The key to Heaven.

When one considers that everything comes from God and returns to him, it is impossible not to perceive, in the generality of the divine creations, the bond that unites them with one another and subjects them to a work of common advancement and, at the same time, to a work of particular progress. Nor can one fail to recognize that the law of solidarity, resulting from this, does not oblige us to gratuitous sacrifices of every kind, one toward another. Besides, it is to be noted that God showed us in everything a first application, by himself, of the primordial principles that he established. Thus, with solidarity, this principle is found expressed in the sensibility with which we were endowed, a sensibility that leads us to share in the ills of others, to have compassion on them, and to relieve them. This is not all. The prophets and the divine Messiah Jesus gave us the example of a second application of the principle of solidarity, by consecrating the love of man for man, first by means of symbolic ceremonies, then by the authority of his teaching, in order subsequently to proclaim as a necessary and rigorous duty the practice of charity, which is the expression of solidarity. Charity is the act of our submission to the law of God; it is the sign of our moral greatness; it is the key to Heaven. Thus, it is of charity that I wish to speak to you. I shall consider it only from a single side: the material side; and the reason for this is simple: it is the side that least pleases man.

Neither the Christians, nor the Spiritists, no one has denied the principle, or rather, the law of solidarity; but they have sought to evade its consequences, and to this end they have invoked a thousand pretexts. I shall cite some of them.

The things of the heart or of the spirit, they say, have a price infinitely superior to that of material things; consequently, to console afflictions by kind words or wise counsels is worth infinitely more than to console by material assistance.

Surely, gentlemen, you are right if the affliction of which you speak has a moral cause, if it finds its reason in a wound of the heart; but if it be hunger, cold, sickness, in a word, if material causes have provoked it, will your gentle words suffice to calm it? your good counsels, your wise opinions to cure it? You will permit me to doubt it. If God, placing you upon the Earth, had forgotten to provide nourishment for your body, would you have found its equivalent in the spiritual assistance he grants you? But God is not man, he is eternal wisdom and infinite goodness. He imposed upon you a body of clay, but he provided for the needs of that body by making your fields fertile and by making fruitful the treasures of the earth; to the spiritual assistance addressed to your soul, he joined the material assistance claimed by your body. From then on, and because selfishness has perhaps stripped the poor man of his share in the earthly inheritance, by what right do you deem yourselves quits with him? Because human justice has excluded him from the number of those who enjoy temporal goods, would your charity not find a more equitable justice to render him? An illustrious thinker of this century did not fear to express himself thus in his memorable profession of faith: “Every bee has a right to the portion of honey necessary to its subsistence; and if among men some lack what is necessary, it is because justice and charity have disappeared from their midst.” However excessive this language may seem to you, it nonetheless contains a great truth, a truth perhaps inaccessible to the understanding of many of you, but evident to us, Spirits who, more touched by the effects, because we embrace them in their entirety, see the causes that produce them.

Ah! says one, no one more than I laments the sufferings and the cruel privations of the truly poor man, the poor man whose labor, insufficient for the maintenance of the family, brings him, in exchange for his fatigues, neither the joy of feeding his own, nor the hope of making them happy; but I would consider it a matter of conscience to encourage, by blind liberalities, idleness or misconduct. Moreover, I consider charity as indispensable to the salvation of man; only the impossibility of discovering real needs amid so many simulated needs seems to justify my abstention.

