Christmas Charities

“For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.”—2 Corinthians viii. 9.

When a beggar asks alms of me, for the love of Christ, can I safely hold back my hand? When I am assured, by persons of wisdom and experience, that I shall do a positive wrong to society if I listen to his prayer, dare I give him anything? These are questions which are troubling a great many of us. They do not concern only the case of the street beggar. They have a very wide application. Some will tell us that almost every time we bestow anything on a fellow-creature, we are indulging a fancy or a sentiment, and violating a law. Some will say that the most indiscriminate kindness is most like the kindness of God, Who giveth liberally to all, and upbraideth not, Who sendeth His rain upon the just and upon the unjust. These opposite opinions do not only distract us. Too often they drive us to the conclusion that there is no principle at all which can guide us; or to the conclusion, more dangerous still, that there are two principles, one of which is good for earth, the other for heaven,—the former to be followed commonly, because it has been ascertained to be true by experience, the latter occasionally, because it is enjoined in the Bible.

Perhaps there is no time when this conflict is likely to be greater in our minds than at Christmas. That season is associated with our old notions of charity. We cannot cure ourselves of the notion that we ought to give then, if we give at no other part of the year. This is not merely because it falls in winter, when nights are long and cold, and work is apt to be scarce;—not merely because the rich then are wont to feast and make themselves comfortable, so that the thought of people starving near them seems peculiarly monstrous,—but because they cannot face the recollection that the Son of God became a poor man among poor men, when their hearts and hands are shut against creatures of their own flesh and blood. We are half-inclined to think that maxims, which in general are indisputable, may be neglected out of homage to the Nativity; that our liberal dispositions ought to be indulged while we are keeping it, though they may need to be carefully watched and restrained when the anniversary is over.

Such a scheme of action cannot be an honest one, my brethren. What is right at Christmas must be right always. Either the Incarnation means nothing, and we should pay no heed to it, or it determines what our thoughts and deeds should be, all our lives through. We should go to it, not to find exceptions from the laws by which men are governed, but to learn what those laws are. It will not, I am sure, encourage or tolerate in us any sentiment which is at variance with principle. It may, if we consider it earnestly, help us to arrive at a principle more comprehensive and more available for practice than either of those to which I have referred, and which will do justice to both.

I. And first: It is certain that if we receive the Incarnation of Christ as the revelation of God’s mind and character to men, any language which has ever been used or can ever be used to denote the fulness and universality of the Divine Love and Compassion, instead of being exaggerated, instead of requiring to be modified and qualified, must be tame and cold. When we say that the appearing of Christ is an answer to all the dark thoughts and conceptions which men in any age or country have formed of Him, in Whom they live and move and have their being; when we say that the Gospel of the Incarnation will at last beat down every kind of devil-worship that has prevailed throughout the world—we speak reasonably, but we only speak half the truth. Not only the notions of God as a cruel, malicious tyrant, plotting against His creatures, but all those notions and phrases which rob Him of His personality, which represent Him under such names as ‘The Divinity,’ or ‘Providence,’ or ‘Omnipotence,’ become offensive to us when once we think that the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in the Son of Man. Then the Name of Father, which Christ proclaimed, becomes the Name which interprets all others, which includes all others. The Divinity which we reverence, is the mind of a Living Father. The Providence we confess, is the foresight of a Father devising what is best for all His children. The Omnipotence which seemed to be on the side of evil, when Christ lay in the manger and the Innocents were slain—when Christ died on the Cross, and priests and soldiers mocked Him,—is shown by the Manger and the Cross to be the instrument which the Father wields for the purposes of His grace, for the Redemption of the world.

So far then it would seem that the defenders of an expansive, undiscriminating charity have much to urge on their behalf. If we are to be followers of God as dear children; if nothing can be wrong in our character, which is like His, nothing right which is inconsistent with His,—there can be no fear of our regarding the race of man, or any individuals of that race, with too much of affection and sympathy, there must be the greatest fear in stinting our affection and sympathy. I think our consciences fully affirm this conclusion. We may every now and then be confused by solemn warnings which we hear, about the danger of being too compassionate; we may feel that those who utter these warnings are striking at some infirmity, some very serious infirmity, in our conduct and in our temper. But when we question ourselves, we find it is not the infirmity of having cared too much for our fellow-men, of having made too many sacrifices for them. No one who is thoroughly honest with himself feels that he is open to this charge. He may have talked far too much about benevolence, but he has not been over-benevolent; he may have indulged in a frothy sentimentalism, but that will rise up before him rather as evidence that he has been over-tender of himself than of any one else. The blessing of the Psalmist, on him who considereth the poor, has not been changed, as some appear to suppose, into a curse. Inconsideration is now, as it always was, the source of all curses.

