BV 
 
 4400 
 
 !R24 
 
141^00 CORNELE 
 
 v. 5L,i UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 WE AKE IVEVER IN DOUBT OF THE MYSTIC 
 VALUE OF A HUMAN BEING WQEIT IT HAPPENS 
 TO BE OUK OWN CHILD. GOD ISNT EITHER. 
 
BARCODE FOR THIS 
 BOOK IS LOCATED 
 
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Cornell University 
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 The original of this book is in 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924007580750 
 
"UNTO ME" 
 
 
 CLoiyi i>^^yu/>'X(^p^e^ 
 
"UNTO ME" 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH 
 
 author of "christianity and the social crisis,'' 
 "for goo and the people" 
 
 
 {•' 
 
 THE PILGRIMr-PRESS 
 
 , ; ,«' ,■ 
 
 boston new YORK CUICAGO M ,!,' / 
 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1912 
 BY LUTHER H. GARY 
 
 Published, October, igi3 
 
 THE •PLIMPTON "PRESS 
 [W«D ■ O] 
 
 NORWOOD- MASS'U" S = A 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PACE 
 
 The Religious Quality of Social 
 
 Work 9 
 
 Social Work is ^I^hristian Work 12 
 Love for God Demands Love for 
 
 Men 16 
 
 Love for Men Trains the Love 
 
 for God 18 
 
 Social Work Brings a New 
 
 Experience of Religion ... 21 
 Social Work and the Cross of 
 
 Christ 25 
 
 Religion has the Master Word 
 
 OF Life 29 
 
"UNTO ME' 
 
"UNTO ME" 
 
 The Religious Quality of 
 Social Work 
 
 Wh 
 
 HEN Jesus looked forward to 
 the great climax of History, the 
 Last Judgment, he saw it as a process 
 by which the inner significance of 
 their own actions and relations would 
 be revealed to men. Those men on 
 his right hand whom he welcomed 
 to their reward had never realized 
 the high quality of their own ac- 
 tions. Here was a man who had 
 seen a work-mate in the heat of the 
 harvest-time eating a crust, and he 
 had shared the contents of his 
 dinner-pail with him and gone on 
 half-rations himself. Here was an- 
 other who had seen a foot-sore and 
 dusty stranger limping into the vil- 
 lage at dusk, and had taken him 
 home, helped him clean up, and 
 
 [9] 
 
"unto 
 
 turned over his bed to him while 
 he slept on the earthen floor. That 
 one yonder had restored the self- 
 respect of a poor neighbor by setting 
 him up in a new suit of clothes. 
 This one had visited a poor debtor 
 pining in prison and brought him 
 food and human comfort in his 
 hopelessness. They all thought they 
 had done it for folks, for dusty, 
 sweaty, tired, discouraged individ- 
 uals. But Jesus says: "Oh, no, ye 
 did it unto me. My life is so identi- 
 fied with my brethren that when ye 
 fed and clothed them, ye fed and 
 clothed me. God is living in these 
 worn human bodies. When ye com- 
 forted them, ye comforted God." 
 
 And those others on the left side 
 — they, too, had not realized the 
 gravity of their own actions. 
 "Lord, when saw we thee hungry, 
 or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, 
 or sick, or in prison, and did not 
 minister unto thee?" They had 
 seen a questionable stranger at their 
 
 [ID] 
 
door and had shaken their heads. 
 They had not felt that they had 
 any call to visit the disreputable 
 persons imprisoned for debt. But 
 thereby they had isolated themselves 
 from their kind, and missed con- 
 tact with God who dwells in hu- 
 manity. They failed to reckon with 
 the social consciousness of Christ 
 and with God's sense of social soli- 
 darity, and so they stand on the 
 left side of the Judge, astonished 
 and perplexed. 
 
 We are all blind to the religious 
 significance of our own lives. We 
 are always in danger of doing high 
 and holy things in a petty and 
 worldly way. The ministers of re- 
 ligion have often been mere slaves 
 of the temple, dusting the sacred 
 implements with fussy zeal, but 
 forgetful of the awful presence of 
 the god. The ministers of charity 
 are the same grade of men and in 
 the same temptation. They may 
 grow absorbed in oiling the wheels 
 [II] 
 
"unto me' 
 
 of their charitable machine and love 
 to hear it purr, but fail to realize 
 how holy their work really is. Jesus 
 was always uncovering the spiritual 
 meaning in the common actions of 
 life. To him the giving of a cup 
 of cold water was a sacrament of 
 humanity. Social workers are deal- 
 ing with people, with folks, in a very 
 human way. But they are also 
 dealing with the Christ who is the 
 champion and saviour of the people, 
 and with the eternal God in whom 
 these men live and move and have 
 their being. 
 
