The Meaning of Charity

Abstract

Whatever may have been the philological or linguistic reasons for the change of the familiar text which uses the term love for the older term charity, the differences of a moral and social character in the meanings of the two terms are sufficient to justify the change. The term charity has evidently outlived its usefulness, and as a vestigial structure is at present really dangerous to the moral tissue in which it has become imbedded. There are therefore good and valid reasons for the discontinuance of the use of the term in the fact that it has lost all moral or religious significance in becoming corrupted to the purposes of narrowly practical interests. And the corrupted concept has vitiated much thought otherwise significant for social discussion, even though the illegitimate use of the term were unintentional or unconscious. It would not be necessary to postulate a preponderance of vicious purpose in order to argue an almost universal misuse of a supposedly moral term. But the change of terms has not touched the root of the matter. The question is not one which has any necessary relation to the use or misuse of language. It is rather a question of the moral and social bases of the concepts involved, or strictly, a question of the nature of the moral and social relations represented, whatever be the terms employed to represent those relations. The proper way to get at the difficulty is, then, by rigid psychological analysis, in order to discover the fundamental types of consciousness represented, and their moral and social value as determined from their relations within the moral consciousness.