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 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
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 BV 2570 .M5 1884 
 Milne, Robert, 
 The problem of the 
 churchless and poor in our 
 
THE PBOBLEM 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHUECHLESS AND POOR IN 
 OUE LARGE TOWNS 
 
THE PKOBLEM 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN 
 OUR LARGE TOWNS 
 
 WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO 
 
 THE HOME MISSION WORK OF THE 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 
 
 BY , 
 
 / 
 REV. ROBERT MILNE, M.A. 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDIXBUllGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCLXXXIV 
 
 All Mights reserved 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Two reasons in particular have influenced the writer 
 in devoting special attention to the problem of the 
 Churchless and poor. The first, that the condition of 
 the lapsed population is one which has now, and not a 
 moment too soon, begun to attract public attention as a 
 blot upon our Christian civilisation ; the second, that, 
 so far as he is aware, this subject has not yet been fully 
 dealt with in its many-sided aspects by any previous 
 writer. Some of those who are most competent to 
 deal with it are prevented from doing so by want of 
 leisure. Others seem to regard the solution of this 
 problem as impracticable, and shrink from grappling 
 with it in despair of final success. But, those who 
 consider the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ an infallible remedy for healing the spuitual 
 maladies of our race, and the Churches as the best 
 organisations for its propagation, have no right to 
 despair of this, any more than of other great spiritual 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 problems with which it has to deal. Fully conscious 
 of the difficulties that beset the present inquiry, the 
 writer would not have entered on so great a task, 
 had he not been more hopeful of a solution than some, 
 and had already had occasion to treat of the subject 
 in some of its more important aspects. From his 
 isolated position, he has had to encounter difficulties 
 which would not have met others who had readier 
 access to the sources of information. However much 
 he may have failed in the subject he has taken in 
 hand, he is, at any rate, conscious of an honest at- 
 tempt to draw the attention of the public to this 
 pressing question, and to interest the members of 
 the Churches in it ; and he is not without hope that 
 others may follow more successfully in his track. 
 His object has been to view the question of the 
 Churchless primarily in relation to the Church of 
 Scotland, but he has never left out of consideration 
 how larn;e a factor the other Churches, as also the 
 State, are in its full solution. A slight repetition of 
 facts or observations may be noticed, but this was 
 partly unavoidable, in consequence of the same sub- 
 ject being treated under different aspects in successive 
 chapters, and partly intentional, in order to enforce 
 more strongly some important truth. 
 
 In the present work attention has been exclusively 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 directed to the question of the Chiirchless in towns. 
 One reason for this is that it presents quite different 
 aspects in its relation to rural districts, and requires 
 a different treatment from the other. Another is, 
 that the writer desired more leisure to consider the 
 question in its bearing on the country districts, and 
 more information than he at present possesses ; but 
 should the present publication answer its purpose, he 
 hopes, God sparing him, to give his attention to this 
 aspect of the question also. Meanwhile, he takes 
 this opportunity of tendering his sincere thanks to 
 those who have supplied him with information, or 
 have in any other way been of service. 
 
 Manse of Towie, 
 
 2Uh 3Iarch 1884. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 ■ \ j \ji i I ,f 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTIOX, ..... 1 
 
 I. GENERAL VIEW OF THE NUMBERS AND CONDITION 
 
 OF THE LAPSED POPULATIONS IN LARGE TOWNS, 18 
 
 II. AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRINCIPAL CAUSES OF THE 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF THE LAPSED POPULA- 
 TIONS, ...... 41 
 
 III. REMEDIAL MEASURES. SECULAR — (rt) BY THE STATE, 53 
 
 IV. REMEDIAL MEASURES. SECULAR — (6) BY ASSOCIA- 
 TIONS AND PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS, AND BY THE 
 POOR THEMSELVES, .... 76 
 
 V. REMEDIAL MEASURES. SPIRITUAL — (o) BY THE 
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND, .... 85 
 
 VI. REMEDIAL MEASURES. SPIRITUAL — (h) BY SUBOR- 
 DINATE AGENCIES, DENOMINATIONAL AND UN- 
 DENOMINATIONAL, .... 96 
 
 VII. CO-OPERATION OF ALL THE EVANGELICAL CHURCHES, 
 AND RECOGNITION OF EACH OTHER's WORK, 
 NECESSARY FOR THE COMPLETE SOLUTION OF 
 THE PROBLEM, ..... 107 
 
X CONTENTS, 
 
 VIII. WHEREIN THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND NEEDS A NEW 
 DEPARTURE IN HER EFFORTS TOWARDS THE 
 RECOVERY OF THE LAPSED — (l.) IN THE INTRO- 
 DUCTION OF NEW, OR THE EXPANSION OF PRE- 
 SENT, AGENCIES, . . . .115 
 
