Poverty, indeed, became in the Middle Ages one of the vows
of monastic orders. In the New Testament it is prescribed,
"Blessed are the poor in spirit" and the doctrine was in many
cases literally accepted.

If any one of you will know whether he is really poor in spirit, let
him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects
of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation
of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out
habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking
to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you
receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you
are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid
them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection
of poverty of spirit.[2]

[Footnote 2: Alfonso Rodriguez: _Pratique de la Perfection Chretienne_,
part III, treatise III, chap. VI; quoted in James's _Varieties of
Religious Experience_, p. 315.]

Contempt for this world's goods, when generalized, promotes
an attitude of indifference to the social conditions in
which men live. The history of the saints is filled with
references to their endurance of pain, ill health, poverty, and
disease. And the "world, the flesh, and the devil" are for
some types of religious mind all one. For such, to be
engaged in social betterment is an irrelevant business, it is to
be lost in the world. People's souls must be saved; not their
bodies.

Religions, on the other hand, have frequently emphasized
man's social duty. In Christianity this is largely a derivative
of the highly regarded virtue of Charity. Interest in one's
own well-being was a prerequisite for the devout, but interest
in the welfare of others was equally enjoined. To help the
poor and the needy, the widowed and the fatherless, to bring
succor to the oppressed and justice to the downtrodden, have
been part of the religion whose Founder taught that all men
were the children of their Father in Heaven. The mendicant
orders of the Middle Ages were devoted to philanthropic works;
and with religious institutions, throughout their history, have
been associated works of philanthropy and social welfare.
Very recently urban churches in this country have been showing
a tendency to reorganize with emphasis on the church as an
instrument of social cooeperation rather than as an aloof
exponent of dogmatic theology. It is the ideal