Has it been otherwise in the history of Christianity? Our Lord Himself found His first disciples, not in a hungry and ragged community, but amid the prosperity and opulence of Galilee. They left all to follow Him and achieved their ministry in poverty and persecution, but they brought to that ministry the force of minds and bodies trained in a very fertile land and by a prosperous commerce.[1236] Paul, in his apostolate, sustained himself by the labour of his hands, but he was the child of a rich civilisation and the citizen of a great empire. The Reformation was preceded by the Renaissance, and on the Continent of Europe drew its forces, not from the enslaved and impoverished populations of Italy and Southern Austria, but from the large civic and commercial centres of Germany. An acute historian, in his recent lectures on the _Economic Interpretation of History_,[1237] observes that every religious revival in England has happened upon a basis of comparative prosperity. He has proved “the opulence of Norfolk during the epoch of Lollardy,” and pointed out that “the Puritan movement was essentially and originally one of the middle classes, of the traders in towns and of the farmers in the country”; that the religious state of the Church of England was never so low as among the servile and beggarly clergy of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries; that the Nonconformist bodies who kept religion alive during this period were closely identified with the leading movements of trade and finance;[1238] and that even Wesley’s great revival of religion among the labouring classes of England took place at a time when prices were far lower than in the previous century, wages had slightly risen and “most labourers were small occupiers; there was therefore in the comparative plenty of the time an opening for a religious movement among the poor, and Wesley was equal to the occasion.” He might have added that the great missionary movement of the nineteenth century is contemporaneous with the enormous advance of our commerce and our empire.
On the whole, then, the witness of history is uniform. Poverty and persecution, _famine_, _nakedness_, _peril and sword_, put a keenness upon the spirit of religion, while luxury rots its very fibres; but a stable basis of prosperity is indispensable to every social and religious reform, and God’s Spirit finds fullest course in communities of a certain degree of civilisation and of freedom from sordidness.
We may draw from this an impressive lesson for our own day. Joel predicts that, upon the new prosperity of his land, the lowest classes of society shall be permeated by the spirit of prophecy. Is it not part of the secret of the failure of Christianity to enlist large portions of our population, that the basis of their life is so sordid and insecure? Have we not yet to learn from the Hebrew prophets, that some amount of freedom in a people and some amount of health are indispensable to a revival of religion? Lives which are strained and starved, lives which are passed in rank discomfort and under grinding poverty, without the possibility of the independence of the individual or of the sacredness of the home, cannot be religious except in the most rudimentary sense of the word. For the revival of energetic religion among such lives we must wait for a better distribution, not of wealth, but of the bare means of comfort, leisure and security. When, to our penitence and our striving, God restores the years which the locust has eaten, when the social plagues of rich men’s selfishness and the poverty of the very poor are lifted from us, then may we look for the fulfilment of Joel’s prediction—_even upon all the slaves and upon the handmaidens will I pour out My Spirit in those days_.
The economic problem, therefore, has also its place in the warfare for the kingdom of God.