A MISSIONARY of the Wesleyan Mission in India writes to Christian Work from Karur that the Hindu women are generally very ignorant as to the real nature of sin. “One poor woman the other day told me, ‘O, yes; I know I am a sinner, and I go every day to the temple, and pray to the gods, because I am such a sinner!’ I thought I would find out what it was that made her feel herself such a sinner, for, as a rule, these people have no sense of sin. So I said: ‘In what have you sinned? What is sin?’ She held up a ragged part of her very old, torn garment, and said with astonishment, ‘Is not this sin enough? and I tell Him I want rice and money, I am a sinner.’ She really meant that she was poor, and that to be poor, to be in want, to suffer, is sin. They know no sense of guilt before God, because they have not seen Him.”
Thus the enemy of truth has deluded millions with the idea that poverty is sin, and that their poverty makes them unworthy of the favor of God. What they need to learn is, not the sin of poverty, but the poverty of sin. The Lord of glory became poor in order to make poor sinners rich. “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, tho He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.” 2 Cor. 8:9. “Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which He hath promised to them that love Him?” James 2:5. The really poor man is he who is not “rich toward God,” no matter how great his worldly wealth.