Chapter XXIII
The Laboring Man
It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill, and makes life various with a new Six Days’ Work; comes ignorance drunk, on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there be,”—and the many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth, knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and may be; whereas ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.
If we have reserved the laborer for our last chapter and the crown of our work, it is not that we love him less or hold him of less account than the professional man or the man of letters. On the contrary, in every one of the preceding chapters, the great virtues inculcated had for one of their chief purposes to bring the rich, the learned, the powerful, and the influential into more brotherly sympathy with the working-man.
We are poor ourselves, and of the poor; our life has been spent in laboring among them, and we consider that the sweetest reward of our present toil shall be in having our books find their way to the home of the laboring man in city and country.
It is no new gospel that a priestly hand could hold out to the sons of toil the whole world over. We cannot promise to make this earth a fool’s paradise where dreamers, idlers, and schemers might dawdle away, in all the ignoble vices that idleness and knavery beget, the golden years given us to merit eternity. Nor may we hold out to those who are not the heirs of great wealth or high rank any other Heaven hereafter than that purchased and promised by the Redeemer of mankind.
Redeemer! Saviour! God of our souls! Comforter of our homes,—the Friend and treasure of the poor,—a laborer Himself, while living among us, to sanctify and sweeten labor; we know that Jesus of Nazareth is all our own,—ALL, even with the glory and bliss of His eternal kingdom! What other gospel, then, do we, can we desire, than that which the sweet and patient Son of Mary, the pupil and adopted child of Joseph the Carpenter, presents to us?
“Come to Me, all you that labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest for your souls.”1
Yes,—He presents Himself to you, O toilers of the field, the factory, and the city,—you whose sweat and whose tears fall upon the hard earth or into the salt sea; He comes to you, in His boyhood and early manhood, with His hands hardened from the carpenter’s toil,—long before He stretched them forth on the bitter wood of the cross to be pierced and torn with the nails; He comes to you, as that Jesus the Good Shepherd whose feet wearied not in traveling again and again and again from one end of His native land to the other in quest of the suffering poor or the over-burdened workmen, to cheer them at their toil, to lighten their misery; and how often, in His own sweet seasons of visitation and needful comfort, has not that same Good Shepherd knocked at your door, His head wet with the dews of the night, and His blessed feet torn and bleeding from the road!
O brothers,—it is in the vesture of His love that we all wish Him to come to us,—with “the purple garment” showing through its rents where whip and scourge have ploughed the flesh, His head encircled with piercing thorns, His meek face bruised with buffets and soiled with dust and spittle, and tears and blood, the strong hands grasping and the mangled shoulders bearing the Cross, and the deep eyes looking into the soul of every one of us to say: “I am the Good Shepherd.” “Behold I have graven thee in My hands;”2 “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore have I drawn thee [to Myself], taking pity on thee;”3 “It is I, fear ye not!”4 “I, I Myself will comfort you!”5 Ah, dear above all that earth and sky contain that is most dear, is to the manly, grateful heart of the laborer, the poor, the suffering, this God of our hearts, this God of our fathers coming to us in our daily need clad in the livery of His love, bearing on hands and feet, on head and heart the glorious wounds inflicted for our sake!
And what does he preach? Patience, purity of heart, contempt of earthly riches, a noble ardor, an insatiable hunger and thirst for all Godlike virtue; fortitude under suffering and trial; unwearied and unfaltering trust in His own ever-present aid; an ambition to be so like Himself in thought and word and deed that all men may see in you the living image of Jesus mighty in loving,—that is, in laboring, suffering, and accomplishing great things for His love; a heart too great for this world and all the things of time, and to be filled only by the Infinite God and the Charity of His everlasting kingdom.
But this is too high a flight. Let us see, more calmly, and with the sights and sounds of our daily toil around us,—what He, our model, wishes every laboring man to be.
Would you contemplate for a moment the army of workmen who have practiced the most heroic virtues in following Christ, and whom the Church has placed among her canonized saints? The Apostles were fishermen by occupation,—and St. Paul, the most eloquent of them all, was by trade a tentmaker, and like his brothers in the Apostleship, earned his own bread while laboring to spread the faith of Christ. The men and women who were first drawn to Him by the preaching and the lowly laborious lives of these Apostles were from the laboring classes,—becoming, in their turn, the ardent propagators of the Gospel specially destined for the lowly and the poor. Thus Onesimus,—the fugitive slave, whom St. Paul converted while imprisoned at Rome, became to the captive Apostle an energetic helper. As Christianity spread, and with its extension persecution waxed fiercer, the laboring classes everywhere furnished their glorious contingent to the host of confessors and martyrs. In every city of the Roman Empire, the common laborer, the tradesman, the liberated slaves of both sexes stood forth before the tribunals beside their masters to confess Jesus Christ, and died with them in the most fearful tortures to confirm this courageous testimony. What need of these details?
