The whole force of events in every civilized country has surely been to make us recognize the dignity of the human soul. In matters of social organization, in the economic labour market, we can see that one chief means of the present terrible oppression of the poor has been the wanton and deliberate neglect of the individual personal worth of the worker. In the ordinary manuals that are issued on the social question, the arguments for both sides are seldom taken from any view of the individual, but from social reasons for the betterment of the community, or from the exchange between work done and wage paid. "By himself," says a modern economist, "a man has no right to anything whatever. He is part of the social whole; and he has a right only to that which it is for the good of the whole that he should have." This is obviously a very splendid basis for any act of social tyranny. One has only to prove that society requires one part of the workers to be underpaid, to find sufficient argument of defence for sweating. Nor is this a mere surmise, for another economist writes, "There are some men whose maximum efficiency per unit of food is obtained with small consumption and small output. These go into lines requiring neither exceptional strength nor exceptional skill and remain poor because the best commercial economy in such lines is obtained by a combination of low output and low consumption." Thus are the crudest cases of under-payment approved!
This case of political economy is symptomatic of a great deal that is present in modern life a desire to exalt the community at the expense of the individual, springing from a disregard of Christian teaching. For the Catholic there can be no such method of argument. Society may fall in ruins, but the individual must be saved. Of course, as a matter of fact, society will become much more prosperous when the individual dignity of human personality has been recognized. Yet, certainly, regard for the individual must precede regard for the whole community. The doctrine, for example, so popular in the novels of George Eliot and in the philosophies of the nineteenth century, that the individual was to care nothing about himself (since he was mortal and his soul faded with him), but was to work for posterity alone, has become recognized as a foolish, though nobly-intentioned, philosophy. For if the individuals were of no worth, then neither could the sum of them be worthy of a man's labour. If I was to put aside my own pleasure, since I was the creature of a day, for the benefit of other creatures no less transitory than myself, then was I to waste the little time that was mine on others, who were no more worthy of it than I? To belittle the individual is evidently to belittle the society. But to exalt the individual is to make of a society something, says Saint Antonino, "almost divine." Christ came to save the whole world, because, under His teaching, the individual soul alone would have been as worth the ransom of His death as was the race.
In all these things then, in the whole of my outlook on life, in my attitude towards others, and in the care I should have of my own soul, I must be continually realizing the supreme value of the individual man. Some saint has said that one soul alone would suffice for a bishopric, that the thing that is deathless, that is exalted by grace till it becomes a partaker of the divine nature, that required the death of God for its own ransom, must be indeed worthy of the highest possible attention and reverence. There cannot, indeed, be any conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the society; for the advance of the members must advantage the whole. But I must begin with the human unit, with myself. I can never value others, nor act charitably towards them, till I am fully conscious of the worth of my own soul. Without that appreciation I can never be of real service to any of them. Once I have perceived my own dignity, I can perceive the dignity of others; and realizing the importance of saving my own soul, I shall be led also to help others to save theirs. The proverb is indeed justified: "Charity begins at home." The very basis, therefore, of all Christian virtue, of any attempt to be made by man to achieve something greater than himself, must rest upon this stable founda tion the value of my own being, its high call and destiny, the very divinity that inhabits me, the spark of God that remains inextinguish able to kindle again into flame the dying embers of my life.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.