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Religious Education

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Religion in the Economic Process

Michael Kenny & S. J.

To cite this article: Michael Kenny & S. J. (1931) Religion in the Economic Process, ReligiousEducation, 26:5-6, 396-404, DOI: 10.1080/0034408310260503To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0034408310260503

Published online: 13 Nov 2006.

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Religion in the Economic ProcessMICHAEL KENNY, S. J.

Director, Departments of Philosophy and Social Science, Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama

WHAT precisely do the terms "re-ligion" and "economics" mean?Economics or business is, I would say,the system or systems by which rationalanimals procure, modify and interchangethe products of the earth for their sus-tenance and development, physical andspiritual. Religion is the acceptance ofall truths and the performance of allduties that bind men to God; and man isbound to God by reason and will, char-acterizing faculties of the spiritual soul,which differentiates him from other ani-mals. Hence, every act of reason andwill, every act done knowingly and freely,binds man to God, whether that free actbe done in private or public, in church orhall, in hearth or mart, in prayer or poli-tics or pleasure; and for every such freehuman act, man is responsible to God, tothe Divine Intelligence and Will fromWhom his reason and his will derive.Therefore, whenever reason and will comeinto play, man must follow the law Godhas implanted in his nature, and thereforereligion binds man to God no less in busi-ness promotion than in ascetic devotion.

The command to love one's neighbor asoneself, written on the tablets of the heartas of the law revealed, includes the neigh-bor in all his activities, civil, social andcommercial; and the least of its obliga-tions is not to steal from him. Obliga-tion is to God, or there is none, except tothe brute force and cunning of the jungle.God, the Creator, Sustainer, Lawgiverand Judge, is everything or He is nothing.History reveals that wherever religion sodenned actuated human activities, peaceand happiness followed in its train; and

wherever it became divorced from busi-ness and public life, discontent and miseryensued, and multitudes hungered whilemillionaires multiplied. This divorce ofreligion from economics begat the condi-tion of 5 per cent jobless and 20 per centbreadless in the richest country of theworld, a problem for which you are hereto find a remedy. Religion alone canremedy these conditions. It has removedimmeasurably worse conditions before,and to show how this was accomplishedis my contribution to a present solution.

I mean by religion not an indefinitesomething of vague common denomina-tors, but a definite code of principles andpractices as essentially static as man's na-ture, binding or claiming to bind all mento God under definite authority in all thepursuits or business of life. Speaking forthe Catholic church, which I am invitedhere to represent, I find that at this sea-son nineteen centuries ago, the risenChrist, issuing command as possessor ofall power in heaven and on earth, com-missioned some Judeans to go forth intothe world and, with that power, to teachall the things He had told them to allpeople for all time. These teachings em-braced not only the worship of the DivineSpirit, the one true God,' and the truth-fulness and peacef ulness and honesty andchastity of the Mosaic law, but the high-est expansion of these virtues in the all-inclusive charity and purity and sacrificiallove of the Sermon on the Mount. Theseprecepts and counsels entered into everypossible relation and activity of life; andthe few Judeans, or rather cruder Gali-leans, set out to preach them, as the one

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RELIGION IN THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 397end and necessity of life, to a preemi-nently capitalistic world that was practis-ing their antithesis.

There were no persons to preach themto. Our Declaration of Independencesays, nobly and truly, that man has fromnature's God, his Creator, certain in-alienable rights, including the right tolife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;and with us every human being is legallya person from his mother's womb. Thethen Roman Empire had no such personsand no inherent rights, except Caesar's.Persona was an actor's mask, and Caesarapplied the word to the family heads andthe few others to whom he ascribed citi-zenship. It was not an inherent right, buta privilege conferred by Caesar, and hecould strip them of it as he pleased likea mask from the face. Caesar was sourceand center of all civil and religious power,a god issuing his decrees as "the divineCaesar," the perfect unification of Churchand State. Hence you must distinguishthe word religion in relation to economics.Religion can injure as well as benefit, cor-rupt as well as vivify, according to itscontent.

