Genesis 1:28

Genesis 1:28

Does this command mean for the human race a destiny of progress or poverty? This question is being pressed upon us to-day from many directions. It is asked, not only by theologians and economists, but as a vital question of daily bread by English labourers and workmen. In the power to bring social questions within the range of a common religious teaching is to be found, in these days, the true "note" of a standing or falling Church. If Christianity still holds the key to all the unsolved problems, both of society and of the individual, it is for the Church of the present to grasp, if she can, and set forth, whether by word or deed, the bearing which Christianity has upon the social life of man.

I. Is poverty a perpetual ordinance of God, to be accepted as an essential part of the providential scheme of government? To any one who believes in the daily prayer Christ taught us, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," there can be no doubt as to the true answer to that question. We believe in the perfectibility of humanity. The grand sweep of things is from the lower to the higher. So far from attributing the state of poverty to the providential order of society, it is to that social order that we attribute all victories which have been won over poverty. Study the laws of Providence, strive to co-operate with them, and you shall see accomplished in humanity this double manifestation of progress, all men approximating to a common level, and a level which is continually rising.

II. How shall we explain Christ's apparent exaltation of poverty and depreciation of just those social elements which seem most characteristic of modern civilisation?

Jesus Christ did not come into the world to give men a new system of morality, but to give us a new motive to be good and to do right. His denunciation of riches and exaltation of poverty must not be separated from the conditions under which He spoke, much less from the real object which He had in view. His method always was to put the abstract principle into concrete shape. We must not go to the New Testament as to a code of maxims and dicta; we must imbue ourselves with the mind of Christ, and let our behaviour flow freely from it.

III. Let us not rest satisfied with the message of the man of science, of the sociologist who tells us that our only hope is in the slow progress of social evolution; let us go down into the thick of the fight, into the grimy street and monotonous village, and there, amid the "dim common populations," let us do journeyman service.

C. W. Stubbs, Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates' Journal,,March 1st, 1883.