 Social Work is Christian 
 Work 
 
 Social workers are in the direct 
 line of apostolic succession. Like 
 the Son of Man they seek and save 
 the lost. Their work is redemptive 
 work. When they loosen the clutch 
 of greed from the thin arm of the 
 child-worker; when they guide the 
 
 [12] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 immigrant safely past the grasping 
 hands to a place where he can work 
 and establish his home in cleanli- 
 ness and hope; when they put eyes 
 on the finger-tips of the blind ; when 
 they lead the deaf out of the prison- 
 house of loneliness and give them 
 speech with their kind; when they 
 save the demoniacs of alcoholism; 
 when they seek to turn our prisons 
 into institutions of social healing 
 and education instead of being steam- 
 rollers and stone-crushers of human- 
 ity; when they try to change the 
 cold stare of respectabiUty with 
 which we Pharisees have always re- 
 garded the fallen woman, into a 
 Christlike look of sympathy and 
 understanding; they are treading 
 step by step in the footprints of 
 Jesus of Nazareth. They are doing 
 with modern scientific methods and 
 with the large resources of mod- 
 ern organization what he did in 
 Galilee, and they have a right to 
 feel the nearness and love of their 
 [13] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 Heavenly Father in doing it, just as 
 he felt it. 
 
 They are doing Christian work 
 when they do social work, even if 
 they themselves disclaim religious 
 motives or even repudiate religious 
 faith. Jesus found society nicely 
 separated into pious people on the 
 one side and publicans and sinners 
 on the other, but he found the clas- 
 sification not in harmony with the 
 facts. The publicans and harlots 
 were showing all the symptoms of 
 religion and the Pharisees turned 
 their backs on God whenever they 
 had a chance. He formulated this 
 remarkable observation in a little 
 parable. He said a man had two 
 sons and asked both to go to work 
 in the vineyard. One politely as- 
 sured his father that he would, but 
 he stayed in the rocking-chair on the 
 veranda. The other grumbled that 
 he wouldn't, but he got on the job. 
 Jesus wanted to know which of the 
 two did the will of his father. I 
 
 [14] 
 
"unto 
 
 judge that he would have a friendly 
 sense of companionship with a social 
 worker who doubted the immortality 
 of the soul, more than with an ortho- 
 dox man who paid the soul six 
 dollars a week for ten-hour labor. 
 
 Whenever the National Confer- 
 ence of Charities and Correction 
 meets, it means more than the 
 deliberations of a few hundred men 
 and women. It is the collective 
 mind of our nation focused on 
 questions of salvation. The intel- 
 ligence which they bring to bear on 
 problems of housing or prison reform 
 is not merely their personal clever- 
 ness, but the accumulated social 
 wisdom of mankind which has been 
 slowly secreted and distilled by the 
 thought and labor of generations of 
 men and women who loved poor 
 humanity and desired its salvation. 
 The righteous and loving will that 
 throbs and vibrates through such 
 gatherings is a manifestation of 
 vaster spiritual forces. All the past 
 
 [IS] 
 
"unto 
 
 is there. The dead saints and 
 prophets of humanity are there. 
 They left the impact of their indig- 
 nation and compassion in society, 
 and that has created the growing 
 sense of social solidarity. Their life 
 has been wrought into the continu- 
 ous common life of the race as its 
 noblest fiber. But back of the moral 
 leaders of mankind was Jesus Christ, 
 whose mind and spirit was working 
 in their hearts and intellects. No 
 gathering of social workers today 
 can dissociate its thoughts and emo- 
 tions from him, or understand its 
 own forces without realizing the 
 presence of God. 
 
 Love for God Demands Love 
 
 FOR Men 
 
 Men tell us that religion ought to 
 have an ethical outcome and that 
 love to God is inseparable from love 
 to men. They say it as if that 
 were a new discovery. It ought to 
 [i6] 
 
"unto 
 
 be a truism by this time. It was 
 once the passionate message of the 
 Hebrew prophets, and was embodied 
 in the Christian reUgion as one of 
 its axiomatic doctrines. "Whoso- 
 ever doeth not righteousness is not 
 of God, neither he that loveth 
 not his brother. For this is the 
 message which ye heard from the 
 beginning, that we should love one 
 another." These words were meant 
 to repudiate the claim to Christian 
 standing of any man whose religion 
 was not grounded deep in active and 
 passionate good will toward men. 
 
