Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/286

 94 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.

are doing something more than their duty toward man and deserve to be very well thought of by God, and in a vague way to attribute to their own goodness what really belongs to God's goodness. For consider: Who is the All-Provider! Who is it that as you say, "owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail," and which "he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth." Is it not God? And when, therefore, men, deprived of the bounty of their God, are made dependent on the bounty of their fellow-creatures, are not these creatures, as it were, put in the place of God, to take credit to them- selves for paying obligations that you yourself say God owes?

But worse perhaps than all else is the way in which this substituting of vague injunctions to charity for the clear-cut demands of justice opens an easy means for the professed teachers of the Christian religion of all branches and communions to placate Mammon while persuading themselves that they are serving God. Had the English clergy not subordinated the teaching of justice to the teaching of charity to go no further in illustrating a principle of which the whole history of Christendom from Constantino's time to our own is witness the Tudor tyranny would never have arisen, and the separa- tion of the church been averted; had the clergy of France never substituted charity for justice, the mon- strous iniquities of the ancient regime would never have brought the horrors of the Great Revolution ; and in my own country had those who should have preached justice not satisfied themselves with preaching kindness, chattel slavery could never have demanded the holocaust of our civil war.

No, your Holiness ; as faith without works is dead, as men cannot give to God his due while denying to their fellows the rights he gave them, so charity unsupported

�� �