p. 8 | TRUE HELPFULNESS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 49.

TRUE HELPFULNESS.

Natural versus Artificial Homes.

Among the many Christian enterprises of helpfulness which the later years have brought, is that of orphanages, children’s homes, etc., without number. They represent oftentimes an immense amount of money and much real charity and sacrifice. But this socialistic idea of helping people en masse, is not the better, the Christian idea, after all. The Lord thus expresses His method:—

“Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?” See Isa. 58:5-11.

The thought is that of individual work, while the present tendency is to do charity by proxy. Doing by proxy, through some one employed by some society, the one who has the burden for the needy rarely comes in contact with them. The hired dispenser of the charities, not having a real burden, often becomes cold, mercenary, and exacting, while the people who have the burden, not having the heart kept warm by actual work, soon weary. They are not blessed, and cease to be blessings. The way to make both effectual is to come into direct contact with the needy, and minister a part at least of your beneficence with your own hand. Great blessings follow this course.

Another way of helping is to seek to do mechanically—in a socialistic way—what the Spirit of God did in the early church when the believers had all things common. The Spirit of God can do such work; no genius and plans of men can accomplish it in unregenerate hearts. It may run well for a season, but selfishness will soon thwart the purpose. Till men are “new creatures” indeed, the ideal assemblage is the natural, divinely ordained home. Nourish and cherish the home life. Help the poor to make a home. Ask, if health will permit, lone wanderers and orphans into your home.

The following from a recent sermon by Bishop Henry Codman Potter, of New York, contains thoughts worthy of contemplation in this line:—

We come back to these occasions of which I have already spoken, and to others like them, and the impressive fact in them is again, and again, and again, that Jesus emphasizes the sanctity of the family life. It was into the fisherman’s home that He went yesterday; it is into the publican’s home He goes to-day; it is into the home of Mary and Lazarus that He goes to-morrow, and the day after, and the day after that, girding Himself for the last great agony of the cross by inspiring the domestic heart and the domestic love. Believe me when, over and over again, He took the commonest means of the commonest men—even the publican and the sinner—and made it the sacrament by which He transmitted Himself to the hearts and to the love of men, He made an example to endure forever. No communistic mechanism which destroys the sanctity of the family, which strikes at the bond of marriage, which disbands the home, and reduces men to a hard and common treatment, and common life, and common activities, will meet the want of that individual heart and life which in each human soul guards most of all the home fellowship, and the nourishment and inspiration of the home life. That communism is characteristic of our modern Christian activity and of those social enterprises which are largely associated with it, and which I would describe by the word “institutional” charity. Let me not disparage it where it is valuable. Let me recognize its large service, especially in this twentieth century, in the amelioration of suffering and of physical pain.

But, after all, when you and I undertake to deal with the miseries of men en masse, we forget of what they are made. You remember when Mrs. Senior, that clever and brilliant English woman, was taken into an orphanage in Liverpool, she was presented to a throng of some five or six hundred boys and girls, who went through, for her edification, the various exercises of the school-room, in which they arose and sat and extended their arms, and lifted their hands and drew them together, and repeated these mechanical gestures over and over again with the splendid precision of a machine—that she was asked by the matron of the institution, “Can you tell us, Mrs. Senior, anything that you think these children want?” “Nothing,” she said, “nothing ‘but a little motherhood.” You can not get a matron for five hundred children with mothering enough to go around. That is a moral as well as a physical impossibility. And there you touch the nerve of failure in all our conceptions of the present problems and perplexities of our social order of mere institutions. Whether you like it or not, you and I must imitate the Master, whose disciples we claim to be. When at the end He hung on His cross, there filed before that cross one after the other the rulers, and priests, and people, and with a fine scorn they cried up into the face of that dying figure, “He saved others; Himself He can not save.” And they were right. Not that it was impossible for Him in a moment to have arrested the whole process of that cruel tragedy, and have come down in triumph from the cross. But no man can save his brother, and at the same time spare and save himself. He saved others because He did not save Himself. He saved others because He did not shrink from the homeliest and humblest contacts. And while men stood without and watched Him with scorn, He went to eat with publicans and sinners; He broke the bread of the hardened and the outcast, and opened the door for the coming of the kingdom of God. Believe me, my brothers, if you and I are of His, we must go and do likewise.