We have at this moment,—among many other venerable names which we omit,—St. Patrick, a slave and shepherd, as the apostle and patron of Ireland, St. Isidore, a farmer, as one of the chief protectors of Spain; St. Genevieve, a poor shepherdess, the honored protectress of Paris; and among the most recently canonized French saints, Germaine Cousin, another poor shepherd-girl, and Benedict Labre, a man who devoted himself to even worse poverty and hardship. Then, as we glance over Christian Europe, we meet here and there with SS. Crispin and Crispinian, martyrs, the patrons of shoemakers, and shoemakers themselves; St. Theodotus, an innkeeper, and also a martyr; St. Homobonus, St. Maximus, and St. Justus, tradesmen and shopkeepers; St. Phocas and St. Serenus, gardeners; St. Galmier, a locksmith; St. Margaret of Louvain, a servant-maid in a tavern, under a master and mistress who died victims to their charity, and in the hour when they had given up all things to follow Christ. The Blessed Peter of Sienna was a combmaker; St. Zita of Lucca, a servant-maid; St. Justa and St. Rufina, of Seville, were workers in earthenware, which they sold themselves. St. Fazio of Verona was a silversmith; St. Thibaud was an apprentice shoemaker. And have we not among the recently beatified of the Society of Jesus Alfonso Rodriguez, a lay-brother and a porter,—a man so divinely wise that he was the spiritual guide of Peter Claver, the apostle of New Grenada,—one of the most heroic souls that ever honored any country?
Can you not hear, as the saintly host of glorified working men and women pass before you in the train of the Lamb, the beatitudes pronounced by the Master, reechoed triumphantly by these, His faithful disciples: Blessed are ye poor!... Blessed are ye that hunger now!... Blessed are the meek....
Will you learn what the holiest men known in the history of the Church thought, under divine teaching, of the exalted sanctity to which every laborer, every working man and woman, every tiller of the soil the whole world over can be, by cultivating their hearts aright and making them like the heart of the Master, meek and humble, patient and charitable?
“When Blessed Anthony,” says the historian of the fathers, “prayed in his cell, he heard a voice, saying, ‘Anthony, you have not yet reached the measure of a tanner in Alexandria.’ The next day, taking up his staff, the old man set out for the city, and having come to the tanner’s house, he entered and asked him to describe his manner of life, as he had left the desert to learn it from him. The tanner replied that he was not aware of his doing any good. Therefore,—he added,—when I rise in the morning, before I sit down to work, I say that all this city, from the youngest to the oldest, will enter the kingdom of Heaven, while I, for my sins, deserve eternal punishment; and I say the same thing in the evening before I lie down, and I believe from my heart what I say. ‘It is enough,’ said Blessed Anthony, ‘I understand my vision.’”6
Would you have the priest enter your homes and preach you another gospel than this? or propose to you a dearer, safer model than your own Jesus? or say to you that you must take up a gospel of hate, and strife, and violence, and bloodshed,—instead of His sweet Gospel of patience, meekness, humility, love, and peace?
He who writes these lines, while he was a poor missionary in the backwoods of Canada thirty years ago (in the autumn of 1847), and while sharing with the poorest settlers among his widely-scattered flock the comforts piety provided for the priest even out of extreme poverty,—set himself about devising many schemes for the improvement of these hardy settlers’ lot, and for the greater good of their brethren both in Canada and in the old country. The government, the Canadian bishops and clergy, and all the most enlightened men in the country united, at the missionary’s voice, to open the waste forest-lands to colonization, and to aid every farmer and his sons toward possessing independent and comfortable homes, and toward securing them many other helps and advantages. The missionary’s voice found thus a ready echo in generous hearts: his sole merit was in having uttered a timely word of exhortation; to others belongs the praise of having made of his dream a great and living reality.
And this we say here,—not through egotism,—but to tell the reader that the priestly heart which speaks in these pages, is one that has ever been devoted to the laboring-man and his best interests. Yes,—the writer knows what noble souls are those of the toiling millions when not led astray by that fell “power of ignorance,” mentioned in the extract heading of this chapter, or fascinated by the ungodly and unmanly theories of “Ignorance drunk,” who, blind, blasphemous, and brutal giant as he is, would this very day,—if the spirit of Christianity were not there to prevent him, pull down the whole edifice of civilization over our heads, even though he should himself perish in the ruin.
We happen to know, also, the brave, warm, true heart that beats beneath the rude exterior and homespun of the working-man. We have so often shared the hospitality of his roof, and have admired the native delicacy and refinement, the gentle courtesy, the unbought and unbounded generosity,—and all the other virtues that lie beneath that homespun,—like purest gold or rarest gems in their native mine.
What then? Do we not wish to improve these virtues? Most assuredly. But we would have them grow in the sunlight of Christ’s truth and teaching; we would have the rich soil of these brave hearts made fruitful by the grace of Him who is, for the peasant as for the prince, for the working-man as for his employer,—“the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
We would have pure gold remain gold; only we would refine it, fashion it into vessels fit for God’s own altar in Heaven.
And you, O dearest brothers, do not give your ear or your heart to this new gospel of hate they would have you believe in. In a country such as this in which you have cast your lot, you are free to rise,—you see so many rise every day from your own level to sit, in Church and in State, with the princes of the people. Be conscientious, God-fearing, sober, steady, persevering, lovers of truth, of honor, of honesty, and all true manliness,—and God will surely prosper you.
Do not believe in the raving of a few madmen, about the abolition of wealth, and all such idle, destructive fancies. Do your best, honestly and honorably, to become independent, to become wealthy. What you get is your own: God grant you to make a right use of it, and with it to help others around you to rise.
Look at our magnificent American forests,—see how by the side and beneath the shade of these lordly trees, that are the admiration of the whole earth, their juniors and successors shoot up, straight, vigorous, and aiming at being one day the equals in height and stateliness of their elders. But cut down that glorious forest or set fire to it, and never again until the end of time will such a magnificent growth arise from the ashes.
