THE one great task of religion, for Henry George, was the
justifying of the ways of God to man, and at such a task
institutionalized religion had tragically failed. It had failed
to demonstrate, he felt, that there was indeed a fatherhood of
God and a brotherhood of man, for in a world which piously
accepted poverty and wretchedness and flagrant injustice,
God's ways were not mysterious but mischievous, and
"fatherhood" and "brotherhood" were empty tropes. Re-
ligion had appeared to him timorous or indifferent when
confronted by glaring wrongs; too often, like philosophy,
it had fled to the ivory tower to be shielded from contamina-
tion, and then from its lofty seat had thundered against all
evil, damning it as some elemental attribute, some primordial
corruption or privation of divine essence. But to George it
was smug blasphemy to declare that always there shall be
the poor and the miserable. It was cowardice to flee from the
squalor and brutishness of life even if the path of retreat
bore the legend of individual salvation. And charity was
hush-money.

Yet George was a devoutly religious man, and all his work
breathed a spirit of piety. He was certain that his mission was
to justify the ways of the Creator, to show that poverty, and
injustice, and all the perplexing absurdities that have made
even the faithful wonder, must be traced not to God's for-
getful equanimity but to the blindness and ignorance of
man. Was not man's inhumanity to man the result of the

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