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The Religion of Revolution

By Herbert S. Bigelow

The Religion of Inspired Politics

Justice, justice shalt thou follow. -- Deuteronomy.

The guinea-pig is not an impressive animal. But he has a remarkable name. This name is remarkable in that the animal is not a pig and did not come from Guinea.

Oliver Wendell Holmes used to protest, in this gentle way, against the misuse of the term, the Christian religion. He thought that in some cases the name guinea-pig religion would be better, since what was sometimes called Christian religion was neither Christian nor religion.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is an exposition of religion as taught by the founder of Christianity. It would not be fair to say that this parable is a complete exposition. But it is fair to say that the quality insisted upon by the parable is essential to any religion which is rightly called Christian.

The priest and the Levite of the parable were the respectable representatives of the orthodox religion of their time. The Good Samaritan was a despised heretic. Yet in exalting the Samaritan, the author of the parable does not commit himself to the Samaritan heresy. He does, however, go so far as to say that the deed of the Samaritan is a more satisfactory test of a man's religion than the creed of the priest.

The Samaritan could not have improved upon himself by exchanging his humanity for the orthodoxy of the priest. But the priest could have improved upon himself by exchanging his orthodoxy for the humanity of the Samaritan.

Noble acts are better than icy opinions. Mercy covers a multitude of heresies. Whatever else the Christian religion may be, we are entitled to say that one of its essential qualities must be a warm-hearted devotion to the needs of suffering humanity.

This parable certainly teaches that if we ever happen to be on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and hear a man groaning in a ditch, it is our duty to go to the man, bind up his wounds, get him to the nearest hotel, and see that he is cared for, and not left to die. But it must be admitted that this parable will have slight application in our day if we wait to encounter precisely these circumstances.

The business of the highwaymen was a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Modern governments have suppressed the highway robber. Our Supreme Courts will not permit robberies that are not reasonable. We do not tolerate any unrefined methods of getting something for nothing.

We have to deal, not with the occasional victim of personal violence, but with the widespread effects of unjust institutions. The charity of a primitive community is no substitute for justice in a complex society.

A man cannot be a Good Samaritan to-day, certainly not in any very vital or important way, unless he has imagination to feel the suffering he never sees, and economic understanding to provide an institutional remedy for institutional ills.

The case which is presented in the parable appears to be one which called for charity and nothing more. But suppose that Jerusalem and Jericho had been self-governing communities. Suppose that the Samaritan had been a Jericho merchant, with a vote in his city and political influence there. Suppose he had been well aware of the fact that his city government was corrupt and in league with robber bands which raided travelers under protection of the police, and divided the booty with political bosses.

Suppose he had known that this wretched man was in reality, therefore, a victim of the Jericho government, which might have protected the life and property of all, but which was run to foster the predatory interests of a few.

If this had been the situation, it could not have been satisfactorily met by isolated acts of charity. After caring for this one victim, it would have been the duty of the Samaritan to try to prevent a repetition of such crimes. It would have been his duty to try to break up the partnership between his city government and the robbers.

If we can prevent suffering, it is more important to do so than to relieve it. We may feel constrained to pay our tithe to charity, but we should not omit the weightier matters of the law; certainly not if we believe that the greater part of the suffering is needlessly produced by the injustice of the law.

More Good Samaritans are needed in politics -- men who have a vision of what an infinite mercy it would be if we could uproot from our government every vestige of special privilege and guarantee to every man an equal chance with every other.

We need Good Samaritans who have, besides the vision, the faith that this can be done; men who, with consecrated enthusiasm and a sound comprehension of economic laws, will work passionately for a truer freedom than the world has yet known. This is what we call the religion of inspired politics.

The problem of the Good Samaritan in our day is essentially a problem of government. Adequate remedies must come, not through personal, but through political action.

If the Christian religion necessarily implies devotion to the needs of suffering humanity, and if these needs cannot be served, save by the agency of government, then it is an important function of the Church to urge upon men the duty of political justice.

