VIII.



We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our
modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The
lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least
the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient
wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of his
immortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that in
some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a
likeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of
Deity. His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await
his coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling
within him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self.
So proud a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after
the day of God he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the
destined comrade of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children
of the King in fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his
many mansions, where light and air, the great purifiers, are already
dimmed and corrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the
labor by which he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told
there is no further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those
dependent on him are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he
dies, leaving wife or children, the social order makes but the most
inhuman provision for them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State
for its poor the workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn
loving-kindness into official acts and make legal and formal what should
be natural impulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity