The True Corrective of Social Inequalities
J. A. Alexander, D.D. Proverbs 22:2 The rich and poor meet together: the LORD is the maker of them all. The text does not mean that both rich and poor are mingled in society, that they oppose or encounter one another, but rather that they are alike, that with all their differences there is still something common to both. What is this common ground, the point of contact and agreement? Not an absolute identity or sameness of condition, but participation in a certain good common to both, and independent of external qualities. The true corrective of all social inequalities, so far as they are evil, must be furnished, not by human institutions and arrangements, but derived from a higher and independent source. Consider how and why the religion of the Bible is adapted to exert this influence. Men's schemes for the practical solution of this great problem are three. 1. The idea of obliterating social inequalities by a coercive distribution of all property. This method is condemned by its violent injustice, by the meanness of its aims, by the hypocrisy of its professions. 2. The idea of securing an equality of civil rights in spite of personal and social disadvantages. As a positive means of correcting the effects of providential inequalities, this is as worthless as the other. 3. The idea of remedying the evil by means of intellectual increase and knowledge and refinement of taste. The objection to this remedy is that when applied alone its influence is not necessarily or wholly good. (1) Christianity distinctly recognises the existence and necessity of some providential inequalities in the external situation of mankind. (2) Its remedy is the direct mitigation of the evils of society by the change wrought in the tempers and affections of the parties. And true religion attaches to the various degrees of wealth, refinement, knowledge, influence, and leisure their corresponding measures of responsibility. It makes each party, to some extent, content with his actual condition, aware of its peculiar obligations, and spontaneously disposed to discharge them. (3) By a process of moral elevation men are first taught to surmount their disadvantages, and then by one of intellectual elevation the classes are brought nearer together. Impress the necessity for popular religious education, not only as the means of personal improvement and salvation, but also as the grand corrective and perhaps the sovereign cure of the disorders which now prey upon society, and "eat as doth a canker." Religious education has a social and secular as well as an exclusively religious use. The true Secret of the "healing of the nations." (J. A. Alexander, D.D.) Parallel Verses KJV: The rich and poor meet together: the LORD is the maker of them all. WEB: The rich and the poor have this in common: Yahweh is the maker of them all.