Article September 10, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Sidney Arthur Alexander, Kenneth Bond, H. Bulcock, Dolliver, Richard W. Boynton, Charles Stelzle

[Sidney Arthur Alexander, canon of St. Paul's cathedral, in Churchman.]

Righteousness, we shall do well to remember, is, in the Greek, only another word for justice. Who can question in our social life the need of justice—justice, that rare, that half-forgotten virtue? Are we just to those from whom we differ in matters of politics or religion; are we just, above all, to the poor by whom we live, and to whom we owe so great an obligation? . . . I do not see how we can hope to arrive at a really happy and stable social order, until justice shall take the place of so-called charity in our normal attitude to those who do so much for our happiness and our life. But more: righteousness means also truth—truthfulness, honor, integrity, sincerity in speech and action. It means that reality of life and thought which enables a man to win the confidence of others, which enables him to pierce through the shows of the world and see things as they are. And no one can look our modern society frankly in the face, and notice its petty hypocrisies and mean deceits, its hollow and superficial forms, its insincerities in and especially its constant habit of judging and valuing men and things not by their intrinsic worth, but by their outward show of wealth and rank and power—no one can see these things and feel that Christian sincerity and truthfulness find a congenial atmosphere in the social world. Yet we need those qualities more and more in our national life.

[Rev. Kenneth Bond in Christian Commonwealth, London.]

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