BOOKS.
RICH AND POOR IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.* Da. Corm deals with "the teaching of the entire New Testa- ment on the social question that concerns the relation of rich and poor, and on earthly possessions in general, in their con- nection with the moral and religious life." The conclusions of the book are summed up in the following sentences :—" To furnish a plan for a social order was as remote from His [our Lord's] purpose as was the teaching of a system of theology." The fatherhood of God, the basis of all true religion, and the golden rule, the principle of the true social order, are, he maintains, the Christian ideals ; "but the systems of theology and the social polities that embody those ideals are the product of the ages ; they are born in the throes of reason and experience." We must say at once that we cannot agree with the arguments by which he arrives at them. While he maintains that in the Gospels no direct and permanent measures for the cure of poverty are to be found, the aim of Christ lying in the realm of religion, and not of sociology, he finds in our Lord's teaching an nnqualified com- mand against the laying up of money, a blessing pronounced upon the poor merely because they are poor, and a recom- mendation to the rich to dispossess themselves of everything by the giving of indiscriminate alms. He is very much afraid of the uncandid method of interpretation which gives to the plain words of Scripture a spiritual meaning, and deprecates continually the spirit which in explaining certain difficult passages in the Gospels has recourse to a theory of meta- phorical language or of Eastern hyperbole. For instance, he refuses to regard the sentences about turning the other cheek, giving the cloke after the coat, merely as metaphorical expressions of the necessity of pardon and the iniquity of revenge. He is predisposed to take all the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount au pied de la leltre. Indeed he goes further, and argues that the less spiritual form in which some of the Beatitudes appear in St. Luke is for that very reason likely to be the more primitive. "Blessed be ye poor" and "Blessed are ye that hunger" represent, he thinks, our Lord's own words, while "Blessed are the poor in spirit "and" Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness" show signs of having been added to. The last clause in the two sentences he regards as a very ancient gloss. But surely it could be just as easily maintained that the more spiritual expression, being, as it plainly is, more in our Lord's habitual manner of speech, which was commonly parabolic and seldom without a spiritual meaning, is the more authentic.
Dr. Cone makes, as it seems to us, insuperable difficulties for himself by his extreme literalness, which he attempts un- successfully to get over in his chapter headed "The Transient and the Permanent" Here he argues that our Lord's words about riches and poverty must be taken in their historical setting, and he thinks we may say without presumption that they do not apply to the existing order of things, and would certainly not be spoken if He were to return to the earth to-day. Poverty now debars from the higher life quite as much as wealth, be declares; almsgiving is dangerous, and by following the letter and not the spirit of the New Testament we may forget the permanent principles of benevolence in the transient direc- tions for the relief of distress. For our own part, we feel that it is dangerous, and scarcely logical, to speak of transient di rections about so permanent a question as that of the relations of rich and Poor. That Christ did not lay down a social system we are Sure; but neither do we believe that His words concerning _Poverty are to be taken so literally or dismissed so easily as Dr. Cone makes out The only really "hard saying" on the subieet---if we dismiss the very ill-defended theory of the 04:438--ig the one about the camel and the needle's eye, in
thour Lord declares that a rich man cannot lead the
Rick °ad and Poor fit the New Testament. By Ora° COne, London: C. Black. higher life without direct spiritual help ; that for him it is impossible without God. For ourselves, we believe this to be still true. It is far easier for a rich man to be wholly selfish than for a poor man. By " poor " we do not, of .course, mean the "submerged tenth" living in great cities whose existence disgraces the civilisation of to-day. The poor man has constantly before him small services which he can do for a neighbour, small sacrifices which he can make for his brethren. If he refuses to do them, he refuses deliberately and his world knows he has refused, and his neighbour pointe out to him his selfishness, most probably by some reciprocal action. But the careless rich man living in pleasure may never make a sacrifice, never do a kindness which costs him anything, never suppress his own good for that of his neighbour or the community, and yet never suspect for an instant that he is at all a bad fellow. "Unless he makes it a matter of conscience to "do good and to distribute," that is, unless he "takes counsel with God," the practical part of Christianity, which is the-service of his kind, slips by him, and he dies without the kingdom of heaven, having "lived to himself."
Dr. Cone says that in the injunction to the rich young man to "sell all thou bast" there is no indication that the recommendation was individual ; but certainly there is no indication that it was not. We can imagine a like incident in the present day. If two friends were occupied in some particular work, say the pursuit of some art or science, to which one gave his whole mind and the other only so much of it as he could spare from the thought of his possessions, we can well imagine the poor enthusiast saying to the rich dabbler, with no intention of condemning wealth in the abstract : "Oh, throw your money into the gutter; it hampers you at every turn."
One stumbling block to the proper understanding of our Lord's words is to be found in the conventional language of to-day. In moral and social arguments all who are not wage- earners are considered to be "rich." That absurd expression, "the working classes," suggests that all who do no manual labour live in idleness. As a matter of fact, the first-class artisan, who too often spends all the margin over and above his house- hold expenses on personal luxury at the public-house, knows far more about "the deceitfulness of riches" than the poor pro- fessional whose scanty margin just suffices to keep up his life insurance or to provide against the dreaded " break-down " which stares the tired brain-worker in the face.
That the New Testament points out the danger of money- loving more severely and with more reiteration than is agree- able to the philosophers of to-day we entirely believe ; but while we doubt the right of Christians to consider any of our Lord's words as of purely historical significance, we cannot but recommend Dr. Cone to reconsider his own advice about "the letter which killeth," meanwhile thanking him for a. suggestive and interesting book on a subject which is always with us.
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