Loading ...A WORD BEFORE READING
Property, what is it? and wealth, what does it include? Who shall control it? Who shall administer it? On what terms shall it be possessed and enjoyed? These questions pulse with human interest, and the average man is wholly absorbed by them. And so he ought to be. In the very beginning it was ordained that man should have dominion over the material world. He was to “replenish the earth and subdue it.” Such a task requires, and ought to require, the whole masterful strength of his mind. The wild goat can find food and shelter, but the subjugation of the earth, the sky, and the sea — this is the task of a man. It is therefore undiscerning zeal — one had almost written unconscionable cant — which exhorts a man to think less of riches and more of religion. There is confusion here in our elemental thinking. Such exhortation does not get to the root of things at all, and it will not pierce through the pride of life that cankers at the heart of our generation. Rather must riches and religion be aligned together in common terms of one spiritual law.
There is no salvation in slenderness, but only in fullness. Our civilization has need of many things if it shall be truly Christian, but in nothing has it greater need than this — that the average man shall recognize the spiritual content of money, and maintain an attitude of stewardship to that with which money is so closely related; that is, to property, income, and wealth.
The volume opens with the discussion of a pagan institution. Now some good people have the notion that to be a ^^pagan” is quite the same as to be a barbarian, if not an actual savage ! Of course nothing could be more untrue. Pagan Greece is still our teacher in some of the high reaches of human thought. Pagan Rome still rules in all our courts of law. Among the great world-leaders, pagan names stand high in honor. Socrates and Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius — these names shall endure upon the earth. Professor James Harvey Robinson, of Columbia University, in The New History, insists that the Greeks and the Romans are our own contemporaries; they are in no sense to be included among “the ancients”; they are identically our own kind of folks. Think of a morning visit at the studio of Praxiteles, or an afternoon at the Woman’s Club with Sappho (we will not say Xanthippe!). Cicero in the Senate — it would not impress men as “heathenish” at all! Yet these are pagan names. Nor could the world-leaders of our own generation be polled without including strong personalities from Japan and China and India — pagan, all of them.
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