Caesar ruled through the few whom heprivileged with power. The privilegedfamily head or citizen was a Caesar in hishome. He could divorce his wife at will;could disinherit, sell, barter, even execute,his children. All the property was his;neither wife nor child could own, buy,sell or acquire except through him andin his name. He could maim, violate andexecute his slaves, who were half thepopulation, rated legally as cattle, andholding no more marriage rights thanbeasts. Doing all the work, the slavechattels enabled a few wealthy monopo-lists to reduce the poorer citizens to eco-nomic slavery. Thus, no woman was aperson, no children were persons, morethan half the men were legally merechattels, three-fourths of the remain-der had no civic or economic rights,and the poor freemen became as servileas the slaves. There was neither chastity,

charity nor mercy, as St. Paul graphicallywrites, Romans, I, 18-32. Labor wasdespised as a slave mark, the workerswere robbed of their wage, and the sickand the poor left pitilessly to rot and die.The personless mass were the chattels ofthe few, and Caesar was the omnipotentmonopolist of rights.

Into this capitalism and centralism dei-fied came the voice of Judean workers,mainly fishermen, proclaiming in thename of a Divine Carpenter that Godwas alone Omnipotent and the LawgiverSupreme; that from Him every humanbeing held rights and to Him owed allloyalties; that man was endowed withpersonality by God and not by Caesar,and to God alone was responsible in allthe business of life. Because, of the hun-dred religions Rome absorbed, this aloneantagonized the whole imperial system ofdivine autocracy over chatteldom, it be-came the state policy to extinguish Chris-tianity in hate and blood. It is becausethe religion of love conquered hate andenergized civilization that Jefferson couldproclaim and we can enjoy the inherentrights of personality and are free to pro-mote the religionizing of business in afree city of a free people. The commandthat rooted all Christian teachingsloveGod wholly and love your neighbor asyourself and as God loved you, hencewith effective love in all human activitiesrooted also His disciples' message.Their gospel was not to nations but tomen; to persons, who alone can love andbe loved; and where persons were not,they were empowered to create them tomake the chattel of Caesar the charteredbrother of Christ. How this was effectedhas direct bearing on the infusion of re-ligion into our economic life.

They baptized democracy into theRoman world and into ours. To thosewho accepted their teachings thatChrist's law of love was happiness andlife, and breaking it was sin and death,baptism was the grant and pledge offreedom here and hereafter. It stamped

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398 RELIGIOUS EDUCATIONthe recipient with "the freedom of the chil-dren of God" and co-heirship with Christto His Kingdom. Given equally to all, towoman as to man, to slave as to free,baptism emancipated the woman and theslave; for once freedom of soul and mindand will was vindicated; physical freedomhad to follow. It emancipated all; forfreedom of soul in the individual wasbound to have its sequel in civic freedomof the mass. Baptism was an objectlesson in universal personality and equal-ity of human rights. Other sacramentssustained and enforced it. Penance, thetribunal to which all violators of the lawshould go for restoration of status, ad-judged pardon and penalty to each, mas-ter and slave alike, solely on their merits.This personal quality was further ex-emplified when slave and master, womanand man, knelt side by side to receive, asthey believed, their Eucharistic God, andwhen, as often happened, the ministeringpriest or pontiff had been a slave. Butperhaps the most effective lesson in theequality of life and living was the sacra-ment of marriage, which, rendering theunion of one man with one woman,whether slave or free, sacred and indis-soluble, established the chaste and healthyfamily as the fruitful unit of society,lifted woman to man's level or raised herto a pedestal of reverence. "We Chris-tians," cried Tertullian, "have everythingin common except our womanhood."

