(2) Poverty fosters bitterness. The poor are tempted to blaspheme; not always, perhaps, against Him whom they call "God," but against the Divine order of the universe which permits so fearful a thing as starvation or want. The world seems all wrong. Man is hard and cold, and the very universe seems cold and hard as well. There is no pity in the heavens. The soul of the poor is embittered ; and that is a dreadful thing, a spiritual disease. You know that a steel spring will stand a certain amount of strain, you may test it up to a certain point, and it will contract, expand, rebound as much as you please. But in every case there is a point of maximum strain ; and if you pass that, your spring loses its power to recover itself, it is spoiled for further use. And the human soul also will stand a great many burdens and buffetings ; it has a wonderful elasticity of courage, and patience of hope, and power of recuperation. But there seems to be a point beyond which these things are almost impossible, a point where men and women just give in. To change the figure, they are no longer swimmers breasting the current; they are driftwood floating with the stream. Indeed, they can hardly be said even to float ; they are utterly submerged by circumstance, and their capacity for faith and hope and spiritual conflict seems to have gone under with them.
Tl Do you remember the passage in The Saint's Tragedy, where Count Walter and the Abbot are discussing the condition of the poor ? " There," says the Abbot — " there we step in, with the consolations and instructions of the faith." "Ay," answers the Count, "but ... in the meantime, how will the callow chick, Grace, stand against the tough old game-cock, Hunger?" The question is a pertinent one. It goes without saying that heaven is not made of bread and butter, or of stone and lime, or of parks and recreation grounds, or of anything else that can be purchased
352 THE GOLDEN MEAN
for money or provided by civilization. Good wages and good houses, liealthy conditions of work, facilities for education and pleasure, will not necessarily save men from their sins. But the lack of these things tends to the loss of self-respect, the decay of the soul's energy, the stunting of that part of man's nature which lives " by admiration, hope, and love." ^
% To his friend, Mr. C. E. Maurice, Morris writes : " In looking into matters social and political I have but one rule, that in thinking of the condition of any body of men I should ask myself, ' How could you bear it yourself ? what would you feel if you were poor against the system under which you live ? ' I have always been uneasy when I had to ask myself that question, and of late years I have had to ask it so often that I have seldom had it out of my mind : and the answer to it has more and more made me ashamed of my own position, and more and more made me feel that if I had not been born rich or well-to-do I should have found my position wwendurable, and should have been a mere rebel against what would have seemed to me a system of robbery and injustice. Nothing can argue me out of this feeling, which I say plainly is a matter of religion to me : the contrasts of rich and poor are unendurable and ought not to be endured by either rich or poor. Now it seems to me that, feeling this, I am bound to act for the destruction of the system which seems to me mere oppression and obstruction. I am quite sure that the change which will overthrow our present system will come sooner or later : on the middle classes to a great extent it depends whether it will come peaceably or violently. If they can only learn the uselessness of mere overplus money, the poisonousness of luxury to all civilization, they will not be so likely to cry out ' confisca- tion and robbery and injustice ' at a system which, while it pro- poses to give to every man what he really needs, will have no call to take from any man what he can really use : in short, what we of the middle classes have to do, if we can, is to show by our lives what is the proper type of a useful citizen, the type into which all classes should melt at last." ^
II.
The Sufficient Poution.
" Feed me with the food that is needful for me."
The literal translation of this clause of the text is, " Give me to eat the bread of my portion — that which by God's providence
> J. M. E. Ross. a J. W. Mackail, Ti^e Life of WUliam Morris, ii. 113.
PROVERBS XXX. 8 353
is determin(3d for me." This is not a definite petition for the needs of the coming day, such as we find in the Lord's Prayer, but a casting of one's self on the Divine love, in readiness to take what that love assigns. The Septuagint gives, " Appoint for me what is necessary and what is sufficient."