In our own day this question of the distribution of wealth stands in the front rank of practical questions. Religious teachers must face it, or else they must forfeit their claim to be the guides and instructors of their generation.
Socialists are grappling with this question not altogether in a religious spirit: they have stepped into a gap which Christians have left empty; they have recognised a great spiritual issue when Christians have seen nothing but a material problem of pounds, shillings, and pence, of supply and demand, of labour and capital. Where Socialism adopts the programme of Revolution, Wisdom cannot give in her adhesion; she knows too well that suffering, impatience, and despair are unsafe, although very pathetic, counsellors; she knows too well that social upheaval does not produce social reconstruction, but a weary entail of fresh upheavals; she has learnt, too, that society is organic, and cannot, like Pelops in the myth, win rejuvenescence by being cut up and cast into the cauldron, but can advance only by a quiet and continuous growth, in which each stage comes naturally and harmoniously out of the stage which preceded. But all Socialism is not revolutionary. And Wisdom cannot withhold her sympathy and her aid where Socialism takes the form of stating, and expounding, and enforcing truer conceptions concerning the distribution of wealth. It is by vigorous and earnest grappling with the moral problem that the way of advance is prepared; every sound lesson therefore in the right way of regarding wealth, and in the use of wealth, is a step in the direction of that social renovation which all earnest men at present desire.
The book of Proverbs presents some very clear and decisive teaching on this question, and it is our task now to view this teaching, scattered and disconnected though it be, as a whole.
I. The first thing to be noted in the book is its _frank and full recognition that Wealth has its advantages_, and _Poverty has its disadvantages_. There is no quixotic attempt to overlook, as many moral and spiritual systems do, the perfectly obvious facts of life. The extravagance and exaggeration which led St. Francis to choose Poverty as his bride find no more sanction in this Ancient Wisdom than in the sound teaching of our Lord and His Apostles. The rich man's wealth is his strong city,[155] we are told, and as an high wall in his own imagination, while the destruction of the poor is their poverty. The rich man can ransom himself from death if by chance he has fallen into difficulties, though this benefit is to some extent counterbalanced by the reflection that the poor escape the threats of such dangers, as no bandit would care to attack a man with an empty purse and a threadbare cloak.[156] The rich man gains many advantages through his power of making gifts; it brings him before great men,[157] it procures him universal friendship, such as it is,[158] it enables him to pacify the anger of an adversary,[159] for indeed a gift is as a precious stone in the eyes of him that hath it, whithersoever it turneth it prospereth.[160] Not only does wealth make many friends,[161] it also secures positions of influence and authority, over those who are poorer, enabling a man to sit in Parliament or to gain the governorship of a colony.[162] It gives even the somewhat questionable advantage of being able to treat others with brusqueness and hauteur.[163]
On the other hand, the poor man has to use entreaties.[163] His poverty separates him from his neighbours, and even incurs his neighbours' hatred.[164] Nay, worse than this, his friends go far from him, his very brethren hate him, if he calls after them they quickly get out of his reach;[165] while the necessity of borrowing from wealthier men keeps him in a position of continual bondage.[166] Indeed, nothing can compensate for being without the necessaries of life: "Better is he that is lightly esteemed, and is his own servant, than he that honoureth himself, and lacketh bread."[167]