An article in a late number of The Philistine names Organized Charity as The Kind that Paul Forgot. Such an aspersion on a saint’s memory is itself uncharitable. If Paul knew his Bible he did not forget the injunction of the Old Testament: “I was a Father to the poor, and the cause which I knew not I searched out;” and Paul said himself to the Thessalonians: “If any man will not work neither shall he eat.” These precepts state two root principles of charity organization—information before reformation, and a flat denial of alms to the indolent. To deny their truth would imply a “Philistinism” of the obnoxious kind that Matthew Arnold had in mind when he said: “Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in its resistance to light.” Even Paul, by the way, was once such a Philistine, but we read that as he journeyed towards Damascus a great light shone around him and he became a new man.

“When letters of appeal to the newspapers are sent to a board of review,” our critic says, “impulse will be put in cold storage.” Possibly, but it would no longer be easier for people to work the newspapers than to work themselves. “Catalogue poverty,” he says, “quiz it, register it, dub it Case One; let hunger wait for an investigation, and if a bar sinister appears anywhere, deny food and shelter.” The last sentence could never have been written if its author had made some preliminary inquiries such as modern charity requires. The invariable rule of true charity is to relieve urgent distress instantly, and to forgive errors seventy times seven even, with a sympathy which never grows callous, if there is still a chance of helping. Paradoxical as it may seem, money is not a panacea for poverty. If drink has made a man poor, money will feed not him but his drunkenness. If improvidence is his fault, free lodging, free food, free clothes, or even work found ready-made, will only foster his improvidence. There are so-called charitable institutions which spend huge sums in gathering about them colonies of thriftless, indolent loafers, whose only hope of regeneration lies in the very spur of hunger which devoted men and women are laboring night and day to remove. It is “moral murder” to teach the poor that drunkenness, indolence and improvidence will be toled along and that a “poor face” will draw doles. To interfere lightly with the severe laws of Nature is to assume a grave responsibility. “Suppose the Father of us all did administer His beneficence on such a plan?” says our critic. Are we sure he does not?

Pauperism is a disease, and requires more skilled treatment and less amateur dosing. Only the most unregenerate complain of the hospitals because they catalogue sickness, register it, quiz it, dub it Case One, or even let suffering wait for an investigation, and refuse to administer soothing drugs which, like alms, give a temporary relief without curing, and are apt to create an appetite which is more harmful than the pain which they relieve.

The Moses has not yet appeared who shall lead the suffering masses out of the bondage of poverty, and we know not even which road he will go, but perhaps the smoothest way and the nearest way is not the one which will prevent backsliding. “And it came to pass that God led them out, not through the way of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, Lest peradventure they return to Egypt, but God led the people about through the way of the wilderness of the Red Sea.”

Frederic Almy.