 IX. WHEREIN THE CHURCH NEEDS A NEW DEPAR- 
 TURE IN HER EFFORTS TOWARDS THE RE- 
 COVERY OF THE LAPSED — (ll.) IN THE VAST 
 MULTIPLICATION OF INDIVIDUAL MISSIONARY 
 EFFORT ON THE PART OF THE MEMBERS OF 
 THE CHURCH, ..... 127 
 
 X. THE church's MISSION TO THE CULTURED AND 
 
 SCEPTICAL CLASSES OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES, . 135 
 
 XI. CONCLUSION — SUMMARY AND APPEAL, , . 146 
 
 APPENDIX, ...... IGl 
 
THE 
 
 CHURCHLESS AND POOE IN OUK 
 LAEGE TOWNS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A Church, in the large sense in whicli it will be 
 often used here, is a divinely instituted agency for 
 bringing the Gospel to bear on the hearts and con- 
 sciences of men. Its function is twofold — to minis- 
 ter the means of grace to its members and adherents, 
 and to bring the Churchless within its fold. - Any 
 association of men calling itself a Christian Church, 
 which regards only the former of these objects and 
 neglects the latter, will soon become shrivelled and 
 effete. The Church of Christ, by the very terms of 
 its Founder's parting commission, is an aggressive 
 institution. By this spirit of aggressiveness it most 
 surely prospers ; by settling on its lees it will most 
 surely become weak. An earthly kingdom may 
 
 A 
 
2 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 weaken itself by too aggressive a spirit, if the 
 energy and money which should go to consolidate 
 it internally are bestowed on the undue extension 
 of its territory. But not so the Kingdom of Christ. 
 It prospers by extension ; it stagnates by resting 
 satisfied with the conquests already made. 
 
 When the foundations of the Christian Church 
 were laid by Christ and His disciples, it was under 
 external circumstances different from those which 
 exist at the present day. But the wisdom of the 
 Divine Founder is clearly seen in His laying down 
 the general principles only of all Church organisation, 
 instead of a definite plan to be followed in all ages 
 and under all circumstances. The Jewish Church was 
 intended mainly for one people and to last for a 
 definite time, and hence its constitution was strictly 
 defined ; its laws and its observances, its form of 
 government and discipline, were grafted on Eastern 
 manners and ideas ; but the Christian Church is 
 intended to be all-embracing in its aim, and to last 
 through all time. It was therefore necessary that 
 its constitution should not be rigid and stereotyped 
 like that of the Jewish Church, but should have, 
 along with the eternal and immutable principles on 
 which its foundations were laid, a certain elasticity in 
 its external constitution to adapt it to the end of 
 its establishment. Hence, there is much about the 
 Church, as an outward organisation, that is left to 
 be devised and built up by sanctified human wisdom 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 3 
 
 SO as to adapt it to the wants of the times ; and this 
 power of adaptation, instead of derogating from the 
 wisdom of its Founder, is a clear proof of His divine 
 prescience. 
 
 But, amid all the variations of outward ecclesias- 
 tical constitution and government, this principle of 
 aggressiveness on the kingdom of darkness remains 
 the same. That Church which most zealously car- 
 ries out the parting commission of the Divine 
 Founder of our religion to preach the Gospel to 
 every creature, that is not only zealous in the build- 
 ing up of believers, but in bringing in the outcasts, 
 whether she can lay claim to so-called Apostolical 
 succession or not, is surely carrying out Christ's 
 own idea of what His Church should be. Every 
 Christian worker, fired with zeal for the extension 
 of Christ's kingdom, be he minister or layman, pres- 
 byter or priest, is a successor of the apostles in 
 the sense in which he can truly be — viz., in wit- 
 ness-bearing for Christ. 
 
 It is with the second function of a Christian 
 Church — that which respects the ingathering of the 
 Churchless — that we have in these pages chiefly to 
 do. And, in considering the various Christian 
 Churches in this land that claim to fulfil this im- 
 portant function, I select the one that has the 
 greatest responsibility, as well as the greatest ad- 
 vantages for this end — the Church of Scotland. 
 
 I start, then, from the position of the Established 
 
4 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Church of Seotbiid as the National Church — national 
 in a sense that will hardly be denied, in that, through 
 her parochial divisions or parishes, she spreads a net- 
 work over the kingdom, and has in each of these a 
 religious establishment for bringing the means of 
 grace to bear on the people. What, then, let us ask, 
 are her privileges as such, and her duties springing 
 therefrom, to the Churchless and poor ? If it can be 
 shown that her advantages for this end are excep- 
 tional, it will equally appear that her responsibilities 
 are so, and that only in making the most unwearied 
 and self-denying efforts for gathering in the outcasts 
 can she be fulfilling her duty to her living Head, 
 