 Moreover, in Christianity love 
 must mean more than mild benevo- 
 lence of feeling. Love gets its Chris- 
 tian definition from the personality 
 of Jesus and from his death: "Hereby 
 have we come to a comprehension 
 of love, by the fact that he laid 
 down his life for us; and we ought 
 to lay down our life for the brethren. 
 But whoso hath the world's goods, 
 and beholdeth his brother in need, 
 
 [17] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 and shutteth up his compassion 
 from him, how doth the love of 
 God abide in him?" This passage 
 shows how swiftly a Christian mind 
 passed from the nature of love as 
 defined by the death of Christ to 
 social action in matters of property 
 relations. 
 
 Thus the insistence that love to 
 God must have its immediate result 
 and counterpoise in love for men is 
 one of the rudiments of Christian 
 faith and feeling. But that does 
 not exhaust the relations between 
 the love of God and the love of man. 
 The causal relation runs the other 
 way too. 
 
 Love for Men Trains the 
 Love for God 
 
 It is by loving men that we enter 
 into a living love for God. Social 
 work may be a gateway to conscious 
 religion. 
 
 An actual love for God is a com- 
 [i8] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 monplace in religious talk, but it is 
 not a common thing in fact. Aris- 
 totle questioned if so high a feeling 
 were possible. To have a strong 
 sense of desire and joy and fellow- 
 ship going out toward that great, 
 unseen, intangible Power which fills 
 the universe is nothing slight, but 
 the highest attainment in the evo- 
 lution of character, the fragrant 
 blossoming of our spiritual nature. 
 
 We assume that love to God must 
 come first and is the proper starting 
 point and foundation for the love 
 of man. Is it not just as much the 
 other way? The love of man is 
 our concrete object lesson in the 
 kindergarten of love, and if we learn 
 that well, and as fast as we learn 
 that well, the love of God grows in 
 us, and we become religious. This 
 is biblical doctrine. " He that loveth 
 not his brother whom he hath seen, 
 how can he love God whom he hath 
 not seen?" He that will not learn 
 the multiplication tables which are 
 [19] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 easy, how can he comprehend algebra 
 which is hard? "No man hath be- 
 held God at any time. If we love 
 one another, God abideth in us and 
 his love is perfected in us." In 
 other words, God is invisible and 
 inaccessible in himself, but if we 
 love one another, we make a place 
 for him in our own life and will 
 realize him and his love. 
 
 To love men, then, is an avenue to 
 the living experience of God. There 
 may be other paths that lead to him, 
 such as the solitary search for truth, 
 or the lonely way of mystic contem- 
 plation. But love is the surest way 
 with fewest pitfalls, the broad way 
 open to all sorts and conditions of 
 men, and the way consecrated by 
 Jesus Christ. We should expect, 
 therefore, that those who are en- 
 gaged in social work with a really 
 loving spirit will find religion grow- 
 ing in them. If their religion in the 
 past has been merely formal, it 
 ought to grow warm and living. 
 [20] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 If it has been in the immature stage 
 of dogmatism and rituaUsm, it ought 
 to come to freedom and maturity. 
 We might even look in social work 
 for that most difficult triumph in 
 the breeding of religion, the restora- 
 tion of conscious religion where it 
 was dead. 
 
 Social Work Brings a New 
 Experience of Religion 
 
 We all have our private religious 
 history, and most of us have suf- 
 fered in the course of it. As modern 
 men we have passed through the 
 scientific and philosophical doubt of 
 this age of transition. For many 
 of us the pillars that used to sup- 
 port religion in our childhood have 
 crumbled and fallen. If we have 
 always kept a roof over our heads 
 "mid all the stormy winds that 
 blow," we have been fortunate. 
 The number of educated men and 
 women who have had a time when 
 
 [21] 
 
"unto 
 
 they regarded themselves as non- 
 rehgious is probably greater than 
 we know. Some social workers have 
 turned from the collapse of their 
 religion to social work as the best 
 thing left to them after the wreck, 
 as the worthiest substitute for the 
 beauty of the religion which they 
 had lost. 
 
 But some of them at least are 
 watching the growth of a new reli- 
 gious life in their minds. It may 
 be timid and unostentatious like a 
 woodland anemone, but it is abso- 
 lutely their own. It was not sown in 
 straight rows by the machine-drill of 
 the church, but is the product of their 
 own seeking and experience, and 
 they love it almost too much to 
 talk of it. 
 