They had community of justice becausethey had community of charity. TheirMaster's saying that whatever they did torelieve "the least of these my brethren"was done unto Him, charged them to re-gard Caesar's chattels as God's freemen;and when their plan of a voluntary com-munity of goods for this purpose provedunworkable, they organized for the reliefof the needy companies of men and wo-men from the laity, which in the stressof persecution grew into a network oforganized social service through the em-pire and for three centuries provided forthe millions that were left orphaned,

widowed, imprisoned, tortured, impover-ished or homeless. These activities ofcharity were novel to the world; and theradical change of viewpoint they effectedin human and property relations is thusnoted by Lecky, the skeptical historian ofEuropean Morals:

Christianity for the first time made charitya rudimentary virtue, giving it a leading placein the moral type and in the exhqrtations of itsteachers. Besides its general influence in stimu-lating the affections, it effected a completerevolution in this sphere by regarding the pooras the special representatives of the Founder,and thus making the love of Christ rather thanthe love of man the principle of charity . . . .A vast organization of charity presided over bybishops and actively directed by deacons soonramified over Christendom, till the bond ofcharity became the bond of unity and the mostdistant sections of the Christian church corre-sponded by the interchange of mercy.

The rich abstained from luxuries togive more to God's poor, who received itfrom God's hands without loss of self-respect ; and rich and poor deemedhumble work after Christ's example aholy duty. This, while shedding dignityon toil and honest poverty and limitingthe field of need, undermined the servilefabric of Rome. Thence, with Christianfreedom under Constantine, two newphenomena emerged, religion's doublegift to the economics and charities oflife.

When the apostles and bishops organ-ized this social network, there was not onehospital or kindred institute of charity inthe world. Charity itself was a Christianinvention. Now sprang up in the citiesof the empire the charity hospital, thefree hospice for strangers, asylums forthe orphan, for the old, the blind, thecripple, the homeless, for the weak andsuffering of every class. This was Chris-tianity's transforming gift to civilization;and it has inspired men and women toour day to perpetuate the systematizedministry of balm and oil to the woundsof humanity.

Initiated by the noble women of Rome,these "works of all others most pleasingto God," were established in every town

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RELIGION IN THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 399by order of the General Council of Nicein 325 and were amply sustained by theofferings of the faithful, pro-rated by thedeacons to their means. The public ac-tivities of Christian women in operatingthese charities brought womanhood intothe open, contrary to pagan restrictions,and, in thus hastening woman's socialemancipation, revolutionized happily thewhole status of public life.

The new institutions were on a scalewe would deem today amazingly progres-sive. In Caesarea of Cappadocia, St.Basil the Great, First Doctor of theChurch, established with the aid of trainedvolunteers not only surgical and otherhospitals for differentiated classes ofpatients, but separate buildings for physi-cians, for nurses, for orphans, for found-lings, for the aged, the homeless and thestranger, and for physical and mental de-fectives. A well-graded educational cur-riculum was supplemented in this expand-ing socialized city by the beneficent pre-ventives of workshops and industrialschools and a central employment bureaufor general labor adjustment; and hos-pital practice was extended to the refittingof cripples and defectives for self-sustain-ing labor.

This was Christianity's second and per-haps richer gift to civilizationreligiousappreciation of the duty and dignity oflabor. The gradual disregard of naturallaw and human rights that had systema-tized slavery among pagan empires, madelabor a badge of disgrace, and only underJewish law was it held in honor.Husslein's Bible and Labor shows howslavery was held in check, the rightsof the toiler and husbandman jealouslyguarded in Mosaic law, and theirviolations scorchingly denounced by theJudean prophets. To have a trade be-came a religious custom even among doc-tors of the law, and the rule, "you mustwork if you would eat," was practiced aswell as preached by St. Paul and theJewish propagators of Christianity. Thisinsistence on the sacredness of toil, with

more intimate worship of the one trueGod under more impelling sanctions,finally abolished slavery and transformedthe barbarian serfs into freemen.

The early church pronouncements onproperty rights had an equally transform-ing influence. In the fourth and fifthcenturies, when slavery still dominatedand plutocracy was entrenched as it neverhas been since, the four chief doctors ofthe church, Basil and Chrysostom in theEast and Augustine and Ambrose in theWest, and Pope Leo the Great in Rome,laid down such radical doctrines on owner-ship that Dr. John A. Ryan of Wash-ington, D. G, wrote a book to prove thesesaints were not socialists. Briefly, theirdoctrine was that as man has a right tolife he has a right to a livelihood fromhis labor and therefore to ownership of adecent sufficiency for his family needs;that every man has this natural right, andfrom nature's law no man has more. Allwealth is held in stewardship from na-ture's God; hence what one has in clearexcess of his needs, he holds in trust forGod's heirs, the poor and needy, the un-employed and unemployable; and therobber rich, as Chrysostom called thosewho had unjustly acquired their wealth,were bound to disgorge it to the indigentat peril of their souls.