 Among the chief of her advantages for the purpose 
 above mentioned may be classed her parochial economy, 
 or the legally defined territories in which her minis- 
 ters carry on their work. Parochial divisions existed 
 long before the Eeformation ; and although various 
 Acts from 15G0 to 1843 gave power to alter them 
 more or less, there was little subdivision made of tlie 
 larger parishes up to the latter date, but in a good 
 many cases two or more neighbouring small parishes 
 were united into one. During tlie past forty years, 
 liowever, a considerable subdivision of tlie larger par- 
 ishes has taken place, so tliat the parishes of the 
 Church of Scotland number one-third more than they 
 did in 1843. Now, these parochial divisions consti- 
 tute well-defined territories for the labours of tlie seve- 
 ral incumbents ; and, nominally, each is responsible for 
 
IN OUK LAKGE TOWNS. 5 
 
 the condition of all the sonls within his own, except 
 such as may be cared for by ministers of other 
 Christian denominations. This responsibility laid on 
 each parish minister for the spiritual condition of all 
 within his own territory is a step, and a most im- 
 portant step, towards the full ingathering of all into 
 the Christian fold. If the practice corresponded 
 with the theory, no better scheme could be devised ; 
 and no one would be free from blame that had not 
 gathered in all the Churchless within the territory 
 assigned him. 
 
 Further, the Church of Scotland has the additional 
 advantage for the ingathering of the Churchless in 
 the existence of a certain minimuin etuloivment ivithin 
 each of those parochial divisions for the purpose of 
 supporting religious ordinances for the benefit of the 
 people. Most of these endowments arise from teinds 
 or tithes, which are a fixed charge upon the rental of 
 land, originating in gifts to the Church by the pious 
 and benevolent of early times. At the time of the 
 Eeformation, more than one-third of the land of the 
 country was in the hands of the Church. In the 
 period of the Eeformation upheaval, a large part of 
 these lands was seized by the laity or the Crown, 
 and but a small portion accrued to the Reformed 
 Church. But in course of time, the State stepped in 
 and made a certain payment to the Church, being a 
 fixed proportion of the rental in every parish, obliga- 
 tory, and thus a permanent endowment was secured. 
 
6 PKOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 The money for the payment of these tithes did not 
 come from the State — never, in fact, belonged to the 
 State. What the latter did was to commute irregular 
 payments from lands into a regular and permanent 
 endowment for the minister who served the cure.^ 
 These endowments exist in all the original parishes ; 
 and in those which have been erected quoad sacra 
 since 1844, there is also a permanent endowment 
 raised by voluntary contributions of not less than 
 £100 a-year. Both those of the first and second 
 class may be increased by annual and voluntary con- 
 tributions, and many of them are so ; but the fact to 
 be specially noted here is that there is in every case 
 as much of an endowment as prevents the minister's 
 entire dependence on his people for his means of 
 living, and hence the temptation to mould his doc- 
 trines to their taste. This system of endowments 
 has also the effect of allowing the minister to give 
 as much attention to the poorer as to the wealthier 
 inhabitants of his parish, without any risk of suffer- 
 ing in his pecuniary interests. There cannot, there- 
 fore, be that competition between his worldly interests 
 and his spiritual duties which often arises when he 
 is in a great measure dependent on the liberality of 
 liis people. As regards the Church at large, the ex- 
 istence of a permanent endowment in each parish 
 
 ^ See a succinct history of tithes in ' Handbook of the CImrcli of 
 Scotland.' By Rev. James Rankin, D.D., Muthill. P. 117. Messrs 
 lilackwood & Sons : 1881. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 7 
 
 keeps her energies from being dissipated, and her 
 usefuhiess from being impaired, in the raising of 
 large funds for the sustentation of her clergy, and 
 allows of the voluntary liberality of her members 
 flowing into channels which may water and quicken 
 the lapsed masses. These two conditions, then, of 
 legally defined territories and a permanent endowment 
 in each parish, give an advantage to the Church of 
 Scotland for gathering in the Churchless possessed by 
 no unestablished Church in the country. 
 
 To this may be added, a long and honoured history 
 — a history bright with many heroic deeds and con- 
 tendings for the right. From the time of the Eefor- 
 mation downwards, she has been the guardian of 
 religious liberty, the patron of education, the pro- 
 moter of civilisation, the helper of the poor. And 
 in more recent times, though her relation, like that 
 of all other religious establishments, to the country 
 has considerably changed, she has still to tell of 
 good deeds accomplished for the nation — of many 
 blessings imparted to the young and the poor. Of 
 the latter, she has far more within her fold than any 
 other Church in the land. 
 
