Work and the First Beatitude

Extract

There is a haunting quality about the gentle irony of Arnold Lunn’s remark, ‘My father held the quaint belief that Christ meant what he said on the subject of riches.’ There is a trenchant quality about Gilbert Chesterton’s remark : ‘If there is one thing which Christ and his saints have said with a sort of savage monotony, it is that the rich are in peculiar danger of moral ruin.’ The ironic quality of the one remark and the trenchant quality of the other are both just, for there are those who seize like vultures on a carcase upon the words, ‘in spirit,’ in the First Beatitude, and have tried to eviscerate Christ’s teaching : as if forsooth the cumulative effect of so many parables, warnings and threats were not to show that it is intensely difficult to be poor in spirit, if one is rich in body. The ordinarily good rich are they who, in St. John Chrysostom’s words, bank their money in God’s bank, the bosom of the poor, getting heavenly usury thereby, and not looking upon themselves as benefactors of the poor, but as debtors to the poor. The very good rich are they who keep the trappings of riches, but discard the reality : a St. Louis of France will wear a royal robe, but next the skin will be a hair shirt; he will keep a rich table for his guests, but he will only toy with his own food.