This would solve our employmentsituation and buoy up our depression. Butpreaching it with all the power of hisgolden eloquence cost Chrysostom exileand death, and though like proclamationsmay not now entail such penalties, it willnot make you popular with the powerful.Yet the Church has canonized the pro-claimers of these principles; and the doc-trine that God gave the fruits of the earthfor the people thereof, that the workershave a divine right to a sufficiency fromtheir labors, that concentration of wealthby the few at the expense of the many isa crime against God and State and people,has been proclaimed by councils and pre-lates and pontiffs from Leo I to LeoXIII , whose great encyclical on the work-

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400 RELIGIOUS EDUCATIONing classes forty years ago applies to ourday the centuried teachings of the Churchand still remains at once the most radicaland rational charter of human rights inthe business and industries of life.

But religion's richer gift to the socialand economic world was the exemplifica-tion of her teachings. The Benedictineand Columban monasteries that studdedthe marshes and valleys of barbarianEurope were schools of agriculture, oftrades and arts and architecture, of medi-cine and nursing and social aid and civictraining, and of religious and generaleducation, that often flowered into uni-versities. Around them Europe's citiesgrew and from their inspiration rose themerchant and crafts and journeymenguilds, the most comprehensive and bene-ficial labor unions of all time. Animatedby religious motive and dedicated to Godand the Virgin Mary and the saints, theseguilds of master craftsmen qualified in ap-prenticed training provided honest goodsfor honest and artistic work at honestprice, secured distribution from producerto consumer at minimum cost, and bystringent laws against "forestalling, en-grossing and regrating," for five hundredyears prevented all forms of cornering.the market. They minimized the middle-man, the heaviest profiteer in modern in-dustries, thus making living cheap for thepoor, widening ownership and barringplutocracy and paupery together. Con-tributing to hospital and church andschool and civic upkeep, they became thesoul of democratic government, extendingit to the Hanseatic League of Germancities, which really established the free-dom of the seas.

These trade guilds, called "religious" byBrentano because of their spirit, by themere force of their Christian working,broke down feudalism and serfdom; andit was religion that directly empoweredthem to do it. You have heard of St.Francis, the little poor man of Assisi, whoset up, in the early thirteenth century,against the luxurious living of the rich,

two orders of men and women vowed tothe service of poverty. These revivifiedEurope with apostolic fire; but it was histhird order of married men and womenin the world, consecrated to Christian liv-ing and charitable doing, that establishedcivic and economic freedom. Advised byPope Gregory IX, St. Francis gavethem four simple rules which democrat-ized Europe. The first twoto carryno offensive weapons and take oathto no manreleased them from serviceto the feudal lords and set them free.The thirdto make their wills forthwithimplied that their holdings from thelord were their own and transmissiblefree to their children. The fourth topay monthly dues to a common fundbonded them efficiently for their own de-fense and for organized social service.The papal sanction made these rules andtheir effects then valid throughout Chris-tendom and planted that seed of reformwhich made the thirteenth the greatest ofcenturies and the nursing bed of subse-quent political and economic freedom.This masterstroke, though overlookedeven by Max Weber and Tawnev in theirexhaustive treatises on religion and cap-italism, sets Francis of Assisi and Greg-ory IX among the great social buildersof all time.