 The compact between the Church and the State 
 implies both reciprocal advantages and reciprocal 
 duties. The State guarantees to the Church perfect 
 freedom of action within the terms of her constitution ; 
 gives a legal sanction to the territorial divisions of the 
 country for ecclesiastical purposes, and guarantees 
 
8 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 for each a limited eiulownient ; or, to speak more 
 properly, guarantees that the endowments anciently 
 provided by private benevolence and now connuuted 
 into a tithe payment shall be regularly paid to those 
 who serve the cures. The Church, accepting these 
 conditions as the. best guarantee for her spiritual 
 freedom and usefulness, agrees to open her doors to 
 all — to work territorially — to be the helper of the 
 l)Oor by providing them with the means of grace 
 without money and without price, and to labour with 
 all the advantages at her command to bring in the 
 outcasts, and to proclaim the Gospel to every home. 
 " We have accepted," says Dr Eankine in his excel- 
 lent closing address as Moderator of the General 
 Assembly, 1883 — "we have accepted our position, 
 and we enjoy our privileges on the distinct under- 
 standing that we shall endeavour to supply means of 
 grace commensurate with the retiuirements of our 
 parishes." 
 
 Such being the case, it is natural to ask why the 
 Church of Scotland has failed to accomplish one of 
 the great ends of her existence — why, with the help 
 of those advantages referred to, tliere are yet so many 
 thousands and tens of thousands of our countrymen 
 living outside of all Church ordinances, not a few of 
 whom are as much beyond the inliuence of the Chris- 
 tian religion as if they were living in the midst of 
 heathendom ? The extent and the nature of the 
 lapsing from Church ordinances in our cities and 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 9 
 
 towns will by-and-by occupy our attention. The 
 instances wherein the State has failed to fulfil its 
 duty in its compact with the Church will be con- 
 sidered in a following chapter. Meanwhile, let it be 
 taken for granted, what no one at all acquainted 
 with our Churchless populations will deny, that an 
 evil of this kind, gigantic in its proportions, certainly 
 exists, and is most likely extending, in spite of all 
 the efforts of the Churches. Confining our attention 
 in the meantime to the Church of Scotland, our next 
 inquiry must be. What are the chief causes of this 
 failure — those causes, in particular, for which the 
 Church herself can hardly be blamed ? 
 
 The first of these is the want of proper expansive- 
 ncss in her constitution. At the time when the 
 Church was established, Scotland was poor and 
 limited in population. Manufactures and mining, 
 by which the country is now enriched, and the 
 population in certain centres largely and suddenly 
 increased, were then hardly known. Commerce with 
 foreign countries was limited, and most of our largest 
 towns did not contain one - tenth of their present 
 populations. On the other hand, many districts of 
 the Highlands were either unpeopled or contained a 
 mere sprinkling of inhabitants, and required little 
 or no pastoral supervision. The division of the 
 country into parishes had taken place at a remote 
 period of its history when the population w^as sparse 
 and very differently arranged from what it is at 
 
10 I'KOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 present. At the Reformation, wlien the Cliurch was 
 established on its present basis, very much the same 
 arrangement of parishes was adhered to.^ During 
 the time between the Church's first establishment 
 and the passing of the Endowment Act in 1844, as 
 already stated, very little was done in the way of 
 breaking down large or populous parishes, though 
 there was more than one Act passed for the purpose ; 
 because, either the conditions of disjunction were 
 difficult of fulfilment, or the means were not at hand 
 for adequately endowing the new parishes that might 
 be created. In former times, voluntary effort to 
 supplement the want of expansiveness in the Church's 
 constitution was hardly thought of ; and the State, 
 which required of the Church the full supply of 
 spiritual ordinances to the country, did not supply 
 her with the means of adequately fulfilling her duty. 
 It demanded of her the full tale of bricks, but with- 
 held the straw. Hence, up to a comparatively recent 
 period, little had been done to meet the great increase 
 of the population in the larger towns and the multipli- 
 cation of thriving villages caused by the increased 
 prosperity of the country. Highland and other 
 parishes came to be more thickly peopled, and families 
 were found ten or even twenty miles from church 
 for whom no adequate spiritual provision was made. 
 The consequence of this state of things was, that in 
 
 * See chapter on " Parishes," in Duncan's ' Parochial Ecclesiastical 
 Law.' 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 11 
 
 many of our large towns, and in some of our country 
 parishes, people left off church-going because there 
 was no church witliin their reach, or having empty 
 pews to receive them. The better classes could 
 generally find the requisite accommodation, the poorer 
 were often crowded out. This state of things con- 
 tinued till Dr Chalmers, in the year 1835, started 
 his scheme of Church Extension, and by his zealous 
 and eloquent advocacy of the cause, was able at the 
 end of seven years to report an addition of about 
 220 chapels to the ecclesiastical strength of the 
 Church of Scotland. He started his scheme under 
 the mistaken apprehension that, if the churches were 
 erected by voluntary contributions, the State would 
 endow them. But the time for receiving State aid 
 for Church endowment had gone. In the meantime, 
 the population had been rapidly tending to certain 
 centres ; villages were enlarging into towns, and towns 
 into great cities. Vast multitudes of the population 
 were growing up beyond the means of grace. The 
 Endowment Act of 1844, whereby, when the Church 
 provides a certain amount of permanent endowment 
 for a church, and marks out a territory for the 
 minister, the State gives its sanction to the pro- 
 ceedings and it is erected into a parish quoad sacra — 
 this Act, on which the noble Endowment Scheme of 
 the late Dr Eobertson was founded, did much to 
 remedy the evil, by allowing of the subdivision of 
 large and populous parishes into workable districts 
 
