.
A silence followed, broken by a fierce voice from a large,
black-haired, heavily-bearded man who sat three seats from
the Bishop. The minute he spoke nearly every man in the hall
leaned forward eagerly. The man who had asked the question,
"What would Jesus do in my case?" slowly sat down
and whispered to the man next to him: "Who's
that?"
"That's
Carlsen, the Socialist leader. Now you'll hear
something."
"This
is all bosh, to my mind," began Carlsen, while his
great bristling beard shook with the deep inward anger of
the man. "The whole of our system is at fault. What we
call civilization is rotten to the core. There is no use
trying to hide it or cover it up. We live in an age of
trusts and combines and capitalistic greed that means simply
death to thousands of innocent men, women and children. I
thank God, if there is a God--which I very much doubt--that
I, for one, have never dared to marry and make a home. Home!
Talk of hell! Is there any bigger one than this man and his
three children has on his hands right this minute? And he's
only one out of thousands. And yet this city, and every
other big city in this country, has its thousands of
professed Christians who have all the luxuries and comforts,
and who go to church Sundays and sing their hymns about
giving all to Jesus and bearing the cross and following Him
all the way and being saved! I don't say that there aren't
good men and women among them, but let the minister who has
spoken to us here tonight go into any one of a dozen
aristocratic churches I could name and propose to the
members to take any such pledge as the one he's mentioned
here tonight, and see how quick the people would laugh at
him for a fool or a crank or a fanatic. Oh, no! That's not
the remedy. That can't ever amount to anything. We've got to
have a new start in the way of government. The whole thing
needs reconstructing. I don't look for any reform worth
anything to come out of the churches. They are not with the
people. They are with the aristocrats, with the men of
money. The trusts and monopolies have their greatest men in
the churches. The ministers as a class are their slaves.
What we need is a system that shall start from the common
basis of socialism, founded on the rights of the common
people--"
Carlsen had
evidently forgotten all about the three-minutes rule and was
launching himself into a regular oration that meant, in his
usual surroundings before his usual audience, an hour at
least, when the man just behind him pulled him down
unceremoniously and arose. Carlsen was angry at first and
threatened a little disturbance, but the Bishop reminded him
of the rule, and he subsided with several mutterings in his
beard, while the next speaker began with a very strong
eulogy on the value of the single tax as a genuine remedy
for all the social ills. He was followed by a man who made a
bitter attack on the churches and ministers, and declared
that the two great obstacles in the way of all true reform
were the courts and the ecclesiastical machines.
When he sat
down a man who bore every mark of being a street laborer
sprang to his feet and poured a perfect torrent of abuse
against the corporations, especially the railroads. The
minute his time was up a big, brawny fellow, who said he was
a metal worker by trade, claimed the floor and declared that
the remedy for the social wrongs was Trades Unionism. This,
he said, would bring on the millennium for labor more surely
than anything else. The next man endeavored to give some
reasons why so many persons were out of employment, and
condemned inventions as works of the devil. He was loudly
applauded by the rest.
Finally the
Bishop called time on the "free for all," and
asked Rachel to sing.
Rachel
Winslow had grown into a very strong, healthful, humble
Christian during that wonderful year in Raymond dating from
the Sunday when she first took the pledge to do as Jesus
would do, and her great talent for song had been fully
consecrated to the service of the Master. When she began to
sing tonight at this Settlement meeting, she had never
prayed more deeply for results to come from her voice, the
voice which she now regarded as the Master's, to be used for
Him.
Certainly
her prayer was being answered as she sang. She had chosen
the words,
"Hark!
The voice of Jesus calling, Follow me, follow me!"
Again Henry
Maxwell, sitting there, was reminded of his first night at
the Rectangle in the tent when Rachel sang the people into
quiet. The effect was the same here. What wonderful power a
good voice consecrated to the Master's service always is!
Rachel's great natural ability would have made her one of
the foremost opera singers of the age. Surely this audience
had never heard such a melody. How could it? The men who had
drifted in from the street sat entranced by a voice which
"back in the world," as the Bishop said, never
could be heard by the common people because the owner of it
would charge two or three dollars for the privilege. The
song poured out through the hall as free and glad as if it
were a foretaste of salvation itself. Carlsen, with his
great, black-bearded face uplifted, absorbed the music with
the deep love of it peculiar to his nationality, and a tear
ran over his cheek and glistened in his beard as his face
softened and became almost noble in its aspect. The man out
of work who had wanted to know what Jesus would do in his
place sat with one grimy hand on the back of the bench in
front of him, with his mouth partly open, his great tragedy
for the moment forgotten. The song, while it lasted, was
food and work and warmth and union with his wife and babies
once more. The man who had spoken so fiercely against the
churches and ministers sat with his head erect, at first
with a look of stolid resistance, as if he stubbornly
resisted the introduction into the exercises of anything
that was even remotely connected with the church or its
forms of worship. But gradually he yielded to the power that
was swaying the hearts of all the persons in that room, and
a look of sad thoughtfulness crept over his face.
The Bishop
said that night while Rachel was singing that if the world
of sinful, diseased, depraved, lost humanity could only have
the gospel preached to it by consecrated prima donnas and
professional tenors and altos and bassos, he believed it
would hasten the coming of the Kingdom quicker than any
other one force. "Why, oh why," he cried in his
heart as he listened, "has the world's great treasure
of song been so often held far from the poor because the
personal possessor of voice or fingers, capable of stirring
divinest melody, has so often regarded the gift as something
with which to make money? Shall there be no martyrs among
the gifted ones of the earth? Shall there be no giving of
this great gift as well as of others?"
And Henry
Maxwell, again as before, called up that other audience at
the Rectangle with increasing longing for a larger spread of
the new discipleship. What he had seen and heard at the
Settlement burned into him deeper the belief that the
problem of the city would be solved if the Christians in it
should once follow Jesus as He gave commandment. But what of
this great mass of humanity, neglected and sinful, the very
kind of humanity the Savior came to save, with all its
mistakes and narrowness, its wretchedness and loss of hope,
above all its unqualified bitterness towards the church?
That was what smote him deepest. Was the church then so far
from the Master that the people no longer found Him in the
church? Was it true that the church had lost its power over
the very kind of humanity which in the early ages of
Christianity it reached in the greatest numbers? How much
was true in what the Socialist leader said about the
uselessness of looking to the church for reform or
redemption, because of the selfishness and seclusion and
aristocracy of its members?
He was more
and more impressed with the appalling fact that the
comparatively few men in that hall, now being held quiet for
a while by Rachel's voice, represented thousands of others
just like them, to whom a church and a minister stood for
less than a saloon or a beer garden as a source of comfort
or happiness. Ought it to be so? If the church members were
all doing as Jesus would do, could it remain true that
armies of men would walk the streets for jobs and hundreds
of them curse the church and thousands of them find in the
saloon their best friend? How far were the Christians
responsible for this human problem that was personally
illustrated right in this hall tonight? Was it true that the
great city churches would as a rule refuse to walk in Jesus'
steps so closely as to suffer--actually suffer--for His
sake?
