| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 16 |
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It is stated that within ten years a certain merchant in a great city lost six bookkeepers by death. He could not understand the strange fatality attending these young people. The symptoms were similar in all the cases, and all of them finally died of consumption. An investigation at last convinced the merchant that the room in which the bookkeepers worked was unhealthy. It was a small office in the back part of the building, into which no sunlight ever came. The merchant then prepared another room, high up in his store, where the sunlight streamed in all day and almost instantly the health of his staff became better. Unconsciously he had been committing a sore wrong against the lives of his clerks. We may say this was only a bodily hurt; but does God not care for our bodies? Is it no sin to injure the health of another, to send men and women down their years with broken constitutions, unable for the tasks and duties that God assigns to them? Is there not a commandment against murdering the body?
The time must come when the law of Christian love shall assert its sway over all the relations of life. Employers must recognize it, and must treat every man, woman, and child in their service as a child of God. Business must recognize it, and the Golden Rule must become its basis, instead of the hard, soul-less, god-less, grinding law of greed and gain, which yet in too many establishments has sway. Men cannot afford to get rich by oppressing the hire-ling in their wages, by grinding the poor into the dust, by doing injustice to the least of God’s little ones. With the New Testament in our hand, containing the Sermon on the Mount, the twenty-fifth chapter of Mathew, and the thirteenth of First Corinthians, we dare not forget that all men are brethren, and that he who hurts the least or the weakest hurts Christ himself, and smites God in the face. There is need for every plain teaching all long the line of the great burning question of capital and labor. Men must learn that money, which comes into their hands through the slightest wronging or harming of another life, brings a curse with it. Or an employee may be unjust to his employer, and the law applies equally to them. There are not two gospels, one for capital and another for labor, and none are exempt from the law of love.
We may hurt our neighbors in many ways. We may do injury to their business, to their influence, to their good name. We may treat them rudely, unkindly, or we may do them harm by neglecting to do the good we owe to them. “It was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink.” All about us are human needs, which are silent prayers to us for help. We may shut our eyes, if we will, and say it is no affair of ours, and these suffering or imperiled ones may go down in the current, while we go on in our busy life and prosper. But we cannot thus get rid of the responsibility. They are our brethren, these hurt ones. Christ died for them. To pass them by is to pass him by. “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
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