Let us examine two questions: What are the problems of the modern Samaritan? To what extent is government responsible for these problems?

The Samaritan of the parable found on the roadside one victim of an illegal industry. In the United States there are over three million victims a year of our legal industries. Let us imagine a wooden platform the length of a man's body. Let us raise on each side of the platform a tall timber, and join them with a beam at the top. Let us fix a heavy piece of wood to slip up and down in grooves. On the under side of this moving piece let us fasten a sharp, ugly knife, so that when the piece falls the knife will cut off the head of a man, or anything else that may be under it. This is a guillotine. Now, suppose we adjust this pleasant contrivance so that it will work automatically and as rapidly as we desire. Let us set the clock so that the knife will drop every ten seconds. Then every minute there are six blows of the knife, and each blow represents what is said to be a needless and preventable injury or sickness or death in the United States. If you read an hour the knife will fall three hundred and sixty times before you lay down your book. It will fall three hundred and sixty times the next hour, and the next. It will fall three hundred and sixty times while you are eating your dinner. It will fall three hundred and sixty times while you are playing on the floor with your child. It will not cease while you sleep. Through the long night and the next day, and through all the nights and all the days of the year it will keep falling.

These are not the victims of desperadoes on the highway. These are the men who are buried in the mines, where they are digging coal for our hearths. They are the men who are cast into fiery furnaces where they are blasting our steel. They are the men whose arms are caught in the looms and whose blood dyes our tapestries. They are the men who slip in the night and fall beneath the wheels of our trains. All along the highways of our industrial life are the bruised and the maimed, the dead and the dying.

Government is not yet run in the interest of the life and property of all. It is not in league with robbers who kill men on the highways. But it is used for the defense of the privileges of the few, by which exploitation is legalized and industry is rendered more fatal than war.

It takes an educated imagination to make a Good Samaritan to-day. To a man without an imagination what does it mean to say that there are six hundred thousand preventable deaths a year in the United States? Perhaps it would mean something if he were to stand forty days and forty nights watching the procession pass four abreast. Perhaps he would get, from that, some comprehension of the extent of this waste. Suppose that our army of one hundred thousand men were massed before Mexico City, and suppose this entire army were blown up and wiped out in an instant by the explosion of mines. Such a catastrophe would stun the whole world. The loss would be unparalleled in the history of human slaughter. It would go down in our school books as a never-to-be-forgotten day, the bloodiest in the annals of man. But suppose we are told that in times of peace there is an industrial army three times greater than this that is destroyed every year. This destruction of life is not due altogether to industrial accidents. The most of it is due to diseases and accidents which are the by-products of poverty, and fall mostly upon the poor.

It is difficult for the Good Samaritan to comprehend the enormity of this waste. It is still more difficult for him to trace the connection between this waste and the poverty that is always with us.

The Federal Census of 1910 investigated factories employing a maximum of seven million hands. This report shows that at certain times of the year the working force of these establishments was reduced by almost a million men. This means that out of seven million American workingmen nearly a million were out of employment at some time during the year.

If a man is paid fifteen dollars on Saturday night, and is knocked down by a robber, who takes his pay envelope away from him, he loses the fruits of one week's work. But if the man's employment is precarious and if he is out of work part of the time, he is in some respects as badly off as if he had been working and had been robbed. If any Good Samaritan has ever been told Saturday night that he need not come back to work Monday morning, and if he has ever gone home and looked into the frightened eyes of his wife, and if he has ever had little ones depending upon him and has had to go forth to seek a chance to work, not certain of finding it; if any Good Samaritan has ever had this experience, he will reflect upon what a tragedy our industrial life is, that a million men should have this experience every year, here on this unused continent of ours, where monopoly is allowed to speculate in the resources of the earth, and to hold these resources out of use, while money is hoarded in the banks and labor stands idle in the market place.

An investigation made by the United States Government revealed these industrial conditions in the steel works at Bethlehem, Pa. Out of every one hundred men employed in this plant, twenty-nine worked seven days a week. Forty-three worked some Sundays in the month.