 Social workers, if they are really 
 candid observers of the facts of 
 human life and not merely doc- 
 trinaires, are compelled to realize 
 the tremendous and subtle power 
 of religion in actual life. They find 
 
 [22] 
 
"unto 
 
 it exerting moral control over pas- 
 sion, stimulating growth and char- 
 acter in the young, occasionally even 
 exerting a transforming power in 
 mature persons that seems almost 
 miraculous. They encounter reli- 
 gion as one of the great realities of 
 life, and if thfey are open-minded 
 toward reality, they learn to bow to 
 it. They even begin to co-operate 
 with its forces and to summon them 
 to their aid, and no man can cast 
 out devils in the name of Christ 
 and then speak lightly of him. 
 
 The mysteriousness of life awakens 
 the religious sense within them as 
 they handle it. For human life be- 
 comes more mysterious the better 
 we know it. Humanum capax divini, 
 said an ancient thinker. We meet 
 some plain man, some homely little 
 woman, rough and unpromising 
 pebbles on the shores of life; we 
 get to know them well, and we dis- 
 cover in them contritions and aspi- 
 rations, heroisms and agonies. We 
 
 [23] 
 
UNTO ME" 
 
 hold a human hand, but we can feel 
 God's life pulsing in it if we know 
 where to feel for the pulse. If we 
 have failed to find anything beauti- 
 ful and divine in any life whatever 
 it is probably because we do not 
 yet know it well enough, or because 
 our social inexperience or our preju- 
 dices keep us from seeing. That is 
 what Jesus wanted to emphasize 
 in that judgment scene, that every 
 atom of humanity has a divine 
 value and significance as such, not 
 simply the choice specimens of man- 
 kind, but the little ones, so that 
 anything done to the least is done 
 to God. We are never in doubt of 
 the mystic value of a human being 
 when it happens to be our own 
 child. God isn't either. 
 
 These are the experiences that 
 come to us in social work and the 
 valuations we gain through it if it 
 really does its work in us. Indeed, 
 this is one of the tests of our social 
 work: has it brought us this insight? 
 [24] 
 
"unto me' 
 
 Is it distilling wonder and reverence, 
 tenderness and awe in us? Has 
 our work for men quickened and 
 deepened our sense of God? If it 
 has not, then it has not done much 
 for us, and it is questionable if it 
 has done anything lasting for others. 
 God can raise up hustlers and busy- 
 bodies almost anjnvhere. They are 
 cheap, the human brothers of the 
 clanking machines in our factories. 
 • On the other hand if our work for 
 men is earning us the tremendous 
 perquisite of a living knowledge of 
 God, let us be thankful and go ahead. 
 It is worth a lifetime to get that. 
 
 Social Work and the Cross 
 OF Christ 
 
 Some one may say that these 
 religious experiences of which we 
 have spoken are vague and misty 
 and not specifically Christian. I 
 should reply that on the contrary 
 they may be more peculiarly Chris- 
 
 [25] 
 
UNTO ME" 
 
 tian than any other kind of religious 
 experience. 
 
 Social workers know that genuine 
 social service is nothing soft-handed 
 and perfumed. It is exhausting, 
 baffling, dirty work, that often takes 
 them among ugly sights, vile sounds, 
 and what is perhaps hardest for 
 some of us, bad smells. It loads 
 them up with the troubles of others, 
 and they bear their griefs and carry 
 their sorrows like the one who was 
 "a man of sorrows and acquainted 
 with grief." 
 
 Any social work that deals with 
 the causes of misery involves fight- 
 ing, for the causes of misery are 
 never only in the people who are 
 miserable. They are chiefly in those 
 who profit by their misery. The 
 lower tenth of society is submerged 
 because the upper tenth is riding on 
 the other nine tenths and putting 
 the heads of some under water. 
 The word redemption means liter- 
 ally emancipation and liberation 
 [26] 
 
"unto me" 
 
 from slavery. It involves making 
 the exploiters quit exploiting. But 
 if any one tries to make them stop 
 they will strike back and hurt him. 
 No one will move very far on the 
 way of social relief without colliding 
 with strong and active forces, per- 
 haps with the controlling forces of 
 society, and being punished for his 
 interference with their income. 
 
