Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/291

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 99

passion, the aberrations of greed and the delusions of a short-sighted expediency men may safely steer? "What is the use of a religion that stands palsied and paltering in the face of the most momentous problems ? What is the use of a religion that whatever it may promise for the next world can do nothing to prevent injustice in this ? Early Christianity was not such a religion, else it would never have encountered the Roman persecutions ; else it would never have swept the Roman world. The skeptical masters of Rome, tolerant of all gods, careless of what they deemed vulgar superstitions, were keenly sensitive to a doctrine based on equal rights ; they feared instinctively a religion that inspired slave and proletarian with a new hope ; that took for its central figure a cruci- fied carpenter ; that taught the equal Fatherhood of God and the equal brotherhood of men; that looked for the speedy reign of justice, and that prayed, " Thy Kingdom come on Earth ! "

To-day, the same perceptions, the same aspirations, exist among the masses. Man is, as he has been called, a religious animal, and can never quite rid himself of the feeling that there is some moral government of the world, some eternal distinction between wrong and right ; can never quite abandon the yearning for a reign of righteousness. And to-day, men who, as they think, have cast off all belief in religion, will tell you, even though they know not what it is, that with regard to the condition of labor something is wrong I If theology be, as St. Thomas of Aquin held it, the sum and focus of the sciences, is it not the business of religion to say clearly and fearlessly what that wrong is? It was by a deep impulse that of old when threatened and perplexed by general disaster men came to the oracles to ask, In what have we offended the gods? To-day, menaced by grow- ing evils that threaten the very existence of society, men,

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