AMONGST the many aphorisms which Shakespeare gave to the world none is truer than the statement that "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." One need search no farther than the New Testament for an illustration of this, for even our Master was assailed by this form of subtle temptation. Unfortunately for the Christian religion many of its adherents have been made the willing exponents of a false method of handling the Scripture. By the wrong interpretation of the sacred Word the Church opposed the Copernican system in astronomy and the corroborative discoveries of Galileo. "Principalities and powers" used to quote the Bible in support of the slave trade and polygamy, and some people still use it to favor the drink traffic. Remembering this, one is not surprised to find the evil of poverty upheld by Scriptural malquotation, as an immovable phenomenon in God's universe. Jesus, within a few days of his crucifixion, in rebuking those who through coveteousness and lust for money murmured at Mary's generous and prophetically consecrating act of anointing her Master's head with precious ointment, said, "The poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always." This utterance has been vigorously seized and constantly applied, both vehemently and glibly as occasion presented, to hinder any wide-sweeping reforms in economic legislation whereby a partial or total obliteration of the "poor classes" was aimed at To this, as to many other misinterpretations, we may follow the Master's example and quote from the same source in reply: so in the words of Jesus addressed to the conservative Pharisee of his day we find an answer to these modern opposers of the kingdom on earth: "Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God."
A few weeks after that memorable act of Mary, when Jesus gave his parting commands to his disciples, he said, "Lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. When we remember that Jesus had already said that "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away," we must admit that either he was forgetful and contradicted himself, or that when he spoke of not always being with them, he must have referred to his human selfhood which he held, to mortal-view, in the flesh; and that when he spoke of his constant companionship with those who obeyed his commands, he referred to his real spiritual selfhood which he had with the Father before the world (the material, illusive sense-world) was. Now Jesus knew that he could make his demonstration over the belief of life in matter, or, in other words, destroy the seeming power of death, in three days, and that the time was rapidly approaching for him to do so. He also knew that the world which had not accepted his teaching would move very slowly in destroying every phase of the false belief in a life opposed to God. One of these phases was poverty, therefore he spoke of them as having the poor, or poverty, always with them, in the same sense in which sin and sickness are always present to mortal belief, which denies that Christ, Truth, is ever-present.
If a more complete ignoring of a command of Jesus than has been displayed in the case of the order to "Heal the sick" be possible, it is to be found in the failure of the Christian church to fulfil the command to preach the gospel, the good news, to the poor.
