Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/372

 the philanthropic rich man is a benefactor to his fellow magnates, and is made to feel their gratitude; to him all doors of fashion swing. But Jesus issued a veto. He denied the legitimacy of alms-giving as a plaster for the deep-lying sore in the social tissue. Neighborly help, man to man, was acceptable to him, and he commended it. But philanthropy as a substitute for justice—he would have none of it. Charity is twice cursed—it hardens him that gives and softens him that takes. It does more harm to the poor than exploitation, because it makes them willing to be exploited. It breeds slavishness, which is moral suicide. The only thing Jesus would permit a swollen fortune to do was to give itself to revolutionary propaganda, in order that swollen fortunes might be forever after impossible. Patchwork reformers are but hewing at a hydra. Confronted with this imperative, the rich young ruler made the great refusal. To give up his fashionable set and join himself to this company of working-class Galileans, was a moral heroism to which he was unequal. Therefore he was sorrowful; he went away, for he had a great social standing.

Something of the same brand of atonement was evidently in the mind of Dives when he awoke to the mistake he had made—desirous to send from hell and tell his five brothers to use the family fortune in erecting a "Dives Home for the Hungry," belike with the family name and coat of arms over the front portal. Jesus would concede no such privilege. He referred those "five brethren" to "Moses and the prophets; let them hear them"—Moses being the leader of the labor movement which had given to the slaves in the Goshen brick-yards their long-deferred rights; and the prophets being those ardent Old Testament tribunes of the people who had so