Two centuries later their reform wassubmerged by the "reformers" where re-ligion was supplanted by r e l i g i o n s .Hitherto the social and economic work-ings of Christendom were motived by theprinciple that "By works a man is justi-fied, not by faith alone," and "faith with-out works is dead." It was this faith, thebelief in God's ever-present eye, that in-spired the artisan to do perfect work, tomake masterpieces for God, the Master.Luther ruptured this harmony by hisproclamation that faith alone avails andgood works are a heresy and a snare.Grasping at the word, the greedy kingsand princes and their hirelings sweptaway the works and the workers fromhalf of Europe, seized the guild funds

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RELIGION IN THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 401and the monastic and communal landsthat employed and fed the poor and, tak-ing charity out of religion like sap froma tree and with it the natural rights of theweak, banned monk and priest and guildand the whole mechanism of religion andbusiness benevolence, and for three hun-dred years niched the old religion of allcivil rights. This drastic change resultedin a double cleavage, between religion andbusiness and the weak and the strong,that left the many impoverished and thefew entrenched in capitalistic power.Again, as with the Caesars, Church andState were united in one head, and againreligion became the tool instead of therule of power. Whereas, when each wasunder separate heads, religion and busi-ness worked in spiritual union, now thatthey were corporately united they ranspiritually apart. "Keep religion out ofbusiness; religion out of politics," becamethe rule; and soon capitalism became theruler. In the ethics of economics, Chris-tian Rome began to be discarded, paganRome to be restored, and plutocracy tocrush a proprietary people into a prole-tariat pulp.

These are not mere Catholic con-clusions. You will find them morestrongly phrased and firmly documentedby Max Weber of Germany and, howevergrudgingly, by R. N. Tawney of Eng-land, two of the three most authentic eco-nomic historians of our day; and thethird, George O'Brien, but supplementstheir findings more authentically from theCatholic viewpoint. 'Tis true, there werenumerous individual abuses in the oldCatholic order and Protestant leadersoften denounced unethical practices of thenew. Luther inveighed against usury andinterest together, going further than thePopes and Scholastics, who condemnedusury, payment for loans involving noloss to the lender or in excess of it; but,contrary to a false tradition, they nevercondemned interest or compensation forthe risk or loss involved. But comparinggeneral results, the standard authorities

agree that in the old order riches wereheld as a means to righteous living andnot an end, that the law and spirit of re-ligion governed the pursuit of gain andthat the Church had the admitted will andright, and usually the power, to enforceher strict ethical decrees in every branchof business and industry; but that in thenew dispensation all this became reversed.When the individual became his own in-terpreter of the Bible, he logically formu-lated also his own business ethics, natur-ally to his own advantage. Hence "busi-ness is business" became the law and endof life, and religion had got to keep outof it. Therewith were shut out the in-herent rights of man; for on this basisthe unscrupulous strong ousted the weak,took hold of industries and governmentand, having tuned law and custom to theirgreed, decreed that the State should alsostand aside and let business run unhamp-ered its own competitive course, with"enlightened selfishness," or rather withheartlessness calloused to consistency.They bought men and women and evenchildren in the cheapest markets like otherutensils, regardless of human rights; and,to create demand for the supply thusforced, they exploited the weak peoplesof the world and bound them to their im-perial juggernaut. Then robber-wealthgrew honored, honest poverty condemned,material science deified, and God and Hislaws philosophized out of life. Thence,while prisons rated higher than poor-houses, and both were overflowing, camethe world warsthe white wars of com-mercial competition and the red wars ofblood and extermination.

This is the modern capitalism, whichMr. Keynes pronounces "absolutely irre-ligious, without internal union, withoutmuch public spirit, often a mere congeriesof possessors and pursuers"; and whichTawney defines "that whole system ofappetites and values, with its deificationof the life of snatching to hoard, andhoarding to snach," which leaves "a tasteas of ashes on the lips of civilization,"

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402 RELIGIOUS EDUCATIONand against which "the saints and sagesof earlier ages launched their warningsand denunciations."

