Page:Labour - The Divine Command, 1890.djvu/147

Rh gain, O you of the upper classes, by holding in your hands the head of all virtue, whereas you now hold only its tail—and by tail I mean love. Love itself creates your words, but not your actions. And why? Because your money has so blinded you that you cannot discern the head from the tail.

Could you believe, readers, that he who shall have welcomed the law of labor with the eagerness that I have described would do to others what he would not have them do to him? Would he take, by any means whatever, the goods of another? Can we suppose that, having resolved to eat the bread for which he has labored with his own hands, and to live an honest life, he will retain whatever he may have acquired dishonestly? No, we cannot imagine such inconsistency.

Could a man, whose conscience is so pure, refrain from holding out a helping hand to his neighbor, or, in other words, could he behold one who is an hungered and not feed him, or one who is dying of thirst and not give him to drink, or a weary traveller and not give him rest in his own house, etc., etc.? A pure conscience has the eyes not of a man, but of an angel. Nothing can escape them.

For him who has not tasted the joy of labor that is accomplished conformably with the primitive law that God himself has given us when creating the heavens and the earth, it is difficult, very difficult in fact, to believe what I have been