Editorial: Why Pray? (1905)

Editorial from the August 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There is a lamentable increase in the number of those who are only casually employed and the difficulty is increasing every year for elderly and even middle-aged men to obtain work. God help the labouring man when he gets old.”

Thus Mr. Thomas Holmes, one of the best known of police court missionaries. But for that matter God help the labouring man when he is young. And God help the labouring man’s wife and the labouring man’s children whether the labouring man be young or old. If God can help he may as well help all who require it, and if abject want justifies helpful intervention, then many a million of the working-class of any and all ages of this and other countries have qualified.

So we might pray if prayers could avail. But Mr Holmes has been appealing to his God for 21 years. Before him countless multitudes raised their voices in supplicatory chorus to the same supposititious personage in the same nebulous region. “God help all poor folk” they cried but God was deaf, or God was dumb or God was impotent for no response came and has not to this day. So that the poor have tired of appealing and those only pray who desire a cheap salve for their souls and an easy road from a difficult position, or those who, sufficiently educated to be conscious of their helplessness, are not sufficiently educated to have severed themselves from beliefs of fetiches born in the childhood of the world.

We are concerned that all poor folk should know why they are poor so that they may apply the remedy for their poverty which collectively they have the power to do. And the first thing they will appreciate in the day when they understand is, that neither gods nor devils nor heavens nor hells can help them into their own ; that upon themselves and themselves alone must they rely for any change they may desire in the poverty that environs them, that eats into their lives and against which they protest and sometimes actively rebel. They will understand then that prayers will not prevail against the robbery of which they are the victims ; they will understand that they must work out their own salvation and achieve their own emancipation. Mr. Holmes must pray if he will. We know a more excellent way.