They never ceased to launch them andtherewith to supply inspiration and guid-ance for healthy reconstruction. Theblatant noises of rationalistic religion inthe eighteenth century and of material-istic in the nineteenth, trumpeting phys-ical science and big business into deity,closed men's ears to papal appeal; butwhen the discovery that the new godswere multiplying human ills began todawn, a voice from the Vatican washeard proclaiming the true principles ofindustrial and social peace, for that dayand our day. A month from today, May15, the 40th anniversary of Leo XIII'sEncyclical on the "Condition of Labor,"Dr. John Ryan will broadcast from Wash-ington the import of this authoritativesolvent of our economic problems. Itsgrowth in influence may be gathered fromthe fact that Father Coughlin has beenbroadcasting it from Detroit the last twoyears to eager millions, and Dr. Ryan willget free hearing for its strongest doc-trines now; but when a few years afterits issue he published the MinimumWage, proving that a living for theworker was the first charge upon indus-try, he was denounced as a socialist. YetLeo had gone further, insisting that theworker's wage should be "sufficient toenable him to maintain himself, his wifeand his children in reasonable comfort";a family wage which though then revolu-tionary is now axiomatic.

So are his other radical prescriptions.A year ago M. de las Cases explained tothe French Senate that, of the nine planksin the Labor Pact of the League of Na-tions, six were stated explicitly and theother three implicitly in Leo's document;viz., that human labor is not merchandiseand has rights above barter; that amongthese rights are a full living wage, aneight-hour day and a twenty-four houror Sunday rest, right of combination andcollective bargaining, the exclusion of

child labor, equal wage for equal work ofeither sex, equitable treatment in work-ing conditions, and supervision of theseconditions by the state, in the exercise ofits paramount duty to protect its ownfoundation, the toiler, in his naturalrights.

A more widely representative French-man, M. Albert Thomas, Director of theInternational Bureau of Labor, issuedthe statement in 1930 that "Leo's LaborEncyclical has been inspiring the interna-tional and democratic labor organizationsof the world." Unconscious of its source,they had absorbed it for its worth, likethe fisherman Burns found singing hissongs for their beauty though ignorantof the author. "This," exclaimed Burns,"is fame." The widening adoption ofLeo's vital teachings sings him a richerfame.

Yet there was nothing new in Leo'sprovisions for social and industrial peaceexcept their phrasing. It is but a restate-ment of the early and middle age andscholastic teachings and of the Church'scontinuous preachment and practice tothis day. Ozanam, founder of the St.Vincent de Paul Society, had republishedin France the Guild and Middle Agemethods, and Bishop Von Ketteler, a pre-late noble who championed the masses ofall creeds, applied their basic principlesand the economics of Aquinas to the in-dustrial slave system of his time, and byletters, lectures, pamphlets and in monstercongresses organized the German work-ers for radical reform. Attacking alikecapitalism and communism, and cham-pioning equally the economic and socialrights of all men oppressed, his mentalityand magnetism inspired the CatholicCenter Party to write Christian justiceinto the industries of Bismarckian Ger-many. It is this party, alone standingfirm on the same immutable principles,that maintained the German republicagainst communism, supplying it withmasterly statesmen, including their pres-ent leader, Chancellor Bruening. Card-

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RELIGION IN THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 403inal Mermillod's leadership produced likeresults in Switzerland, perhaps sociallythe best ordered state in Christendom;and Leo XIII incorporated their experi-enced counsel in his epochal Letter to theemployers and rulers and workers of theworld.

As that golden message, issued byCatholic and other agencies in five centpamphlets, is everywhere procurable, Iwill but mention a few of its funda-mentals. Premising that, from the de-struction of the workmen's guilds and ofthe Church's restraining influence, rapa-cious usury and greed have enabled a fewto monopolize wealth and lay a yoke littlebetter than slavery on the impoverishedmasses, he insists on the divinely imposedduty of the State, by laws or just dis-tribution and protective enactment tosecure to the worker a wage or an owner-ship that will provide him a family suffi-ciency and security therein. That is theeconomic preventive of ills and cures.Charity there must be; but were that pre-ventive enforced by public justice, nohonest worker or his family would haveto eat of public doles.

