And yet, as any one knows who knows anything of the delicacy, vigilancy, and thoroughness with which a well-organized society conducts its work, any such grotesque and deplorable result would, with a little wise co-operation between the Church and such a society, have been rendered impossible. I know how impatient many good people are of the services of any such association, and we have all heard ad nauseam of their protests against a "spy system which invades the sacred privacy of decent poverty," and the rest; but, in fact, such persons never seem to realize that, in one aspect of it, the Church stands, or, as a matter of common honesty, as the administrator of trust funds, ought to stand, on the same equitable basis, at least, as a life-insurance company. Now, when I seek the benefits of a life-insurance company I am asked certain questions which affect not only my physical resources but my diseases, my ancestry and their diseases, my personal habits, infirmities, and the like. If the company has the right, in the just interests of its other clients, to ask these questions, as administering a large trust, has not the Church, which is also the administrator of a trust no less in the interest of other clients?
But, indeed, this is the lowest aspect of such a question, and I freely admit it. The title of this paper points to that gravest aspect of it, with which I am now concerned. The largest mischief of indiscriminate almsgiving is not its wanton waste it is its inevitable and invariable degradation of its objects. I have spoken of the grave antagonism of the Church to wisely organized charity, but it is but the echo of the hostility of the individual, and often of the best and wisest men and women. Elsewhere (but not, I think, in print) I have related an incident in this connection of which one is almost tempted to say ex uno disce omnes. Approaching one day, when I was a pastor in a great city, the door of one of my clerical brethren, I observed a woman leaving it who, though she hastily turned her back upon me, I recognized as a member of my own congregation. On entering my friend's study I said to him:
"I beg your pardon, but was not that Mrs. whom I saw leaving your door a moment ago?"
"Yes."
"What was she after, may I ask?"
My friend now, alas! no longer living was a man distinguished by singular delicacy and chivalry of character and bearing, and he turned upon me with some surprise and hauteur and said:
"Well, yes, you may ask; but I do not know that, in the matter of the sad and painful circumstances of one of my own parishioners, I am called upon to answer."
"Precisely," I replied; "but, as it happens, she isn't your parishioner."
"What do you mean, sir?" he exclaimed, with some heat. "Do you suppose that I don't know the members of my own flock?"
"On the contrary," I said, "I have no doubt that you know not only them but the members of a great many other flocks, as in the instance of the person who has just left your door, who, as it happens, has been a member of the church of which I am rector for some fifteen years."
The remark and the abundant evidence with which I was able to re-enforce it at last persuaded my friend to institute further inquiries, which resulted in the discovery that the subject of those inquiries maintained similar relations with some seven parishes, from every one of which she was receiving, as a poor widow, a monthly allowance! And yet my reverend brother was one of the most strenuous opponents of any system or society, any challenge or interrogation which, as he said, came between him and his poor. Alas! though in one sense they were his poor, in another they were as remote from him as if they and he had been living in different hemispheres. With every sympathy for their distresses, he had not come to recognize that, under those complex conditions of our modern life, to which I have already referred, a real knowledge of the classes upon whom need and misfortune and the temptations to vice and idleness press most heavily has become almost a science, in which training, experience, most surely a large faith, but no less surely a large wisdom, are indispensable.
In this work there is undoubtedly a place for institutional charity, and also for that other which is individual. The former affords a sphere for a wise economy, for prompt and immediate treatment or relief, and for the utilization of that higher scientific knowledge and those better scientific methods which the home, and especially the tenement house, can not command. But over against these advantages we are bound always to recognize those inevitable dangers which they bring with them. The existence of an institution, whether hospital, almshouse, or orphanage, to the care of which one may easily dismiss a sick member of the household, or to which one may turn for gratuitous care and treatment, must inevitably act as strong temptations to those who are willing to evade personal obligations that honestly belong to them. In connection with an institution for the treatment of the eye and ear, with which I happen to be officially connected, it was found, not long ago, that the number of patients who sought it for gratuitous treatment was considerably increased by persons who came to the hospital in their own carriages, which they prudently left around the corner, and whose circumstances abundantly justified the belief that they were quite able to pay for the treatment, which, nevertheless, their self-respect did not prevent them from accepting as a dole. Such incidents are symptomatic of a tendency which must inevitably degrade those who yield to it, and which is at once vicious and deteriorating. How widespread it is must be evident to any one who has had the smallest knowledge of the unblushing readiness with which institutional beneficence is utilized in every direction. A young married man in the West, I have been told, wrote to his kindred in the East: "We have had here a glorious revival of religion. Mary and I have been hopefully converted. Father has got very old and helpless, and so we have sent him to the county house." One finds himself speculating with some curiosity what religion it was to which this filial scion was converted. Certainly it could not have been that which is commonly called Christian!
And at the other end of the social scale the situation is often little better. In our greater cities homes have been provided for the aged, and especially for that most deserving class of gentlewomen who, having been reared in affluence, come to old age, after having struggled to maintain themselves by teaching, needlework, and the like, with broken powers and empty purses. But it has, I am informed, been often impossible to find places for them in institutions especially created for their care, because its lady managers have filled their places with their own worn-out servants, who, having spent their years and strength in their employer's service, are turned over in their old age, with a shrewd frugality which one can not but admire, to be maintained at the cost of other people. It is impossible to confront such instances, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, without recognizing how enormous are the possibilities of mischief even in connection with the most useful institutional charity.
And yet these are not so great as those which no less surely follow, as it is oftenest administered, in the train of individual beneficence. In an unwritten address, not long ago, I mentioned an illustration of this which I have been asked to repeat here. While a rector in a large city parish, I was called upon by a stranger who asked for money, and who, as evidence of his claims upon my consideration, produced a letter from my father, written some twenty-five years before, when he was Bishop of Pennsylvania. The writer had, when this letter was placed in my hands, been dead for some twenty years, but, in a community in which he had been greatly loved and respected, his words had not, even in that lapse of time, lost their power. The letter was a general letter, addressed to no one, and therein lay its mischief. When read, it had in each instance been returned to its bearer, and he soon discovered that he had in it a talisman that would open almost any pocket. He was originally a mechanic who had been temporarily disabled by a fit of sickness; when I saw him, however, he was obviously, and doubtless for years had been, in robust health. But he had discovered that if he were willing to beg he need not work, and he had long before made his choice on the side of ease and indolence. After reading the letter which he produced, and looking at its date and soiled condition, both revealing the long service that it had performed, I said to him, "No, I will not give you anything, but I will pay you ten dollars if you will let me have that letter." It would not be easy to describe the leer of cunning and contempt with which he promptly took it out of my hand, folded it, placed it in his pocketbook, and left the room. He was not so innocent as to surrender his whole capital in trade!