The Industrial Conflict in the Light of Revelation.
By G. W. Rine
IN one of his New England speeches, delivered in the summer of 1902, President Roosevelt affirmed that the workingmen had many grievances to be redressed, but that they deserved no sympathy or commiseration on the ground of their being obliged to work. All right-thinking persons will assent to the President’s averment. For no person can live a sane, normal life without devoting himself to regular, honest, intelligent work. It is only by being one of God’s working men that a man can be one of God’s noblemen. Before returning to His Father, the Master “gave to every man his work.” This He did because He knew that no man is really and truly a man unless he be a workingman—working with hands and head and heart. “Next to faith in God is faith in labor,” wrote one of the old English divines. This thought needs restatement. Faith in God implies faith in labor. God is life, and life means work. Hence, devotion to God necessarily carries with it devotion to work—devotion expressed in service. Life means service and service means work. To be nothing is to do nothing. To do something worth doing is to be something worth being. “There is always hope for a man,” wrote Carlyle, “who actually and honestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair.” Blessed is the man who has found his work, and does it—blessed because he is fulfilling the supreme mission of life, and is thus conforming to the supreme law of life. This is the normal life, because it is the life of God. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,” declared the greatest Worker the world ever knew. To bear the cross is to follow Jesus; but the cross means service, and service means work. Labor in itself is not a curse, but is distinctively and essentially a blessing—a blessing given to man before he fell. Gen. 2:15. Too many peoples are still the victims of the delusion that work is a disagreeable necessity of life, something hopelessly hostile to the very notion of blessedness. Yet there is nothing more evident in all this world than the fact that there can be no genuine, lasting happiness in this life, apart from earnest work. These poor souls are the unconscious disciples of the old philosopher who wished that the earth might be transmuted into a bun and the sea into lemonade, in order that the world might be happy without effort. It was the heathen world that regarded manual work as servile, and, therefore, at variance with the dignity of a true gentleman, or a noblewoman. They thought such work unworthy of a free man, and fit only for slaves. This viciously false conception of common work was born of heathenism, and heathenism is demonism. Idleness and goodness simply can not live together in the same person. They are mutually repellent. In short, idleness is in itself a species of sin; work, if not righteousness in itself, is the unvarying and eternal accompaniment of unrighteousness. This ethical necessity of honest labor is just as essential on the part of the rich as of the poor. In the day of supreme and final reckoning every man shall be rewarded “according to his works.” A tree is known by its fruits, by the results of its activities. Jesus, the Author of righteousness, sanctified common toil and hallowed the faithful performance of the humblest duties by His example as well as by His teachings. By His toil as a carpenter, and, subsequently, as a teacher and missionary, He lifted common duty and common labor to a plane of sacred dignity and nobleness. It has been said that the unemployed classes at both ends of the social scale are the vicious, the dangerous classes. A great Christian thinker once declared that “If you are idle you are on the way to ruin, and there are few stopping places upon it.” He clearly saw that idleness is the sepulcher of virtue, and that to do nothing is the readiest road to do that which is worse than nothing. All human experiences, as well as revelation, attest the great fact that life can not be kept sweet and true apart from the filling up of time with useful labor. Idleness invariably ends in ennui, disgust, and moral laxness. In Ruskin’s apt phrase: “There is a working class, strong and happy, among both rich and poor; there is an idle class, weak, wicked, and miserable, among both rich and poor.” By nature’s law, immutable and just, goodness ever ends where indolence begins. The Spaniards have a saying that the busy man is troubled by one demon; the idle man by a thousand. Of essentially the same import is this Turkish maxim: “The devil tempts all men, but the idle man tempts the devil.” If he be idle, even a Christian can not long maintain moral integrity. We remember with what severity Paul rebuked the Thessalonians when he learned that some of them, in the ardor of their religious feelings, had forsaken their ordinary occupations. Their motives were good, but their judgment was in error. Their purpose in abandoning their occupations was that in quietness and peace they might cultivate a spirit of prayerfulness and an inner devotion or spiritual meditation. But the very means defeated itself and made the end impossible. Instead of growing in grace and spiritual devotion, they became busybodies, flighty, and a nuisance to their quiet, hard-working neighbors. Knowing that all sorts of moral disorders would arise from this unhappy state of affairs, Paul sent them this spirited rebuke: “When we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.” It is evident from these words that any one who can work and has a chance to work, can not eat the bread earned in the sweat of another’s face, and still be guiltless. No one, however, should work simply to get the wherewithal to live, but from a conviction that working is the truest, highest, and happiest kind of living. Many persons work hard and long to acquire a competence, with the hope that5then they shall be able to devote themselves to something higher. There can be no greater delusion. There is nothing higher than honest, intelligent work. There is nothing baser or more execrable than voluntary idleness. Honest, earnest service is the only badge of true nobleness, of genuine manliness, of intrinsic worth. He who conscientiously serves is ever God's nobleman. The Motive and the Fruit.
