Holy poverty

“ Come, therefore, thou divine Physician of souls; for we all have need of thee! “Bow down thine ear, O Lord, hear me: for I am poor and needy” (Ps. 86:1) ,—poor in righteousness and true holiness. So great is the poverty of man, that unless he be covered with the mercy of God, and clothed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ (Isa. 61:10) , he must appear with shame and nakedness before the judgment of God and all his holy angels; and in this respect, man is by nature reduced so very low, that there is not a more indigent creature in the world. ”

“ And then, how many more of us there are, not so bad as that, but still feeble and languid, whose Christian history is a history of weakness, while God's power is open before us, of starving in the midst of abundance, broken only by moments of firmer faith, and so of larger, happier possession, that make the poverty-stricken ordinary days appear ten times more poverty-stricken. ”

“ Though it may take the language of prayer, it is blasphemy that attributes to the inscrutable decrees of Providence the suffering and brutishness that come of poverty; that turns with folded hands to the All-Father and lays on Him the responsibility for the want and crime of our great cities. We degrade the Everlasting. We slander the Just One. A merciful man would have better ordered the world; a just man would crush with his foot such an ulcerous anthill! It is not the Almighty, but we who are responsible for the vice and misery that fester amid our civilization. ”

“ According to the principles of Christianity, poverty itself is a virtue; indeed, it is the virtue, which sovereigns and priests oblige their slaves to observe most rigorously. With this idea, many pious Christians have of their own accord renounced riches, distributed their patrimony among the poor, and retired into deserts, there to live in voluntary indigence. But this enthusiasm, this supernatural taste for misery, has been soon forced to yield to nature. The successors of these volunteers in poverty sold to the devout people their prayers, and their intercessions with the Deity. ”

“ But these reasons are more external and official; the deeper spiritual significance of Christ's poverty will be disclosed as we regard it as part of His training as the Son of Man, and His exhibition of what the true life of man is to be.
Christ's poverty was part of that suffering through which He learned obedience and was perfected by God as our High Priest. To human nature [Pg 70] poverty must ever be a trial. We were made to be kings and possessors of all things. To have nothing costs suffering. ”

“ POVERTY AND RICHES I
The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides through misery and humiliation!
But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself upon renunciation without compensation. ”

“ Their very necessities almost compel them to seek comfort from God in prayer. Many of the poor indeed neglect these advantages and make their poverty a source of discontent and even murmuring against Divine Providence in this regard. ”

“ And many inconveniences distinctive of poverty are common to all religious. But so long as their order or congregation exists and flourishes they need have no care or anxiety for themselves or their future.
Our poverty, however, is of a totally different type, and our dangers of a different nature. The life of a secular priest may be full of care and anxiety on the question of money—difficulty of making ends meet, support of church and school, perhaps the weight of a capital debt, good works languishing for want of means—the poor dependent on him—and so forth. ”

“ The Church had made poverty the highest state, and insisted, as she does in part to-day, that the suffering and deprivation of one class were ordained of God to draw out the sympathies of the other. The rich must save their souls by alms and endowments, and contentment and acquiescence were to be the virtues of the poor. ”

“ It is a melancholy reflection, that the wealthy are more careless about religious duties than the indigent, and that poverty and piety are so often linked together. I often observed, when we stopped at any town or village, which had symptoms of great poverty, that the inhabitants seemed also unusually devout. ”

“ No, it is not the holding of property, but the selfish misuse of it and the inordinate desire of material gain and its pleasures, which is opposed to the virtue of evangelical poverty. In few words may the Christian precept of poverty be set forth: Let no man set his heart on any material possession for its own sake, or for the mere holding of it; if a man is lacking in this world’s goods, let him not fret nor complain, but seek rather the life of the spirit. ”

“ Therefore, when I find in the tenth chapter of Proverbs this: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty,' I shake hands with the author, and travel with him for this trip at least. The prophet does not say that their destruction is ignorance, or vice, or sin, or any of the ordinary blossoms of poverty which it is the fashion to refer to as its root. He tells us the truth—the destruction of the poor is their poverty. ”

“ It is very easy, they say, when one is himself in comfortable circumstances, to represent to the poor that their poverty is a school for heaven, and to preach a contempt for riches etc. They entirely forget, that the first promulgation of the Gospel was made at a time when the worst kind of pauperism prevailed ”

“ At the time of the Reformation, poverty had become so desecrated as a part of the great system of evil it had to combat, that, in casting out those errors, it cast out a part of the truth with them. Since that time it is as if our Protestant theology has never ventured to enquire what the place and the meaning and the power is which Christ and the Apostle really gave poverty in their teaching and practice. ”

“ It is easy to sermonize on the blessings of poverty, and to congratulate the poor on their peculiar privileges, but it is mockery. The testimony of all whose experience qualifies them to bear it is, that in proportion to the keenness of want are men unfitted for the exercises of religion. It is vain to attempt spiritually to bless those who are struggling against the horrors of starvation. Poverty may no doubt be sanctified, but to the irreligious it is far more frequently a curse than a blessing. ”

