The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MAY 20, 1909. MR. FISHER ON THE CHURCH AND THE TOILER

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 20, 20 May 1909, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MAY 20, 1909. MR. FISHER ON THE CHURCH AND THE TOILER

HE reinforced seismic wave that was caused (W * Ira ' iy le ess i ua earthquake travelled fast and •*•_, J$ . far. It rocked ships in Crete and Cyprus J&J '< J|* and spat foam upon the blackened rocks of y|^=ssjnf Malta. A somewhat analogous result has \JhaSlc~ been produced in a small way in these south«£BnSTrak crn lands by the eruptive passion of the \ ™ speech delivered last week by Mr. Fisher (the V* Australian Federal Premier) to the Presbyterian Assembly in Melbourne. It set up a reinforced wave of controversy that circled all Australia and ended by tossing its foam upon the shores of New Zealand. ' I think,' said the Catholic Bishop of Auckland, ' the Presbyterian Assembly made the greatest mistake in asking a man such as Mr. Fisher to address their meeting. You do not as a mle invite a man to insult you. It is easy to bring up all sorts of objections to the Church.' Mr. Fisher repaid the compliment of his hosts by treating them to his crude and ill-digested ideas as to what Christianity has ' failed ' to do for the toiler and the poor. Mr. Fisher's bountiful unacquaintance with the broad and outstanding facts of the Church's work in these respects Avould have remained undiscovered had he been satisfied to play an innocuous part, or to bear in mind the Celtic proverb which makes the closed^ mouth melodious. But, like the blackboard in Kipling's Day's Work, he elected to tell the Assembly all that he knew upon his chosen theme- (which was very little indeed) — and a very great deal that he did not know. One of the outstanding facts of history is the transformation that was wrought in the whole social fabric by the Christian teaching of the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the essential equality of all men !in -His sight. This teaching gave to the world a new view of human life and of the poor and lowly; it set ;n; n operation, too, those wondrous and varied works of charity •which- have done so much to enrich mankind and assuage - thei ills 'Of earthly existence. In the course of time it -ifaroughtj another revolution in the social order, when it

extinguished slavery, raised honest toil, for the first time in human history, to its proper dignity, and surrounded it with many comforts and safeguards which, lost to a great extent during and after the Reformation, the toiler is now only winning back once more. It is a poor criticism that must clap its blind eye to the telescope. Here 1- 1" it suffice to say a fow brief words about what the Church has done for the toiler. She found him a slave. She made him a free man. Free labor was scarcely known in the world that the Church set out with such slender means (humanly speaking) to conqtier. Lecky points out. three well-marked stages of servitude in pagan Rome. The worst of these succeeded the Roman conquests in the East and West. The victories of the Republic flooded the markets with hapless captives, who were sold as slaves to* the highest bidder. In his History of Slavery and Serfdom (London, 1895), Dr. John Kells Ingram says that, on a moderate calculation, the slaves in Italy alone, in the hey-day of the Republic, reached the enormous total of 21,000,000 in a free population of only some 7,000,000. Some of these slaves were the friends and trusted agents of their masters. The great mass of them were the merest chattels — beasts of burden, or worse. They were (as Dr. Ingram shows) denied every moral right, and were completely at the mercy of their task-masters in an age when parents had — and occasionally exercised — the power of life and death over even their own children. The marriage of slaves was not recognised by law. ' Their testimony,' says Lecky, was in general only received in the law-courts when they were tinder torture. When executed for a crime, their deaths were of a most hideous kind. The ergastula, or private prisons, of the masters were frequently their only sleeping-places. Old and infirm slaves were constantly exposed to perish on an island 'n the Tiber.' Slaves Avere liable at any time to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena — and did not Vidius feed his fish with the flesh of his slaves ? Porters were chained . to the doors in pagan Rome. Slaves cultivated the fields in chains. And, in the event of the murder of a master by some unfortunate toiler, maddened by ill-treatment, all the slaves in the household were executed, after the hideous fashion of the time, except those that were in chains at the time or incapacitated by serious illness. And Tacitus tells us that this law Avas rigidly enforced. This was the condition of the toiler, white and colored, in the Roman Empire when SS. Peter and Paul came to its capital to preach Christian liberty, the equality of all meiu- -bgf ore God, and the moral and human rights of dependents to brotherly and kindly treatment at the hands of their masters. Such was the condition of the toiler when the Church came upon the scene. Labor had then touched its physical hell-of-the-damned. Its moral evils cannot well be overstated. The toiler was brutalised; a stigma rested upon honest labor ; the free poor were degraded and impoverished. The Church altered all that. Writing upon this subject ten years ago, we summarised her action in the following words: 'Her course of action,' says Baluffi, ' was measure "l, not sudden nor reactionary.' So deep a social sore naturally took time to heal. The Church's action on behalf of the slave resolved itself into three kinds: (1) She proclaimed the equality of and fraternity of all men in the sight of God; (2) she raised the moral dignity of labor; (3) she gave an unexampled impetus to the movement for enfranchising slaves. Not alone the priesthood, but even the episcopate, were open to manumitted slaves in the early Church. And the noble Church of St. Vitalis, at Ravenna (Italy), was dedicated by Justinian to the memory of a martyred slave. The monks were the pioneers of modern free industrial life. They removed the stigma of contempt attached to labor, worked for work's sake and for God's sake, and softened and sweetened everywhere the life of the tiller of the soil. In over forty Councils the bishops enacted laws for the protection of slaves, for their gradual emancipation, erected schools and asylums for them, sanctified their manumission by solemn religious services, and excommunicated all who attempted to deprive them of their liberty. ' Both in the East and West the monks emancipated the slaves on lands given to them. Alms were collected for their enfranchisement; the practice of manumitting as an act of devotion, and of leaving them their liberty by will, was encouraged by the Church everywhere. The result is stated by Lecky: In the twelfth century ' slaves in Europe were very rare. In the fourteenth century slavery was almost unknown.' It had been mitigated into serfdom and villeinage. These, in turn, gave way in time to the absolute liberty of free and untied labor. The great religious revolution of the sixteenth century was accompanied by a return to the enslavement of the toiler in England and Scotland. In England, the condi-

tion of labor reached, during the early part of the nineteenth century, a degree of degradation and misery such as, perhaps, it never touched in any Christian land. It is only since the days of the Reform movement that labor under the British flag began to win back some of the rights and privileges that (as Professor Thorold Rogers and others show) it had enjoyed in the much-abused, because much-misunderstood, middle ages.