CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY.

(Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday afternoon, the 27th April, being the third Sunday after Easter, 1890.)

ACTS X, 38,

"Who went about doing good."

THIS epigrammatic description of our Lord's earthly life occurs, as you will remember, in St. Peter's address to Cornelius and his friends at Cesarea, an address which, on account of its reference to the Resurrection, is used by the Church as the Epistle for Easter Monday. When we first hear it, such an account of our Lord's life on earth, if taken by itself and without the striking context, may appear to fall below the level of the subject, and to range Him on the same plane of excellence as has been attained in successive centuries by many of His disciples. We must many of us have known, probably many of us do know, men and women of whom St. Peter's words would be a just and unexaggerated description, men and women who, nearly or altogether, throughout life have gone about, still do go about, doing good to their fellow-creatures; and as we think of them we are perhaps at first inclined to wonder that the Apostle should have so expressed himself, expressed himself in such very measured terms when speaking of his and our Lord and Master.

Here, then, it is necessary to consider to whom St. Peter was addressing himself. Before him stood the centurion, Cornelius, probably a few comrades, and certainly some Jews, who, on an occasion like this, would not have had the largest place in the Apostle's thought. The persons of whom St. Peter was chiefly thinking were Cornelius and the other soldiers present-above all, Cornelius. The band to which Cornelius belonged consisted of Italian levies, and Cornelius, as his name shows, belonged to an old Roman family. And when St. Peter says that our Lord during His earthly life

"went about doing good," he knew perfectly well that such an account of that life would have appeared anything but tame, commonplace, inadequate, to those whom he was especially anxious to influence, because it was so sharply contrasted with anything that they had left behind them at home. For that great world in which Cornelius and his comrades had been reared must indeed have made the men and affairs of Palestine, generally speaking, seem by comparison petty enough-as we should say, provincial. Everything outward at Rome, the world's centre, was on a splendid scale. The public buildings, the temples, the baths, the public shows, everything connected with the army, everything connected with the machinery and the apparatus of government, was calculated to impress, and even to awe the imagination. But there was one overshadowing defect in that great world which would have come home with especial force to the minds of the class from which the rank and file of the Roman forces were chiefly recruited. It was a world without love. It was a world full of want and suffering, and the whole of the great social and political machine went round and round without taking any account of this. It was a world without love. Commenting on this fact nearly three centuries later, Lactantius, after describing the salient features of heathen life, adds: "Compassion and humanity are peculiar to the Christians."

It is easy to point to a few facts which may at first sight appear to traverse this severe judgment. Such are isolated acts of natural kindness provoked by some great calamity, as was shown for instance in Nero's reign by the heathen inhabitants of Rome after the killing or wounding of fifty thousand persons by the fall of the theatre at Fidenæ, or, some years later, by the general readiness to relieve distress when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by an eruption of Vesuvius. The beggars, too, who sat all day on the steps of the temples of ancient Rome, would never have sat there unless kindhearted people had now and then tossed them a small coin. And liberality was celebrated in the speeches of great orators, in numerous inscriptions, even on the current coin of the empire, as a public virtue. Liberality, indeed, was a sort of virtue which had to be practised, whether he liked it or not, by every public man in Rome. From the Emperor downwards, every public man had to make over to the public, in

some shape or other, a certain part of his income, whether in gifts to his native city, or to the club or society to which he belonged, over and above gifts to his friends, guests, relatives. He must build a theatre, or build an aqueduct, or a fountain, or a temple; he must make a new road, he must repair the city walls, he must give corn, wine, oil, to be distributed among the citizens, he must erect public baths, he must endow a public library.

Of all these forms of liberality we have many and indisputable records, as well as of the presents to the people which each emperor used to give on succeeding to the throne, on the fifth, on the tenth year of his reign, on the occasions of a birth or a wedding in the imperial family, or of a public triumph. When, for instance, Julius Cæsar triumphed, the people were feasted in the streets at twenty-two thousand tables, and the costliest wines of Southern Italy and of the Greek Archipelago were said to have run in rivers.

