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In a Mohammedan country it is counted a duty as well as a holy deed to encourage beggars: almsgiving represents to the faithful Mussulman equivalent gain in Paradise; and no one starves in Morocco, though occasionally dismissed with a wave of the hand and "God provide for you." Mad people are regarded as saints, and credited with the gift of prophecy.
They are to be constant in the exercise of charity and almsgiving, to have a watchful care over all sick brethren, and to support and sustain all old men. They are not to receive letters from their parents, relations, or friends without the license of the master, and all gifts are immediately to be taken to the latter or to the treasurer, to be disposed of as he may direct.
You would not think religion consisted in a sanctified demeanour, in an ostentatious almsgiving, in a harsh judgment of all without the pale of your opinions. You would behold in it a benign and harmonious system of morality, which takes from ceremony enough not to render it tedious but impressive. The school of the Bayles and Voltaires is annihilated.
She was accounted, and was really, so far as almsgiving was concerned, a charitable woman, and tender hearted to the poor; and yet this suffering slave, who was the seamstress of the family, was continually in her presence, sitting in her chamber to sew, or engaged in her other household work, with her lacerated and bleeding back, her mutilated mouth, and heavy iron collar, without, so far as appeared, exciting any feelings of compassion.
She had taken up the fancy of becoming a Sister of Charity, not as Honoria might have done, from genuine love of the poor, but from 'a sense of duty. Almsgiving and visiting the sick were one of the methods of earning heaven prescribed by her new creed.
The published records of the Inquisition refer incessantly to preachers of this kind who denied private property, asserted that no rich man could get to heaven, and attacked the practice of almsgiving as something utterly immoral. The relation between these teachers and the Orders of friars has never been adequately investigated.
The men were seafaring, the women lacemaking, and just well enough off to make dissent doubly attractive as an escape from some of the interfering almsgiving of the place. Over-visiting, criticism of dress, and inquisitorial examinations had made more than one Primitive Methodist, and no severe distress had been so recent as to render the women tolerant of troublesome weekly inspections.
In return for this the old man surrendered the golden slippers, which, it is also said, the reverend fathers carefully locked away in the treasure-chest, lest the Virgin should again be tempted to such extravagant almsgiving. The Maidens Leap Once in the Hardt mountains there dwelt a giant whose fortress commanded a wide view of the surrounding country.
The second class of patristic texts which are relied on by socialists are, as we have said, those 'where the practice of almsgiving is recommended in the rhetorical and persuasive language of the missioner where the faithful are exhorted to exercise their charity to such a degree that it may be said that the rich and poor have all things in common. Such passages are very frequent throughout the writings of the Fathers, but we may give as examples two, which are most frequently relied on by socialists.
And when you have said all this, ladies, and more, for more will suggest itself to your woman's wit, say to them with St Paul "And yet show we unto you a more excellent way," a nobler argument and that is Charity. Not almsgiving. I had almost said, anything but that; making bad worse, the improvident more improvident, the liar more ready to lie, the idler more ready to idle.
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