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Equality of Consideration

A Study of Christian Courtesy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2024

S. F. Darwin Fox
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Equality of function and equality of opportunity will make the world no happier or better. But where there is equality of consideration social peace reigns.

In a flower sepal, petal, stamen, anther, root, each has its contribution to make to the life and sweetness of the flower, and each is concerned in the health of the whole. So in the Christian State everybody is to be somebody, but not ‘ nobody to anybody.’ Each human being is ‘a separate thought of God.’

If a young man is taught to be as attentive to plain and poor girls as to attractive and smart ones, to the governess as much as to the heiress, if he is taught to treat inferior races, when among them, with respect and sympathy, he will be a better man than if he should thrill with the political theories of Harrington, Sidney, Condorcet, or Bright.

The modern child is encouraged by assiduous deference to its ideas and desires to be inconsiderate to others, especially its elders; the schoolboy has a snobbish way of refusing recognition to the claims of ‘outsiders’ or of social inferiors. Whereas it is by his behaviour and special courtesy to outsiders and inferiors that a gentleman is known. A lady also.

Queen Victoria wrote in one of her letters : ‘I was taught to beg my maid’s pardon for any naughtiness or rudeness towards her—a feeling I have ever retained.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 12 , Issue 140 , November 1931 , pp. 658 - 665
Copyright
Copyright © 1931 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Mill was justly severe on insolence to ‘niggers’ (Letters, i, 4, 21, 130; ii, 187). Lord Morley points out that bad manners, offensive in any country, are in India a crime.

2 Many readers will remember the description of the Protestant Nunnery,' set up by Nicholas Ferrer in the reign of Charles I, and of its inhabitants and way of living, in J. H. Shorthouse's romance, John Inglesant. Nicholas Ferrer was an Anglican deacon, and the friend of George Herbert, the parson poet of Bemerton.

3 Brief Lives, ii, 241.

4 But George Herbert complains of the new-rich of his day that ‘they think their servants for their money are as other things that they buy, even as a piece of wood which they may cut or hack or throw into the fire; and soc they pay their wages all is well.’ (The Countrey Parson).

5 Gray. (' English Men of Letters.')

6 E.g., by Count Van de Vaya in Inner Life of the United States (1908). He was also struck by the impenetrable barriers which hedge a President, compared with the affable accessibility of the old monarchies, and the personal ties between prince and subject.

7 Col. iv, 1.