12 PROBLEM OF THE CIIUKCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 similar to the original parishes. Still, very much 
 remains to do among the lapsed populations. A 
 permanent endowment of even £100 or £120 a-year 
 implies the gathering of a large sum of money. In 
 the case of the parishes erected under the Endow- 
 ment Scheme, the original endowment is often largely 
 supplemented by church-door collections and seat- 
 rents ; hut the parishes erected in the very poorest 
 districts cannot depend on this source of income. 
 To obtain the services of an experienced minister, 
 and to establish the necessary agencies for the proper 
 working of the parish, the endowments for these 
 districts would need to be very large ; and hence, 
 while those districts whose populations are able in 
 a great measure to help themselves have had little 
 difficulty in obtaining the necessary endowments, the 
 poorer are left unprovided for ; and this, and not 
 any intentional neglect on the part of the Church 
 herself, is one of the principal causes of her failure 
 to overtake the evangelising of the poorest and most 
 spiritually destitute districts of our large towns. 
 
 Another cause of the Church's failure to overtake 
 this work, and one intimately connected with the 
 former, is the departure from the proper parochial 
 economy in the spiritual administration of large toivns. 
 What has been well styled the " commercial " or 
 " shopkeeping " system, has prevailed more or less in 
 most of our town congregations fur a considerable 
 time past. In other words, town ministers are, from 
 
IN OUK LARGE TOWNS. 13 
 
 the necessities of the system, hardly parish ministers 
 at all, but simply pastors of their several congrega- 
 tions that meet in the parish church. The practice 
 of charging high rents in town churches, and the 
 rapidly increasing populations of the parishes, have 
 very much conduced to this state of things. Why 
 the practice of charging seat-rents came to be intro- 
 duced, it is now somewhat difficult to determine. It 
 might well be worth the money and trouble to make 
 a thorough investigation into the subject, and to 
 ascertain whether the lands originally mortified in 
 tlie neighbourhood of towns for the support of Chris- 
 tian ordinances, as tliese towns increased, were laid 
 hold of and their value added to the common good 
 of the town, on the condition of the municipalities 
 paying a certain sum therefrom for the minister's 
 maintenance ; and whether, in course of time, the 
 town councils, in order to recoup their outlay from 
 the common funds, introduced the system of charg- 
 ing seat-rents. It is very possible that in not a few 
 cases, were the original endowments available, they 
 would have sufficed, with the great increase of their 
 original value, to endow a sufficient number of charges 
 to overtake the whole spiritual destitution. But the 
 charging of high seat-rents in town parish churches, 
 however it originated, has had the effect of supplying 
 ordinances and pastoral superintendence to the com- 
 paratively well-to-do, to the exclusion of the very 
 poor. This privilege, if privilege it can be called, of 
 
14 PKOBLEM OF THE CHURCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 rentinji the sittinjjs in the churches, is not confined 
 to the inhabitants of the parish. All who choose to 
 come from any quarter of the town are admitted on 
 condition of paying the stipulated amount, and of 
 there being roonl Hence, in spite of anything the 
 minister can do, his charge becomes congregational 
 instead of parochial. Not a tithe of his congregation 
 may be parishioners ; the great majority will likely 
 be scattered over the town of which his parish forms 
 a part. He has, therefore, either of two courses 
 before him — to confine his pastoral work to his 
 parish, to the neglect of the many from beyond it 
 who are his hearers from week to week, and who 
 have a claim on his week-day ministrations ; or, giv- 
 ing his attention to the members of his congregation, 
 who in general demand all his time and strength, 
 to neglect the interests of his parish as such. But 
 even wlien, as some have attempted to do, he gives a 
 good deal of his attention to the spiritually destitute 
 within his parish, the influence exerted upon them 
 can be neither great nor permanent. He cannot 
 bring them into the parish church, for it is perhaps 
 already full ; or if not, they dislike to be seen among 
 their betters. If he is able to gather a few into 
 mission-halls and there address to them the words 
 of life, they are only temporarily interested, and 
 ready, without a permanent attachment to a church 
 by membership, to fall back into their former state. 
 This system of pure Congregationalism has grown up 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 15 
 
 in our large towns in spite of the wishes or occa- 
 sional exertions of the ministers themselves. It has 
 sprung from a variety of causes, and it has been one 
 of the chief obstacles to the thorough evangelising of 
 the lapsed. 
 
 A third cause of the Church's failure to overtake 
 the spiritual destitution of the country is one which 
 has already been casually alluded to under the first 
 head — viz., the rapid increase of the population in 
 large towns and other centres of industry, making it 
 difficult for the Church, by mere voluntary efforts, to 
 keep pace in her supply of ordinances with the great 
 increase of the population. In mining and manufac- 
 turing districts workmen converge from all parts of 
 the country, and in a few years, that which was 
 perhaps a barren wild becomes alive with a teeming 
 population. We have only to compare the present 
 population of such parishes, including the quoad 
 sacra parishes erected out of them, as Old and 
 New Monkland in Lanarkshire, with what they 
 were fifty years ago, to find what an immense con- 
 course of people mining and manufacturing operations 
 have drawn together in so short a time. In the same 
 time, Glasgow has increased by 483,000 {including 
 its suburbs); Edinburgh, by 100,000; Dundee, by 
 92,000; Aberdeen, by 48,000, and so on. How 
 great an extension of ecclesiastical and spiritual 
 agency on the part of all the Churches is necessary 
 to meet this rapid increase can easily be seen. Then, 
 
IG PKOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 ULjMin, though the population of the purely agricul- 
 tural districts is diminishing, and the larger part of 
 those who migrate from them goes to swell the in- 
 crease of the large towns, this does not imply the with- 
 drawal of any spiritual agency from the rural districts 
 to help on the evangelising of the towns. Each parish, 
 though half the population should leave it, requires 
 the same parochial machinery for its use as before. 
 
 A fourth cause of the failure of the Church of 
 Scotland to overtake the spiritual destitution of the 
 country arises from the secessions ivhich from time to 
 time have talcen flace from her ranks, in a great measure, 
 through the existence of Patronage. While the vast 
 amount of spiritual energy displayed by Dissenting 
 Churches is frankly admitted ; while the liberality 
 of their members and the enthusiasm of their office- 
 bearers have claimed the admiration of an unpreju- 
 diced public, there is still a consideration which will 
 force itself on that public contemplating the great 
 work in the country still awaiting the Churches to 
 do. That consideration is, that, had the money 
 expended during the past forty years in maintaining 
 rival religious ordinances by Churches having the 
 same Bible, the same creed, and preaching the same 
 Gospel, in places where they were not required, been 
 expended in evangelising the lapsed districts terri- 
 torially, the problem of spiritual destitution of the 
 country might have been solved. Some of the 
 seceding Churches, when working territorially, have 
 
IN OUE LARGE TOWNS. 17 
 
 done excellent work among the Cburchless in large 
 towns. But, so far as they act on the voluntary 
 principle, that work is sadly hampered and curtailed. 
 Tlie fact, however, still remains, that in many 
 places, especially in our large villages, there is a 
 great superabundance of religious establishments, 
 weakening one another, and involving a useless 
 expenditure of money, that might be far better 
 expended in the bringing in of the Cburchless into 
 the Christian fold. The weakness accruing to the 
 Established Church through the secession of 1843, 
 diverted for a time her attention from the problem 
 of the ingathering of the lapsed, and has allowed 
 them to increase even in a greater ratio than the 
 increase of the population. The dissenting Presby- 
 terian Churches, in their earnest struggles to main- 
 tain the ordinances of religion in the churches 
 already planted, have also been unable to do much 
 in this direction ; and so it is, that through the 
 weakening of the Church of Scotland by the seces- 
 sions that have taken place from her ranks, and 
 though in all the branches vast sums of money have 
 been voluntarily raised for religious purposes, the 
 problem of the gathering in of the outcasts yet 
 remains to be solved. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 GENERAL VIEW OF THE NUMBERS AND CONDITION OF THE 
 LAPSED POPULATIONS IN LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 The very first step towards the solution of the 
 problem of religious destitution in large towns is 
 to make inquiry into the number and condition of 
 the lapsed. If there are no other accurate means 
 of ascertaining these, then it becomes the Church 
 or Churches interested to make a full and accurate 
 investigation of the facts of the case. The true 
 physician makes a careful diagnosis of his patient's 
 symptoms ere he ventures to prescribe ; for, if he 
 prescribe at random, or on careless inquiry, into the 
 symptoms, he may kill where he meant to cure. 
 So, there can be no better foundation for Christian 
 work among the irreligious and non-church-going 
 than a thorough inquiry into the facts of the case. 
 In this chapter,^ we exclude the better classes among 
 the Churchless, and confine our attention to those 
 who inhabit the densely crowded and poorer local- 
 ities of our towns. Now, how are their number 
 
 * This exclusion has reference to the consideration of the condition 
 of the lapsed, not to their sum-total. 
 
THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 1 9 
 
 and condition to be ascertained ? Not, I answer, 
 through any Government religious census, however 
 desirable in some respects. Only missionaries, Bible- 
 women, and others intimately acquainted with the 
 populations among whom the Churchless are chiefly 
 to be found, can tell with tolerable accuracy who 
 among them are connected with any Church or not. 
 Many will profess at first their connection with 
 some branch of the visible Church, who will be 
 found on further inquiry to have no Church con- 
 nection at all. In a general way, it is possible, by 
 ascertaining the membership of the several churches 
 in a large town, and multiplying the number by 
 three, that the average numbers connected with the 
 Churches may be ascertained ; and then, subtract- 
 ing this from the total population, the numbers 
 having no Church connection, including the popu- 
 lation of all ages, may be roughly guessed. Praise- 
 worthy attempts have been made to furnish a general 
 estimate of the non-church-going in some of our 
 largest towns — Glasgow especially ; and though their 
 absolute accuracy may not be depended on, yet, 
 when from different data, and by different calcula- 
 tions, the same, or nearly the same, result is reached, 
 we may have the assurance that the error in the 
 estimation cannot be very great. In other cases, 
 the numbers have been ascertained by direct inquiry, 
 but even such a means of ascertaining the numbers, 
 for the reason above given, cannot be absolutely 
 correct, unless the results have been verified by 
 
20 I'KOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLES3 AND POOK 
 
 agents working in, and well acquainted with, the 
 district. About thirteen years ago, several attempts 
 were made to ascertain the non-church-iioin<' in 
 Glasgow, and the conclusions which were reached 
 by independent inquirers all pointed to the same 
 general result. 
 
 In the year 1870, the Hev. James Johnston of 
 Free St James's Church, Glasgow, published a strik- 
 ing pamphlet, entitled, ' Iveligious Destitution in 
 Glasgow,' in which he calls attention to the condi- 
 tion of the vast population living beyond the means 
 of grace, and by a series of careful calculations, comes 
 to the conclusion that there were 132,251 of the 
 nominally Protestant population of Glasgow outside 
 of all Christian fellowship, and that, notwithstanding 
 the zeal of the Clnirches, the number was increasing. 
 " It is a sad fact," he says, " that in spite of many 
 noble and generous efforts on the part of many 
 ministers and merchants of late years, and notwith- 
 standing many gracious manifestations of the influ- 
 ences of the Spirit of God, the destitute population 
 of our city goes on increasing. We keep our ground 
 relatively, but not absolutely. . . . The efibrts 
 of the Church have not near kept pace with the 
 increase of the population." 
 
 In the same year (1870) an Association was 
 formed, styled, "An Association for Promoting the 
 Eeligious and Social Improvement of the City." 
 Next year, this Association issued a report on the 
 
IN OUK LARGE TOWNS. 21 
 
 religious condition of Glasgow. In tins, by means 
 of various investigations, and by a comparison of the 
 statistics of Church attendance and membership with 
 the whole Protestant population, they came to the 
 conclusion that there were 130,000 within the city 
 " who are habitually neglecting all public means of 
 grace, and this with reference to the Protestant popu- 
 lation only." Again, the late Alexander Whitelaw, 
 Esq., M.P. for Glasgow, to whom the Church of Scot- 
 land owes a debt of gratitude that may well enshrine 
 his memory in the hearts of her members for many 
 generations, proceeding on careful statistics as to the 
 non- church -going population compiled by a com- 
 mittee of the Presbytery of Glasgow, gives the result 
 of his inquiries in a pamphlet, entitled, ' A Statement 
 of Church Statistics, with remarks on Church Work. 
 Glasgow: 1871.' In this pamphlet, by an intricate 
 series of calculations, he comes to the same general 
 conclusion with the other two authorities mentioned 
 as to the number of the Churchless ; while, with ref- 
 erence to the population of the whole Presbytery of 
 Glasgow, he arrives at the following among other 
 conclusions : — 
 
 "(1) There is a larger Eoman Catholic population 
 than the population connected with the Church of 
 Scotland. 
 
 " (2) All the Presbyterian Churches together have 
 only one-half of the population connected with them. 
 
 " (3) The population which has no real connection 
 
22 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 with any Church is as large as that connected with 
 any of the Presbyterian Churches." — P. 15. 
 
