The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-04-02
1SCRIBES AND PHARlSEES"
COMP1RED JTITH PEOPLE OF TO-
 DAY BY BOLTON HALL.
Arraigned Charitable Organizations and Called Them mAbominattonS-Hia Radical Views on Other Mntters.

and Called Them Abominattoms-Hfa ia I Radical Views on Other Matters.
 Bolton Hall, son of the late Dr. John
 Hall of New York city, spoke to a large
 terday afternoon at the public mass
 meeting under the auspices of the Y. M.
 c. A. Sprinlled through the audience
 one could notice prominent ministers of
 the city, professors in Yale university
 and many well known churchmen MT.
 Halls subject was "Scribes and Phari-
 sees," and he was listened to attentively
 throughout and greeted with tumultu-
 ous applause, as was also MT. Irvine,
 who followed him in q ten-minute talk.
 In brief, MT. Halls remarks were as l follows:
 In the fifth chapter of Matthew the twentieh verse, you will find these words: Except your righteousness shall | exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of heaven. Now, what did their righteousness consist of? They made long prayers and lasted all most to the degree of starvation. Dp we exceed them in this? No. Our pray CTS and religious life do not hold a can- dle to theirs. We are apt to say noWa- days that we know we devour widows houses and are whited sepulchres, but we give lots of money to charitable in- stitutions and belong to numerous soci- cities to ameliorate the conditions as they exist. Christ says Except your righteousness shall exceed the right eousness of the Scribes and Pharisees ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven
 You are a merchant; you sell goods, and in the interest of your business you must sell below your competitor and deprive him Of sales which he needs to make in order to succeed in his busi- ness, because people have just so much money to spend and they buy where they get their goods cheapest. You are clerk and seek a position. Twelve men besides yourself are seeking it, yet if you get it those men are left without the means which would come from that position. You are party to his loss, yet to protect yourself you must grind him to pieces and crush him to the earth Suppose you are an employe; you are very industrious and do the work of three men-you deprive two men of the means of livelihood and there is very little distinction between taking the money they did not earn and taking 1t after they had earned it. Now sup- pose, again, you are sick of all these things and make up your mind to es- cape the whole thing You go and buy a piece of land and start to raise pota- toes for your use, and at the very start you are robbing some farmer of the money he would get for raising potatoes. You get on the railroad train and when you pay your fare you contribute to the organization whlchf is corrupting the laws of the state of New York. You are disgusted with the electric light and the gas companies, and resolve to use kerosene, and yoH buy your oil of one of the cruelest monopolies that ever ex- isted
 We are all in the same boat. Not one of us can do anything that approx mates right. We are all a part of this system. We have innumerable societies for prevention of crime and cruelty to children and to animals, and some of us Pharisees are condoning ourselves with the thought that we contribute largely to these things, when we had better throw our money into the sea, for all the good it does, because it only the evil we wish to eradi- cate.
 Then there's the society for the sup of vice-there is more sup pressed vice than eVer Then some of | us are anti-vivisectionists and vegeta- rians q am myself) and say. like Phari- sees, that we eat no flesh, yet we wear shoes made from the hide of a COW. Suppose Adam and Eve, when they were placed in the Garden of Eden, had started out on an exploring expedition and should come upon a sign No Trespassing,' and have somebody iay to them that this was not their land and that they must not trespass upon t. You laugh, yet this is the condition If the present day"
 The speaker bitterly arraigned the various organizations for charitable work, and said that they were abomina- ions.