It will often leave the
ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It
will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice
though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the
formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that all
men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the formula
of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If there were but
one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest of us made
merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to God night and
day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly works with, a
creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividly personal immortality.
Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or even happy merely like a
herd; for it is not a question of men, but of a man. A man's meals may be
poor, but they must not be bestial; there must always be that about the
meal which permits of its comparison to the sacrament. A man's bed may
be hard, but it must not be abject or unclean: there must always be about
the bed something of the decency of the death-bed.
This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible
murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil that
threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannot encourage
the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out.
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