“ This being so, mark the word of our Lord Jesus to the present state of the professing Church: "Thou sayest I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, but knowest not that thou art poor, and blind, and naked, and wretched, and miserable." Yes, in the light of God, in the eyes of the Lord, in the judgment of the sanctuary, we live in a day of poverty. It is this which characterizes the day in which our lot is cast,—a lack of all true riches, whilst the air is filled with boastings of wealth and attainment. ”

“ It is quite evident that religious poverty gave the key to the situation,—poverty, self-abnegation, the resignation of all temporal considerations in life, by men who had no families to provide for, no station to acquire ”

“ They are ever apt to contrast their circumstances with those of their wealthy neighbours, and to deplore their poverty, and fret at it as that which keeps them down, depriving them of all good, and exposing them to all evil. And, without doubt, it is the source of many and heavy sufferings, both in the way of privation and endurance. But the poor may indulge their fears, and make themselves unhappy without cause. Their forebodings may be more than groundless. If by their poverty they are exposed to some evils, they are exempted by it from others. ”

“ What do you want among poor ugly crones who drag their crooked limbs out of bed so early to go to their Saviour, because later they must do the work of their little homes and cannot get away? What brings you to share with us the bitter bread of poverty, the bread of the poor in spirit, with which our Saviour fed the five thousand and will feed thousands and tens of thousands more from eternity to eternity? ”

“ Soon your riches will be cursed. When you are poor, you will not be able to find them. In your poverty, you will cry to the Lord. But 'Your cries will be in vain, for it will be too late, and nothing can stop your destruction,' says the Lord of Hosts. ”

“ Poor as the Dissenting clergy may be, as a body, we hear of no such conflicts in their lot. The poor spirit-broken clergyman bearing, undeserved by him, the opprobrium belonging to his church, seeing his gentle wife washing his floor, or striving to patch up once more the girl’s frock and the boy’s coat; while they, poor children, peep in at the door of the labourer’s smoky cabin, and rush in at the first invitation to take a sup of milk or a potatoe! Scraps of the classics, descriptive of poverty, will run in his head, instead of gospel consolations of poverty ”

“ It is not enough to preach love of poverty to the poor, or to talk to them about the sumptuous beauty of poverty. The poor do not believe the words of the rich until the rich willingly become poor. The Disciples destined to preach the beauty of poverty to both poor and rich were to set an example of happy poverty to every man in every house on every day. They were to carry nothing with them except the clothes on their backs and the sandals on their feet. ”

“ We are deeply impressed with the great destitution of these people as regards intellectual, moral and spiritual things. Poor in the extreme as far as their physical wants are concerned, they are still poorer in reference to the wants of their minds and souls. So great is their poverty in these particulars, that, in large measure, they do not, until approached in Christian kindness, realize it. They are without education, and without true religion; without schools and without churches. ”

“ In Catholic countries, that does have a softening influence upon the rich and upon the poor. They believe the same. So in Mohammedan countries they can kneel in the same mosque, and pray to the same God. But how is it with us? The church is not free. There is no welcome in the velvet for the velveteen. Poverty does not feel at home there, and the consequence is, the rich and poor are kept apart, even by their religion. ”

“ No man has an absolute ownership before God, so that he may satisfy his own whim or pleasure without consideration for what is due by Divine Law to his fellow-men. Possession in the sphere of conscience is stewardship. The rich are God’s stewards, appointed to “give to every man his just measure in due season.” Such briefly is the precept of Evangelical Poverty—a precept which has no direct connection with any theory of social economics, but is based upon the fundamental law of religion, that only the poor in spirit are spiritually free and capable of citizenship in the realm of eternal life. ”

“ The most obvious, certainly the most obtrusive evil in the homes of the wretched, is poverty. The love of God, who has given for man’s use the earth and its fulness, the gospel of Him who fed the hungry and healed the sick, teach us to look with tender interest upon the poor, and try to redeem them from a lot as full of temptation as of suffering. ”

“ If, by descending a step or two lower in the scale of comfort, the comfortable classes could lift the very poor a step or two higher, the Church ought not to help the rich to shut their eyes to their obvious duty by giving them the excuses of such texts as "The poor shall never depart out of the land," or, "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." Poverty is often a good school: but penury is distinctly an evil; and the Church should regard it as an evil not coming from God, and should make war against it, and teach the poor not to acquiesce in it. ”

“ Another way of practising this poverty is to follow the counsels of Jesus Christ, Who bids us sell all that we have and give it to the poor, imitating our divine Master in that poverty which He embraced for us, that we, through it, might be made rich. ”

“ This very sentiment, which our cultivation refines, fosters, makes supreme, is encountered by that harsh and cruel evil which grows also with the growth of civilization—poverty—civilized poverty. Oh, 'tis a frightful thing, this well-born, well-bred poverty! There is a pauper state, which, loathsome as it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. ”

“ The poorest of all, those who live by odd jobs, by ungracious charity and also—oh, poverty!—by some discreet theft, the ragged, the vermin-ridden, the timid, the wretched; old widows whose children are far away, young orphans not yet able to earn a living, hump-backed old men with no acquaintances, strengthless invalids, those who are incurably sick, those whose wits no longer rightly serve them, who have no understanding, who cannot work. ”

“ May not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed is the strenuous life,—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival [pg 368] of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. ”