Fifty-one worked twelve hours a day, and twenty-five worked twelve hours a day and seven days a week. But the most terrible fact of all is that 46 per cent of the entire working force was found to receive less than two dollars a day.

For a man with a family two dollars a day means poverty, even while he works. When an accident or sickness come, it means pauperism or else it means vice and crime. He who knew about war said it was hell. But so is peace hell on two dollars a day, with a family to support by precarious employment, working six or seven days a week and twelve hours a day.

In the face of such conditions the Good Samaritan will not be content to build orphanages and almshouses. He will feel the need of something more effective than that. He will desire a government that will guarantee a better chance than this to all men. These conditions exist because government is not used intelligently to protect the lives and property of all. On the contrary, government is still used to grant and defend special privileges to the few.

We have in our penitentiaries 150,000 criminals. We have 172,000 in institutions for the insane. We have 155,000 feeble-minded wards of the state. We have 85,000 in institutions for the deaf and 64,000 in institutions for the blind. Yes, and we have five million, five hundred thousand illiterate persons, mostly Americans. These are a few of the liabilities of the nation. These are some of the by-products of our civilization.

A man could not be a Good Samaritan in dealing with these problems without having some instruction in the first principles of political economy. He who understands how government has interfered with freedom, how unnecessarily it curtails the opportunities of men, and to what extent the laws we make create poverty -- he who understands this will see the tragic helplessness of most of our charities. He will see that poverty, the sink of our social sins, cannot be removed save by economic changes, to be effected by political action. The abolition of poverty is the great work for modern Samaritans, for poverty is the root of many other evils.

A man can hardly be a Good Samaritan to-day who is unable to look upon poverty as Shelley looked upon it:

Thou knowest what a thing is Poverty
Among the fallen on evil days.
'Tis Crime, and Fear, and Infamy,
And houseless Want in frozen ways
Wandering ungarmented, and Pain,
And, worse than all, that inward stain,
Foul Self-contempt, which drowns in sneers
Youth's starlight smile, and makes its tears
First like hot gall, then dry forever!

The church has a great responsibility in a republic where church members are sovereign citizens. The greatest need of our time is a revival of a politically expressed religion. Man's greatest need is not faith in God. He believes in God, but he believes with a heavy heart. What he needs is the faith that he has the power and is called to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. If he had that faith, his faith in God would become a living force in his life.

Our modern men and women are not happy. They feel a great lack in their life. They do not know what that lack is. What they crave is religion, a religion that can satisfy their mind and fill their heart. Their life needs the kindling power of a great enthusiasm. They are eternal. They were meant to live in heroic deeds. What they need is the thrill of a great adventure. There surges up in their souls an infinite yearning. They must have more than the husks of existence. Nothing will satisfy them but the divine fire of a great faith, faith that they now have the power to open the gates of heaven.

The soul is awakened into a God-intoxicated life by the overmastering passion for a great truth, or by the stirring appeal of a noble cause. You are citizens with ballots in your hands. You are kings of the richest portion of the globe in this age of transcendent opportunity. Why not crown your days with glory? Do you say that there are mountains of ignorance and indifference on every side? I tell you that faith can remove those mountains. You can win in your day a new and wonderful social justice. Believe in yourselves and in your divine mission to do this thing. Believe and act. The joy of battle, the divineness of the deed, will be to you the birth of a new life.

The hour calls for churches filled with consecrated citizens, men and women who strive with fervor for the abolition of poverty and the industrial emancipation of the race. The hour calls for a church militant. We need Isaiahs for preachers. We need Savonarolas to arise in all our cities and speak with tongues and hearts aflame the mighty message of a conquering faith. These mountains of unbelief must be melted away. The world's ignorance and indifference must be riven with the lightnings of God. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Your eyes and mine, if we will, shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord.

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Citation: Bigelow, Herbert S. The Religion of Revolution (Cincinnati: Daniel Kiefer, 1916; BoondocksNet Edition, 2000). http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/bigelow/ (Aug. 2, 2001).

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