The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1898. PHILANTHROPY AND CHARITY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 21, 29 September 1898, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1898. PHILANTHROPY AND CHARITY.

HE century of wooden nutmegs, pine cloves, sawdust flour, and sanded sugar, was referred to in the following terms by the Archbishop of Wellington, on last Sunday, at the opening\of the Catholic Orphanage, South Dunedin :—: — If ever there was a century remarkable for its adulteration, it is this, the nineteenth century, with all its boasting. It is a dishonest century. We find it difficult to get anything genuine. It is the order of the day. But when it is applied to the highest of all virtues, charity, it is the worst of all adulterations. We hear men talking about charity, but there is of ten no more charity in their notion of it than there is in a post. Theirichariiy is nothing more than mere philanthropy. Such people love their neighbour merely as a fellow-man, and sometimes from mere natural tenderness of heart, sometimes out of sheer pity, help a poor fellow who is ' down in the world.' That is mere philanthropy, and not charity. Charity such as our Saviour requires exists only in those who love their neighbour for G-OD'S sake, but even that is not. strictly speaking, Christian charity. Christian charity consists in loving our neighbour for Christ's sake, as a member of Christ. The difference between philanthropy and charity is thus a radical one. It is not merely something external or accidental. It lies in the very mainspring of action — the motive — and thus gives a different character and complexion to the whole substance of the good actions that are done to their neighbours by, say, the devout Sister of Charity and even the highest type of the mere philanthropist. ** • • Herein lies one gulf that separates Christian teaching and practice from both the old paganism of Greece and Rome and the neo-paganism of Mandeville, Hobbes, Tingot, Rousseau, Proudhon, and their later imitators. ' Christianity,' says the Rationalist writer, Lecky, ' for the first time made charity a rudimentary virtue, giving it a leading place in the moral type. . . Besides its general influence in stimulating the affections, it effected a complete revolution in this sphere, by regarding the poor as the special representatives of the Christian Founder, and thus making the love of Christ, rather than the [mere] love of man, the principle of charity.' Even in the very dawn of Christianity the scattered churches were connected by great organisations of charity which knew no line of race or colour. The bond of charity became the bond of unity even when the infant Church was fighting for life with wild beasts in the arena, and in the torture-chamber with men that were still more savage. * When the victory of Christianity was achieved,' says Lecky, ' the enthusiasm for charity displayed itself in the erection of numerous institutions that were altogether unknown in the pagan world.' The charity of Christ urges it. It is ever in the rank, green leaf. It knows no decay. It is trammelled by no boundary-line : its field is the whole extent of human ills — from the foundling infant in London or Paris to the dying leper in Molokai ; and its elastic and energising eagerness adapts itself to every fresh form of misery that altered times or climes or condition bring in their train. A few of its annals have been written by Cardinal Baluffi and others : the merest logbook entries. Its complete history is written in letters of light by God's Recording Angel.

* * # Nothing of the kind was known to paganism. Charity — the love of our neighbour for God's sake — was an idea that never seems to have entered the mind of a pagan philosopher. Stoicism — the fashionable philosophy of pagan Kome — recognised, after a fashion, a vague brotherhood of man. But Stoicism was a war against the expression of even merely human sympathy, grief, or pity.

Supernatural pity was beyond its ken. Its ideals were Anaxagoras and Stilpo. The first met the news of his son s death by simply remarking :« I never supposed that I was .the father of an immortal.' Stilpo received with equal callousness of demeanour the announcement that his native city had been sacked and his daughters carried away into slavery. With these philosophists sympathy was a weakness ; pity a crime ; human virtue a bald egotism. The place of charity was with them taken by a cold and unsympathetic philanthropy.- 'Nearly all relief,' says Leoky, * was a State' measure, dictated more by policy than benevolence ;' but * the active, habitual, and detailed charity 'of private persons, which is so conspicuous a feature in all Christian societies, was scarcely known in antiquity, and there are not more than two or three moralists who have ever noticed it.' The Emperor Julian (known as the Apostate) endeavoured to graft a system of charity on the stem of paganism. He had all the power of the mighty Roman Empire at his back, but his attempt was a dismal failure.

Charity had no part in ancient paganism. It has no part in the new. Hobbes's shocking philosophy did not recognise even the existence of such feelings as unselfish pity, sympathy, or love. He made rank selfishness the whole groundwork of even the sacred love of a mother for her infant child. This form of philosophism is happily dead and six good feet under the earth. Condorcet gave to the world the modified pagan dictum : * Compassion for man is-a weakness, unless it has for its object the general good.' The French infidel philosophy of the last century— the child of a somewhat similar English philosophy of an earlier date — substituted a passionless and empty regard for the human species for that Christian love which embraced each and all. Condorcet, Tingot, Helvetius fiercely assailed the institutions of Catholic charity. The French Revolution — the outcome of French philosophism — dragged through the streets and scourged noble and hapless ladies who, as Edmund Burke said in the British Parliament, were 'devoted to the most sublime duties of religion.' The great Revolution, like that of a later day, expelled the nursing Orders, and placed women of a very different class in their place, closed orphanages and refuges for the aged, misappropriated legacies to the poor, A. Revolution on similar lines in Spain closed 2,166 hospitals and reduced tens of thousands of people to want. And all this in the name of philanthropy.

Now, there is philanthropy and philanthropy. There is the merely Stoical kind, which ignores or wars against the finer sentiments of the human heart, pity, sympathy, etc. It is as cold and irresponsive as an iceberg. There is that other pagan kind of philanthropy which has arisen within the past three centuries, and which is aggressively antiChristian. Its work has been one of mere levelling and destruction to the sound of the fine-spun phrases and airy generalities of men not one of whom was conspicuous for unselfishness or love of the afflicted. Where are its fruits ? There is, again, a form of philanthropy which is capable of effecting a certain range of good : that which arises from purely and merely natural human goodness and sympathy. This form of philanthropy is, perhaps, in Christian countries, seldom found in what we may term its crude state. Even where philanthropists of this class are not professed believers in Christ, they live in an atmosphere of thought, feeling, and sentiment which has been created by Christianity. Consciously or unconsciously they must, to some extent at least, be guided in their actions by motives or principles which are distinctly Christian. In this case philanthropy may be merely Christian charity in disguise, or adulterated. Mere philanthropy in itself, proceeding on right lines, is good so far as it goes. But it does not go far. It has its own little sphere. Judged by its roots or by its fruits, when compared with true Christian charity it is as the gilded counterfeit compared with the mint-marked gold coin.