p. 243 | Religion for the Poor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 16, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 16.

Religion for the Poor.

IN an article in the North American Review for April, 1884, Judge John A. Jameson says:—

“We cannot better close than by stating our conviction that for the saving of civilization from the destruction threatening it, as well from the prevalence of crime and social immorality as from the thickening dangers of industrial discontent and conflict, religion is the most effective instrumentality. Not the religion that builds temples from which it excludes the poor; not the religion which shoots philosophical treatises from its pulpits over the heads of those who most need its consolations, in the condition of social contempt and proscription in which they are held; but the religion which reaches its hand to the plain men and women who form the bulk of our race and do its work; which wins, instead of repelling them, and which shows itself the friend and minister of the toiling millions, rather than of the millionaires who build its palaces; the religion, in short, in which there is little of Augustine and Calvin, and much of Jesus.”