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Saturday, December 21, 2019

Am I My Brother's Keeper? Dec. 18, 1919

From the front page of the Forest City Courier, Thursday, Dec. 18, 1919

Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

Above all else this country needs a nation-wide revival of old-fashioned prayer-meeting relation—

A religion that makes men realize that if there is a heaven, there must also of necessity be a Hell—

A religion that makes a man realize that every act is recorded on his own conscience, and that though that may slumber, it can never die—

A religion that makes an employer understand that if he is unfair to his employees and pays them less than fair wages, measured by his ability and by their efficiency and zeal, he is a robber—

A religion that makes an employe know that if he does not give full and efficient service, he too is a robber—

A religion that makes a farmer who packs bad fruit at the bottom and deceives the buyer by the good fruit on the top, realize that is a theft just as much as the one who robs a hen roost at night—

A religion that makes a man who robs a railroad of its fair or its freight bill know that he robs himself of all right to feel that he is an honest man—

A religion that makes a man realize that by driving too hard a bargain with his servant, his employe, or his merchant, he can be just as much a profiteer as the seller or producer who swindles by false weight, false packing or false charges—

A religion that will teach church members who fail to contribute to the extent of their ability to the support of religion, and that compels them to recognize that if they are paying their pastor less than a living salary, they are robbing God and man alike—

A religion that will make the laboring man, who, by threats or by actual violence against the nonunion man, strives to keep him out of employment, realize that he is at heart a murderer and is murdering the individuality, and the liberty of his fellow man, and is displaying a hatred which, if it has the opportunity, will commit physical murder—

A religion that will make the politician who yields principle for the sake of party, who worships at the feet of any class and sells his soul for political preferment know that he is not only a coward and a poltroon, and unworthy of the respect of any decent man, but which will also make him see that he is helping to murder human liberty, as great a crime as murdering the individual man—

In short, we need a revival of that religion which will make every man and woman strive in every act of life to do that which, on the great Judgment Day, they will wish they had done, as with soul uncovered they stand before the Judgment Seat of the Eternal.

Until the people of this nation accept and live this religion there will be strife where there should be peace, there will be strikes and lockouts and murder where there should be co-operation and harmony; there will be hatred where there should be friendship and love.

In the Golden Rule, followed in the fullness of the spirit of this kind of religion, there would be found a solution for every business trouble; there would be created friendship between employer and employe; capital and labor would work in harmony and with efficiency, efficiency for the capital and efficiency for the labor, with profit to both.

Religion of this kind is not measured by the hope of a Heaven hereafter but by the full fruition now of “Peace on earth to men of good will.”

It is not merely the chanting of hymns here or in the world to come, but it is in the recognition and full application by rich and by poor, by learned and unlearned, that each one is indeed his brother’s keeper that we can bring this country and the world back to safety.

A nation-wide acceptance of this, the only true religion in action, would bring business peace and world peace where there is now turmoil, and men would then cease to seek to gain their aims by lawless acts of immorality, but would in spirit and in deed follow the Divine command, “All things whatsoever ye would that men do to you, do ye even so to them.”

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