II. Again, if we have not followed a cunningly devised fable in supposing that Christ, Who was rich, for our sakes became poor;—if the narrative of His birth into this world, and of His Life in it, is one to which we attach any sacredness,—it cannot be a true maxim that men should generally be left to the consequences of their own acts, that we should turn away on the other side when we see one who has fallen into poverty or into crime, comforting ourselves with the thought that it was his own fault, and that we are not to save him from the results of his folly and recklessness. There is, indeed, no history which shows so clearly as the Gospel History that individuals and Nations may be left to taste the fruits of their misdoings. The Son of Man wept over a hypocritical city and yet left it to be trodden down by its enemies. But surely one sin, the chief sin, of that city, of its priests and rulers, was that they were wrapped in their selfish pride and importance; that they spurned the Lazarus at their gate; that they worshipped the letter of the Law, forgetting the meaning and the end of the Law. Their great complaint against Jesus was, that He received sinners and ate with them. His complaint of them was, that they did not look for a Shepherd Who would go into the wilderness to seek after the wanderers of His flock, and that because they would not have a chief Shepherd of that mind, they, the inferior shepherds, had become mere hirelings.

We could not confess a Saviour at all, if we did not believe that men had fallen into an evil condition, out of which they needed to be raised. We could not confess such a Saviour as Jesus, if we did not believe that the worst part of the fall was voluntary; that men had themselves to blame for their greatest calamities. That principle is involved in the idea of an Incarnation. It is carried out into the minutest details in the acts of Christ. He who knew all men, could, if He had pleased, have fixed on the most respectable, and have bestowed all His blessings on them. He deliberately proclaimed the opposite rule as the rule of His conduct. The Physician, He said, was for the sick, not for the healthy. He cured a man to whom He had need to say, Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee. He healed those who had unclean spirits. He cast the seven devils out of Mary Magdalene.

Most of these acts were done for the bodies of men. Our Lord drew no artificial distinctions between cures of the body and of the soul. He claimed to be the Lord of both. He proved Himself to be the Deliverer of both. His example, then, may fairly be pleaded by those who say that they are not bound, in dispensing gifts and services, to choose the meritorious; who remind us that if we had to prove our title to live, we must all be left to perish.

III. But there is another aspect of the Nativity which requires to be as seriously contemplated as either of those which I have brought before you. It is that which is so prominent in the Collect for Christmas Day. The Father gave His Son to take our nature upon Him and to be born of the Virgin, that we being regenerate and made His children by adoption and grace, might be renewed daily by His Holy Spirit. Christ did not merely stoop to our condition, He stooped to us that He might raise us. He came to assert for those, whom he was not ashamed to call His brethren, the dignity of Sons of God. And as this was the ultimate object of His Incarnation and Humiliation, so far as we are concerned—it appeared in every part of the work which He did while He was clothed with our mortality. He did not merely heal the sick and cast out devils. He called forth the Faith and Trust of those whom He restored. This was a part, the very highest part of their restoration. “Thy faith has saved thee,” He said to the Samaritan leper, who had already been made clean, like the other nine who went their ways without returning to give glory to God. In other words, He called forth the true manhood in the poor, degraded creatures to whom He came; He awakened them to a sense of their glorious parentage. He led them to look up from the earth on which they had crawled to the living God. He found the sheep He had been seeking. He brought them back rejoicing to their proper fold. And so He distinguishes more accurately between man and man than those distinguish, who denote one set of men as respectable and religious, and another as odious and profane. He spoke to each heart by his acts more than by his words. If there was in that heart a sense of oppression, a desire for deliverance, it responded to His call, it became the heart of a man. If it was violently shut against Him, it endured the worst punishment it could endure; it remained in its previous obtuseness; it grew every day more hard and impenetrable.

Now here, brethren, is a justification, drawn from the Nativity and from the example of our Lord, for those who say that many of our so-called charitable deeds are not good, but mischievous. We need not introduce distinctions, which only perplex our consciences, between acts that are good for Society and acts that are good for individuals. We need not balance the duties which we owe to the one against those we owe to the other. It is clearly not good for any individual that he should live as a mere animal, when God has intended him for a man; as a slave, when he ought to be free; as a liar, when it is his privilege and his right to speak truth. If by our alms we tempt him to be a miserable creature, sustained by chance bounty, selling his soul for pence, we are guilty of our brother’s blood; we are not leading him to feel that he is a child of God; we may be, so far as in us lies, keeping him from that new and high life which Christ took our flesh to vindicate for him.

It is on this ground that I would rest the condemnation of that lazy self-indulgent giving, into which we are all apt to fall, and which we know in our consciences has no title to the noble name of Charity. On this ground, too, we have a right to say that many religious institutions of other days were not godly institutions, because they kept up a race of vagabonds who never learnt the worth and glory of labour; who never learnt, therefore, to be brave and faithful; who prayed to chance, and not to their Father in Heaven, to give them day by day their daily bread. We are not, indeed, called upon to pronounce sentence upon those institutions, as if they never could have been useful, or as if they might not have been turned to a good use when they were most corrupted, or as if they may in no case have compensated by their sympathy for the wrong which they inflicted by their prodigality. As little need we decide, about any particular instance of almsgiving in our own day, that it was wrongly directed, because it was not in conformity with some rule which we have laid down for ourselves. Rules are most fallacious things; they will be continually violated,—I had almost said they ought to be continually violated, because the condition of no human being is exactly like that of any other, and because it is most desirable that each case should be tried, as far as it can be, on its own merits, and should not be labelled according to some arbitrary classification of ours. What we want is, to understand the end that we should keep constantly in view. We shall make many mistakes, doubtless, about the means of effecting it; we shall have to learn by failures. But we shall then at least know when we have succeeded and when we have failed. We shall have a standard by which to try our own acts, and to show us what wrong habits of mind have made our acts defective or mischievous. We shall feel that we are not the least absolved from the duty of helping our fellow-men, by their errors or ours; by their reluctance to be benefited, or our stupidity in benefiting them. We shall be sure that we are only God’s almoners, and that He has found more ingratitude in us,—more misunderstanding of His purposes,—than we shall ever find shown towards us by those of whom we fancy we have most right to complain. We shall be sure that the Spirit of Him Who gave His Son to take our nature upon Him, will impart to us greater wisdom in giving, as well as more sympathy and more faithfulness, in proportion as we feel distrustful of our discernment, and cast ourselves upon His guidance.

I think, then, brethren, that we need not choose St. John’s Day as a day for forgetting the precept, that we cannot love God Whom we have not seen, unless we love our brother whom we have seen. I think we need not make Christmas less a time for opening our hearts to the needy and suffering, than we have done hitherto. We may turn any day into a St. John’s Day, by taking his maxim as the maxim of our lives. We may carry Christmas through every season of the year, by remembering what it tells us of our divine birth, and of our relation to all the members of Christ’s family.

That this lesson may not be a dead one for you, I am going to tell you why I think District Relief and Provident Societies, such as are established among you, fulfil all the conditions which should meet in Christmas Charities. When you relieve as private individuals, you may do a good which no formal, legal distribution of alms can do, because you come face to face with human beings. But then you are felt to be the benefactors; the gratitude, if there is any, is fixed exclusively upon you. When you go forth to relieve as members of a district, you have all the same opportunity of showing personal kindness, and of exercising personal vigilance, as in the other case;—you have greater security that the persons whom you visit need your help;—but you are able to remind them, without preaching, by the very name you bear, that they and you belong to a body; that there is a Christian fellowship for you both; that Christian prayers and sacraments are what bind you to your neighbour and your brother.

This is one thing, and a very great thing. Then I rejoice heartily to find that you join together these words “Relief” and “Provident” in the announcement of your purposes. I do not mean that you can always join them together in fact. You must relieve many who are not provident, and whom you cannot make provident. In doing so you bear a witness for the love of God to His creatures,—a witness that Christ Who was rich, for their sakes became poor; that witness may not be in vain, even for the highest objects. But if you can convince your poor people that the best relief, the only true relief, is that which awakens them to exertion, to hope, to foresight, you are fulfilling in a far more satisfactory, in a far more evangelical way, your duty to your fellow-men.

I use this last expression deliberately. I am anxious to use it. For I fear that many of us suppose providence or foresight to be a secular, not a Christian or Evangelical, virtue. It may have become such in some cases. Men may have acquired large fortunes by a foresight that was merely selfish; in that case their own wild speculations or the prodigality of an heir very commonly scatters in a short time what it has taken a long time to gather. But I am convinced that if providence is ever to become a characteristic of the poor,—who have so many motives to dissipate their little earnings,—to whom it is not honest to hold out the possible chance of their drawing prizes in the world’s lottery,—it must have a deeper root than this. They must learn that the two meanings of the word are not so distant as we have made them; that we are to be provident for our children, because God is provident for His; that it is the glorious characteristic of man to look before and after, because he is made in the image of God Who is, and was, and is to come. Christ took our nature upon Him and was born of the Virgin that He might bestow the divine attributes upon men. Christ called forth foresight in them by calling forth faith in them. He taught them to trust in a Father; to work cheerfully and hopefully, not anxious about the morrow, certain that they might commit themselves to Him Who had appointed them their work, and would give them strength to do it. Christ taught those who trusted in Him that they were not limited by the instant on which they were standing, because they were sharers of His life and immortality.

My brethren, our poor people will not learn providence by copying the practice of the higher classes, nor of the moneyed classes. Our high classes and our moneyed classes may need to be reformed by them. England may again become a thrifty and provident nation, may be preserved from sinking into a nation of gamblers, by her labourers. If we are to gain that great benefit from them, we must ground their providence upon the Gospel that Christ by His nativity has claimed for them a second birth. As they receive this Gospel, they will not like savages wait upon accident, they will not wish to live by fruits that grow of themselves; they will sow in hope and plough in hope. They will wait for the common harvest, because they will refer it to the same God Who will fulfil all the promises He has made us, Who will show us that all our kindness has its ground and consummation in His love, all our knowledge in His wisdom; Who will perfect every Christmas blessing, when His Son appears without sin unto salvation.