 In that case the social worker 
 comes into very intimate touch with 
 Christ by sharing his sufferings for 
 humanity, for Jesus too got hurt 
 because he collided with the selfish 
 interests of the ruling classes. If a 
 man attacks child-labor or the un- 
 derpayment of women in industry, 
 and finds himself misunderstood or 
 abused, or perhaps without position 
 and income, his pain is part of that 
 vicarious suffering by which the 
 redemption of humanity is achieved. 
 Without the shedding of blood in 
 some form there has never been 
 cessation of sin. 
 
 [27] 
 
UNTO ME" 
 
 For ages the cross of Christ has 
 stood at the center of Christian 
 theology. But many good men who 
 are loud in their insistence on the 
 cross as the only means of salvation 
 have apparently never had any ex- 
 perience of the pain of the cross. 
 They do not "bear the marks of 
 the Lord Jesus." There are no 
 scars on them anywhere. Their re- 
 ligion has served to make them 
 respected. All men like them for 
 their goodness. But their goodness 
 was never so good that it waked up 
 the devil. They never antagonized 
 profitable sin; so they never got 
 hurt. But in that case their religion 
 is not as specifically Christian as 
 they think it is. 
 
 Social work, the kind that deals 
 with the causes of misery, is today 
 almost the only form of Christian 
 work that involves the risk of perse- 
 cution. Thereby it opens to us a 
 living experience of the cross of 
 Christ and a fellow-feeling with all 
 [28] 
 
"unto me' 
 
 his followers of the Church Militant, 
 which has moved down the centuries 
 in a thin red line, but to which the 
 Church Dormant owes all it enjoys 
 of the higher life. Such social work 
 throws us back in loneliness on God 
 and we find him near. Let no one 
 who suffers unselfishly for the cause 
 of truth or justice or liberty say that 
 he is not religious or not a Christian. 
 His life belies his professions. He is 
 a poor hypocrite of infidelity. 
 
 Religion has the Master 
 Word of Life 
 
 Thus social work is full of religious 
 qualities. It is both the product and 
 the cause of genuine religion. It 
 offers religious experiences to be 
 found nowhere else in that fulness. 
 The only question is if social workers 
 become conscious of what they are 
 doing and experiencing, and "en- 
 joy religion." A savage will ap- 
 ply the force of leverage, but our 
 
 [29] 
 
UNTO ME" 
 
 power over nature increases when 
 we understand the laws that govern 
 that force and master it by obeying 
 it. Men are always stretching out 
 their hands to us and crying dumbly: 
 "Are you the one that can help us? 
 Have you got God within you so 
 that you have love to understand us 
 and power to save us?" The people 
 whom we have to help in our charities 
 and corrections have drifted from 
 their anchorage. They have gone 
 astray like lost sheep, as Jesus 
 called them. A man or woman of 
 strong and stable faith, who knows 
 something of the meaning of life, 
 can become the center of their solar 
 system, the power they swear by, 
 the rallying point of one more effort. 
 Stability and quietness are them- 
 selves powers of social healing and 
 restoration. But only a mature re- 
 ligious life can give that power in 
 its fulness. 
 
 Religion has the master word 
 in human life. When patriotism, 
 [30] 
 
"unto 
 
 poetry, science, or philosophy rises 
 to its highest level, it becomes re- 
 ligious. In the great moments of 
 life, either in joy or sorrow, nothing 
 suffices except religion. If the 
 Titanic had sunk while the band was 
 playing anything but a religious 
 song, it would have been felt as a 
 dissonance. Nearly all forms of 
 charity and human betterment began 
 in the souls of men and women who 
 had the substance of religion in 
 them. Their impulses of mercy or 
 anger may have been uninstructed, 
 but at least they saw and struck out 
 before science or government moved. 
 Living religion gives prophetic in- 
 sight and daring, and so raises up 
 the pioneers of love and justice. 
 Other things being equal, a man 
 of religious faith and temper is al- 
 ways the wiser and stronger. The 
 religious souls are the master souls. 
 
 [31] 
 
OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, A HAN OF 
 RELIGIONS FAITH AND XBM|>ER |S ALWAYS 
 THE WISEIt AND STRONGER. THE RELIG- 
 IOUS SOULS ARE THE MASTER SOULS. 
 
Cornell university Library 
 BV 4400.R24 
 
 "Unto me" 
 
 3 1924 007 580 750 
 
 W 
 
 JESUS IS AlWAYS UJIiCOVERBSTG THE SPIRIT^ 
 
 •XJkL MEAHING IN tHE COMMON ACTIONS 
 
 OP LIFE. TO HEM, THE GIVING OF A CUP 
 
 OF COLD WATER WAS A SACRAMENT OF 
 
 HUMANITY. 
 

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