Now, these isolated efforts to relieve suffering, these gifts to the needy, this liberality of the orators, and the inscriptions, these largesses to the people, these public works, these costly entertainments, as Cornelius and his friends knew well, were not the outcome of love. They were forms of an expenditure which was essentially selfish. The main object of such expenditure was to secure that sort of popularity which means political power. It was repaid, if not in kind, yet substantially. It has no more to do with charity, which loves its object for his own sake and not for the sake of what can be got out of him, than any other kind of outlay of capital with a view to a calculated return has to do with it. It was from first to last a matter of business, and as a consequence of this, so far was it, generally speaking, from doing good to the people who were its object, that it rapidly demoralised them by spreading among them habits of idleness and corruption. The Roman people, under the system of imperial largesses and entertainments, increasingly hated work. It cared only for such ease and enjoyment as it could wring out of its rulers. It became utterly indifferent to everything in its rulers except their capacity and willingness to gratify itself.

In order to do real good, the eye must rest not on what is prudent in, or what is expected of, the giver, but on what is needed in the recipient. And thus mere liberality, if active,

is blindfold; while charity seeks out its objects with discrimination and sympathy, liberality has no eye for the really sore places in the suffering and destitute world. Nothing was done systematically in that world with which Cornelius and his friends were familiar for classes or for individuals who could make no return. There was no sort of care for widows or for orphans. There were no hospitals-there was no public provision for those who were not citizens, and therefore had no influence. There was no consideration whatever—it is little enough to say this-for the immense class of slaves. Slaves were simply property to be bought and sold and punished, and, at one time, killed at the discretion of their masters. And if here and there there were schools, like those under Severus, their main object, when we come to examine them closely, appears to have been to provide recruits for the Roman army. And all this was in harmony with principles laid down by the great teachers of the ancient world, such as Plato and Aristotle. In Plato's ideal state the poor have no place-beggars are expelled or left to die as injuring the common prosperity.

In Aristotle's account of the virtues, the most promising from a Christian point of view is generosity, but on examination generosity turns out to be a prudential mean between avarice and extravagance. The generous man, we are told, gives because it is a fine thing to give, not from a sense of duty, still less at the dictates of love for his fellow-creatures. It is no wonder that, when these were governing principles, there were few efforts in that old world, to which Cornelius had belonged, that deserved the name of doing good.

When then Cornelius heard from St. Peter of such a life as that of our Lord, and had further in all probability asked and received answers to the questions which St. Peter's description suggested, he would have listened to a narrative which had all the charm, all the freshness of a great surprise. Cornelius knew that in his own Italy the poor, and especially the sick and the hungry poor, were not simply of no account, they were looked upon as incumbrances on the national life. As they could be of no service to the State, either in the army or in the public works, there appeared to be no object in keeping them alive, and no effort was made to do so. This very class, it would have struck Cornelius, was the object of our Lord's particular attention. The hungry peasants whom

He fed on the shores of the Sea of Galilee were not like the comparatively well-to-do citizens who feasted at Cæsar's twenty-two thousand tables. Our Lord was observing His own rule: "Wher. thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maim, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed, for they cannot recompense thee, for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just." To have fallen among thieves, to have been wounded and left half dead, was itself a claim on The Good Samaritan, and He spent His ministry in acknowledging it. His practice was in conformity with that Divine precept: "Be ye therefore merciful as your Father also is merciful."

Watch Him at work in or near Capernaum, as the Evangelist who on Friday was especially in the mind of the Church, and who was St. Peter's penman in describing his Divine Master's life, watched Him, as St. Mark describes Him in the first three chapters of his Gospel, beginning with the cure in the synagogue, then healing Peter's mother-inlaw of a fever, then relieving a large number of persons who had gathered at sunset at the door of St. Peter's house, then, after prayer throughout the night, curing the leper, then on returning to Capernaum healing the paralytic who was let down through the house roof, then later on healing the man with the withered hand in the Capernaum synagogue on the Sabbath.

This is evidently a sample, an extract as we might say, from the diary of our Lord's occupations during His ministry, and Cornelius, when He came to inquire, would have been struck by the fact that, unlike the calculated liberality of the leading men at Rome, it did not win for Him any political or social capital. Those poor lepers, and paralytics, and fever-stricken peasants, could make no return to their Benefactor, and He did not ask for any. He was indeed sorry, for the men's own sake, when only one out of a company of ten lepers returned after being healed to give glory to God, but it was their loss, not His, that He deplored. His own rule was that which He enjoined on others: to ask for nothing again, to give alms and do kindnesses in such ways as might escape, if duty permitted it, a return in the way or honour, or reputation, or acknowledgment of any kind. And this, Cornelius would have observed, implied nothing short of a new ideal of life and work.