More important than laws is the spiritthat enforces them. The will of workerand owner to do right by each, the com-mon consciousness of mutual duties aswell as rights, an enlightened public con-science that guards all God-given rightsof man and family and had liefer be rightthan be richthis is the spirit that bringseconomic prosperity with peace and justlydistributes it to all. This spirit religionalone can beget, sustain and vivify. Dutyis more pressing than rights which arewon in its discharge; and religion alonecan prescribe and sanction duty. Religionis the bond between man and God; andwithout God there is neither duty norconscience nor love of humankind. Re-ligion alone can exercise the capitalisticspirit of gain for gain's sake, and wealthfor wealth's; can instill the convictionthat not to amass riches but to be good

and to do good makes life worth livingand worth leaving.

Senator Borah said recently that legis-lators should be more interested in the 96per cent of our people who have but 20per cent of the wealth than in the 4 percent who own the rest of it. But unlessreligion, unless the laws of justice andduty dominate hearts and govern values,the 4 per cent will bar the laws of welfareand enlarge their wealth, and hold the 96per cent under the foot of Big Businessand its great god, Efficiency, whatsoeverthe co-efficients.

Religion, true religion, not all thatmasks in its name, can alone dethronethat mammon and enthrone the God ofrighteousness in the hearts of men. Whilevindicating man's God-given right to raisea family and support it from his toil, LeoXIII equally stresses the correlative dutyof observing God's laws in the raising ofit. In the old Testament and the New,large families are blessed, and sexual usein prevention of Nature's procreative pur-pose is accursed. "Multiply and fill theland" saith the Lord. "No," says BigBusiness, "for the land is ours. Effi-ciency's temple has no room for poverty'soffspring. Shut them off or shut themout." Mr. Chesterton parallels this con-traceptive abomination with the device,where tall hats are the mode, of remedy-ing an under-supply of hats by cutting offthe over-supply of heads. It is worse, forhere there is an over-supply of sustenancefor all; there is wealth to support de-cently thrice our population; but our dis-tributive system conveys the cream of itto the 4 per cent. Then comes a "Councilof Federal Churches," and, instead ofdenouncing that system and demanding adistribution that will maintain man's rightby God's law to live and to procreate life,advises, in the name of religion, tramp-ling on the laws of religion's God, puttinglust above love and lucre above life andpracticing the Onanism that God hascursed. The poor must not produce

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404 RELIGIOUS EDUCATIONyoung heads because Big Business hascornered the hats.

This is not religion, nor is it economics,the science of supplying the sustenance oflife. Religion and economics shouldjointly enable man to have life, and tohave it more abundantly. This is theteaching of Leo and of all his papal line.Business is for man, not man for busi-ness ; and all economics should be shapedto give him life in its fullness. Com-pulsory poverty is a criminal indictmentagainst any state system that compels it.So wrote St. Antonine of Florence in thefirst formal book of economics, six cen-turies ago, and so reiterates Leo. Histeachings are energizing beyond hischurch; and religious educators of allcreeds have been instilling them into theminds and hearts of our people. This"Federal Council" does not represent thechurches; even our millionaires have beensharing their wealth with the poor, andCardinal O'Connell has declared, "TheProtestant rich and the Catholic poor areblood brothers in charity." He mighthave included the Jews, always foremostin beneficence. Let us all be blood broth-ers, too, in economic justice, a more vital

religious bond. "Works without faith"is as fatal as "Faith without works."Love of the neighbor will never energizeunless motivated by love of God. InGod's name and law, let us concentrate onwinning for our every neighbor the pri-mal right to live and lead and procreatelife by the laws that God has allotted toall men.

Let minor needs wait on fundamentals.The violin is pleasing in its place; butfiddling is not in place while Rome isburning. Our first duty is to extinguishthe fire. Influence your communities andcities and states to provide maternity andother free hospitals for the poor, andwhatever else their essential needs re-quire, and urge the rich to share theirluxuries with the needy; but apply yourprimal energies to extinguishing the lawsand customs that multiply the poor. Ex-tinguish or control the middlemen whoswell the prices and swallow the profits;and so write the laws of distributive jus-tice on hearts and in statutes that a suffi-ciency for his economic and spiritualsalvation shall be secured for everyhonest worker in the land.

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