Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 264, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1910 — Pitying the Laboring Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Pitying the Laboring Man

- A THAN of Victoria, Australia, JfigL Pk. speaks as- follows concernMg laborers and the labor! question: “Surely we have! SitK com ® message for our toil-* ing brothers who are looking so earnestly, so pathetically for the! breaking of the day. The workers think we are out of touch with themj They say we are so snug in our assurance of a golden city beyond the sklesi that we have no thought or passion for that city which is to come down out atfj heaven from God to the peoples Whether that be true or not, it Jg time for us to bestir ourselves, to demon-; strate that we are not our of touch! with the masses; that in all thelc struggles for juster conditions, for social righteousness, for higher idealsj the Christian church is with the workers.”

We wonder sometimes when this sort of thing is going to stop. The patronizing air which so many assume when they begin to talk about the day laborers is enough to fill those very laborers with disgust. In the first place, a lot of sentimental pity is being wasted over the laboring man. He asks none of this, and it does him no good when it is expressed. The laboring man is the happiest man alive. Of course, there are a few exceptions here, just as there are a good many exceptions among those who have received a self-appointed place among the gentlemen of leisure. Nature has no blessing for that which doesn’t do anything. Everything is life, activity, animation. When a thing in nature no longer works we call it dead and begin to search for a spade to bury it. Nor does God bava blessings for the idler. That isn’t the way he dispenses what Is in his hands. He has mapped out six days of every seven for work, and it is the universal human experience that. when his comrades are kept, the keeper is the happier, even though he doesn’t labor the six days for thejiole purpose of being obedient to the Lord.

Privilege of the Toller. The necessity for work is inwrought Into the constitution of things and persons. The very fact that a man Is a toiler puts him in line with one of the greatest commandments of God. In some places the conditions under which he toils ought to be improved, radically improved. And here those who have been trying to express pity need to put their attention. If safety devices can be Installed where there has been danger heretofore, If sunshine can be admitted to drive out the darkness and dry up the mold, If proper ventilation can make it healthier for the tolling men and women, if improvement can be made in the moral surroundings, if children are kept out of body stunting and mind destroying factories, and a whole catalogue of other things remedied, there will be no appreciable chasm between working men and women and other mortals. But this long drawn out strain over working men, because they are working men, is oat of harmony with the whole make-up of men and the purpose of the Lord. The church which lends itself to this kind of music is losing its opportunity and. destroying the possibility ever of finding one. No Possible Gulf. Again, there Is not that impassable gulf between the Christian church and the common tollers which some speakers and magazine Correspondents would have us believe. Some topics for .disquisitions are found in the rich churches of New York, but any such are mlsrepresentatlves of American Christianity as a whole. The toiler six days in the week is the backbone of the church on Sunday and during the week. There Is no better man in church than he who is engaged in honest Industry during the week. Such a man is providing for his family. Conscientiously, or nnconscientfously, he is obeying the Sabbath commandment, the great part of which is to work six days on order to appreciate a rest on the seventh day. To claim that the toiling masses, putting the noun with its modifier in quotation marks, are out of touch with the church, is a slander against these men who work. There are some,'to be sure, who have a grievance, with or without a foundation; but we cannot draw a universal conclusion from such Insufficient data. The working man belongs to the church, and the church belongs to the working man, and the two belong to each other, and both belong to God. —Religious Telescope.