The disciplinary and ennobling power of work is largely determined by its spirit and motive. Merely selfish labor, designed solely to get and to keep, tho better than indolence, is yet nothing more than ugly, barren drudgery. But let it glow with the sheen and warmth of love, and work rises to the dignity and glory of a God-given mission, of a divinely inspired joy. In the last analysis it is only love that takes all the grossness, and all the sting out of work, and lifts it above bare, soulless drudgery. All true work is service, and service is the issue and fruit of love. Such work is the very salt of life, giving it tone and flavor. Apart from love-inspired work there can be no self-respect, and hence no peace, no lasting happiness. Nothing else can yield a joy so pure, and keen, and wholesome as the consciousness of duty done, of honest work well performed. Emerson once pithily wrote: “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” The sweetest of all pleasures is the fruit derived from consecrated toil. God intends that we, like the bee, shall make our daily work our chief joy and amusement. What a paradise this would soon be if every worker should fall in love with his work, become infatuated with it, not for its own sake, but for the sake of Him who in love has given “every man his work.” In my reading my eye recently caught this epigram: “One of the great lessons of life is not to do what one likes, but to like what one does.” This each one can do if he will receive into his heart the divine spirit of labor, which is nothing less than the spirit of consecrated service. Most earnestly would I urge upon the young people the absolute necessity that in the appointed and demanded work of their life they should find the supreme pleasure and joy of their life. Do not do your work simply because you must; do not do it slavishly, and then, having got it done as speedily as possible, look somewhere else for the enjoyment that every normal heart craves. How dreary such a life must be! I have a conviction that if every man could say with Jesus, “My meat [delight] is to do the will [work] of Him that sent Me, to finish His work,” the saloons, the theaters, the race-tracks, etc., would soon all disappear for want of patronage. Ay, even strikes, lockouts, boycotts, and all forms of industrial strife would perish from sheer anemia. Every one would do his work so well, so joyously, that a just compensation would follow as certainly as the night the day. If young people would study the principles of their work, let their interest dwell on its details; appreciate the help they are rendering others through their work, and the education and discipline that their own minds and hearts are getting out of it; they would soon find their appointed work to be the center and source of their highest and holiest joys. Then they would not be running everywhere else to find other pleasures to compensate them for their self-sacrificing toil. One can never do well what one does not do gladly. No one who hates his work will linger over it lovingly, and thus give it those extra touches, and that exquisite finish that love alone can give. It is the heart that gives insight and penetration to the head, and deftness to the hand. The slave, conscious of his slavery, is a bungling workman; but God's free man, consecrated to his work, is the incarnation of skill. The man who has caught a vision of the sacred dignity of honest work, sees vastly more in his labors than his daily income, or the employment of his time, or even the mere benefiting of his fellows. To him work is the incarnation of the unseen principles of character. He sees clearly that in the loom of his daily work, honesty, integrity, accuracy, thoroughness, conscientiousness, and truthfulness are being woven into the fabric of character. To him the varied forms of work are so many conductors through which messages of grace and truth find their way into the heart. His workshop is not only a place for making things, but for making men; the office is not only a place for balancing ledgers, but for making character; the mart is not only a place for making money, but it is first of all, a place for fitting the virtues into one's life, for turning out true, cultured God-fearing men. A school should not be so much a place for making scholars as for making righteous men and women. What we are growing to be, is very largely determined by our doing. He who is doing careless, slipshod, slovenly work is making for himself a careless, slipshod character. Truthfulness in work is as imperative as truthfulness in speech. To put deceit into one's work is the most effectual way to put deceit into one's character. Shoddy work is, however, not only a sin against the worker, but an offense against society, as well as a sin against brotherly love. Somebody suffers for it, is defrauded by it. Speaking plainly, then, dishonest work is at once to cheat, to lie, and to commit a grave offense against one's own soul. The true worker, then, is the true nobleman. He accepts his work as God-given, assigned to him as a sphere wherein he can serve humanity and glorify God. Such a view of one's work transfigures petty drudgery, and glorifies the narrow corner. It adds a new and sacred sanction to the universal necessity, the universal law, of work. True work is applied worship—religion fulfilling its normal mission.