Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Faith as a bulwark against inhumanity
Faith as a bulwark against inhumanity
Apr 26, 2025 12:52 AM

The 20th century was full of horrors, but atrocities are not just part of the past.

As we approach the 100-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a familiar es to mind: “Man’s inhumanity to man.” I had never explored the provenance of this line. A quick internet search provided not only the author but also the entirety of Robert Burns’ 1784 poem “Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge,” from which the quote resonates. plete stanza reads:

Many and sharp the num’rous ills

Inwoven with our frame!

More pointed still we make ourselves,

Regret, remorse, and shame!

And man, whose heav’n-erected face

The smiles of love adorn,

Man’s inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn!

Burns crafted these lines more than 130 years before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution overthrew what all reasonable scholars would confess was a corrupt aristocracy. Rather than establish a safe harbor of republican democracy, however, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and their pletely unmoored the Eastern European countries that became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with their brand of totalitarian tyranny. In so doing, they unleashed terror on untold millions, numbering far more than Burns’ “countless thousands.”

Among the many ignominies inflicted on the unfortunate citizens under the Soviet boot was the Holodomor, the name give to the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s. The exact number of those who perished from starvation may never be tallied, but it’s certain multiple millions of innocent people suffered excruciating and needless deaths.

Lest readers assume all the inequities and humiliations inflicted on God’s children are only historical in nature, the current protests against Romanian corruption prove otherwise. The Romanian Orthodox Church is among the most vocal opponents of government measures that would decriminalize official misconduct.

Returning to “Man Was Made To Mourn,” Burns captures perfectly the “inalienable rights” granted us by God and defined through natural law:

If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave,

By Nature’s law design’d,

Why was an independent wish

E’er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to

His cruelty, or scorn?

Or why has man the will and pow’r

To make his fellow mourn?

Today, those who would trample on our freedoms and “make his fellow mourn” still exist. At the Acton Institute, we keep the memory alive of those who have heroically championed our freedoms—some making the ultimate sacrifice.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Jesus and Class Warfare
Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...
Mistaken About Poverty
Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...
Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley
Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...
Creating an Economy of Inclusion
The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...
Adam Smith and the Poor
Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....
Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi
In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...
Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church
Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...
Up from the Liberal Founding
During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...
How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind
Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...
C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender
From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved