The following piece explains
why God wants us to be personally involved with the downtrodden. He explains
how it brings alive our noble appreciations as well as our moral disgusts.
Working with the downtrodden
is the schoolhouse of Christianity, where we broaden our understanding of God,
of justice and of mercy, and how it deeply changes us and helps us understand
the plans and purposes of God.
"In every heart God has implanted moral
admirations and disgusts, they may lie dormant perhaps, until some occasion
comes, but they are ready to waken into power, and do homage to the noble and
spurn the base.
These natural sentiments you
will exercise when you associate personally with the poor and the downcast, and
in exercising these sentiments, you may confirm, by offering to them examples
for judgment, or examples of patient suffering that touch the springs of pity, or
of selfishness and cruelty that gnaws the heart with honest indignation, or of
heroic faithfulness that flings across the soul a breeze of resolution, of
saintly love that diffuses the very atmosphere of heaven.
By bringing this various world of the poor
and downtrodden into your world, you deliver yourself from the imprisonment of
merely personal interests and you enlarge your ethical field of view, you begin
to fully understand justice and introduce your sentiments of right and wrong to
a whole new scope of meaning.
The
effect of this wider experience is incalculably great. It opens 'fresh continents' of character to
mental survey, and throwing the human tones upon the ear in language unheard
before, it startles the observer with the sigh of pity and the vow of justice
and the prayer of sorrow, in a dialect other than vernacular, it acts upon the
judgments of conscience like foreign
travel upon those of perception; and imparts a quickness of insight and
breadth of view which are unattainable within a narrow circle, and which, by
the very presence within the memory of a thousand other scenes of beauty, bathes
the home-landscape in the light of new endearment and appreciation. Abridged James Martineau.
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