The impossibility of discovering real needs, such, my friend, is your justification. And yet, this justification would never be sanctioned by your conscience, and I want no other proof than your own confession; for, from the right that the truly poor man would have to your alms — and you acknowledge that right to him — from that right, I say, there follows for you the duty to seek him out. Do you seek him? Impossibility holds you back. What then! charity has no limits, it is infinite like God, from whom it emanates, and it admits no impossibility! Yes, something holds you back: it is selfishness, and God, who probes hearts and purses, God will easily discover it beneath the fallacious pretexts with which you veil it. You may deceive the world, you will succeed in momentarily deceiving your conscience, but you will never deceive God. In a hundred years, in a thousand years, you will appear again upon the Earth; doubtless you will live there, stripped of your present opulence and bent beneath the weight of indigence. Well then! I declare to you: you will receive from the rich the contempt and the indifference that you yourselves, when rich, will formerly have shown toward the poor. It is said that nobility obliges; solidarity obliges even more. Whoever withdraws from this law loses all its benefits. This is why you, who will have kept the selfish core of your nature, will suffer, in your turn, the contempt of selfishness. Listen to this passage from Rousseau:

He says: “For my part, I know that all the poor are my brothers and that I cannot, without an unjustifiable harshness, refuse them the slight assistance they ask of me. For the most part they are vagabonds, I agree; but I know too well the sufferings of life to be ignorant of how many misfortunes may reduce an honest man in his lot. And how could I be sure that the unknown person who comes to implore my assistance in the name of God may not be that honest man, on the point of perishing from misery, and that my refusal will reduce to despair? Even were the alms given to him not a real assistance for them, it would at least be a testimony that one is in solidarity with their sufferings, a softening of the harshness of refusal, a kind of greeting that one renders them.” It is a son of Geneva, gentlemen, who speaks thus of fate; it is a philosopher quenched at the dry springs of the eighteenth century who fears to overlook the honest man among the unknown people who hold out their hand, and who gives to all. He gives to all because all are his brothers: he knows it! Do you know less than he, gentlemen? I dare not believe it.

But to what measure must you give, or rather, what is, in your goods, the share that belongs to you and the share that belongs to the poor? Your share, gentlemen, is the necessary, nothing more than the necessary, and you must not exaggerate it. In vain will you avail yourselves of your position, of the burdens arising from it, of the obligations of luxury that it requires; all this concerns the world, and if you wish to live for the world you will advance only with the world, you will go no faster than the world. In vain too will you allege, to justify your habits of indolence, a labor to which the poor man does not devote himself, and which, practiced in your house and by you, makes you the beneficiaries of greater well-being. In vain will you allege this, because every man is consecrated to labor, either by himself or by others, because the negligence of his neighbor would not absolve him of the abandonment in which they would have left him. From your patrimony, as from your labor, you are permitted to take only one thing for your own benefit: the necessary; the rest belongs to the poor. Such is the law. I do not deny that this law admits of moderations, in certain cases and in given circumstances; but before the light, before the truth, before divine justice, it admits of no more.

And the family, what will become of it? Are we quits with it once we have succored the so-called poor? No, evidently, gentlemen, since, once you recognize the necessity of stripping yourselves for the poor, it is a matter of making a choice and establishing a hierarchy. Now, your wives and your children are your first poor; to them, therefore, you must give your first alms. Watch over the future of your children; concern yourselves with preparing for them calm and tranquil days in the midst of this vale of tears; leave them even in deposit a small inheritance, that will allow them to continue the good you have begun: this is legitimate. But never teach them to live selfishly and to regard as their own what belongs to all. Before and after them, the authors of your days, those who fed and watched over you, those who protected your first steps and guided your adolescence — your father and your mother — have a right to your solicitude. Then come the souls that God gave you as brothers according to the flesh; then the friends of the heart; then all the poor, beginning with the most wretched. As you see, I grant you moderations and establish a hierarchy in conformity with the instincts of your heart. Nevertheless, take care not to favor some too greatly to the exclusion of others. It is by the equitable sharing of your benefits that you will show your wisdom, and it is again by that sharing that you will fulfill the law of God in relation to your brothers, which is the law of solidarity.

“Justice,” says Lamennais, “is life; charity is also life, but a life more beautiful and more sweet.”

Yes, charity is a beautiful and sweet life, it is the life of the saints, it is the key to Heaven.

Lacordaire. n [1]

[v.

Lacordaire.]