 In Edinburgh, the religious destitution in propor- 
 tion to the population was at the period referred to 
 not less appalling. From the reports of the City 
 Mission and otherwise, it was calculated to contain 
 from 50,000 to 60,000 of all ages outside the 
 Churches — not, of course, all destitute of the means 
 of grace, but though in some cases enjoying the bene- 
 fit of missionary and other spiritual ministrations, yet 
 having no Church connection. In one of the soul- 
 stirring appeals of the Endowment Committee com- 
 posed by the venerated founder of the Endowment 
 Scheme, the late I)r James Robertson, it is stated 
 that the fact was forced upon the Committee's con- 
 viction by proofs which they dared not attempt to 
 controvert, that, of the gross population of 714,430 
 souls contained in the towns under review, there was 
 in all probability more than a third part — that is, 
 upwards of 230,000 immortal beings — who, though 
 living in the midst of a Christian land, are living in 
 a state of alienation from the commonwealth of Israel, 
 " without God and without hope in tlie world." 
 
 Again, the Committee on Christian Life and Work 
 in the years 1872 and 1873 issued queries to the 
 kirk-sessions of the Church embracing a column for 
 those not connected with any Church. In many ,of 
 the country parishes, this query could be answered 
 with tolerable accuracy, but in the large parishes of 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 23 
 
 the towns, a full answer to the query was next to 
 impossible, unless the minister through missionary or 
 other agency had the statistics at command. Never- 
 theless, reports on the non-church-going were sent in 
 from 507 parishes, embracing a population, exclusive 
 of Eoman Catholics, of 1,111,454, of whom 161,296, 
 or nearly one-seventh of the whole, were repre- 
 sented as neglecting Church ordinances. For the rea- 
 son already given — viz., that, in the large towns, 
 where spiritual destitution is greatest, there would 
 be the greatest difficulty in furnishing the returns, 
 and consequently fewer returns in proportion made 
 — this proportion of one in seven of the population 
 as non- church -going would be rather under than 
 above the mark when applied to the whole popula- 
 tion of Scotland. But, suppose we take off 300,000 
 for the present Eoman Catholic population, which is 
 nearly the number claimed as belonging to them, and 
 divide the remaining population by seven, and sup- 
 pose the ratio of those neglecting Church ordinances 
 to the whole Protestant population is the same as it 
 was ten years ago, we shall still have nearly half a 
 million of the inhabitants of this country outside of 
 all Church connection. Some, however, believe that 
 the outlying population, instead of diminishing, is 
 increasing ; or at any rate, that if there are fewer 
 than before of the purely lapsed population, there is 
 an increasing number of those who have nothing 
 more than a nominal Church connection. 
 
21 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Reference has been made to the non-churcli-going 
 population of the two largest cities of the kingdom ; 
 but, if we come to the smaller towns, we shall find 
 the religious condition of many of them very little 
 better. The Committee on Christian Life and Work, 
 in their report to the Assembly of 1872, say — " Many 
 country towns are almost as completely church-going 
 as the rural districts ; others have their thousands 
 who practically live outside of all the Churches, the 
 proportion of this class being often quite as high as 
 in the great cities. The towns so described are 
 almost all mining and manufacturing towns, in which 
 the territorial means of grace have been within a 
 generation far outgrown by the population. The 
 proportion of non-church-goers in such towns is fre- 
 quently from one-fourth to one-third of the inhabi- 
 tants. Out of 34,000 in one large parish, 10,000 
 are believed to belong to no Church. In another 
 mining district, six parishes which represent a popu- 
 lation of 32,000 are reported to contain almost 9000 
 non-church-goers." 
 
 Now, of the large numbers of neglecters of Church 
 ordinances here given, it is to be remembered (1) 
 That there is a considerable number of young chil- 
 dren, who, of course, having to submit to the condi- 
 tion of their parents, are reckoned along with them in 
 the category of the non-church-going. (2) That it 
 would not be correct to say of even all the adults 
 that they are beyond the means of grace ; for many 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 25 
 
 of them, though prevented from poverty and other 
 reasons from attending church, are yet frequent at- 
 tenders at prayer-meetings, and as exemplary in their 
 home religious duties as those who are attenders on 
 public ordinances. 
 
 It is a matter of re2;ret that in none of the lars;e 
 towns, so far as I have been able to discover, have 
 there been anything like reliable statistics of the 
 lapsed populations obtained to the present date. 
 Whether, therefore, there has been an increase or 
 diminution of the spiritual destitution prevailing some 
 ten or twelve years ago, it is impossible with any 
 certainty to say. On the one hand, in such towns as 
 Edinburgh and Glasgow, a vast improvement has been 
 made in the dwellings of the poor. Many of the 
 worst of the slums have been cleared out and decent 
 dwellings erected in their stead. By this and other 
 means of sanitary improvement, the death - rate, es- 
 pecially in Glasgow, has largely diminished, and the 
 physical condition of many of the poorer classes 
 sensibly improved. On the other hand, the popula- 
 tion in the large towns during the period referred to 
 has so rapidly increased, that the religious denomina- 
 tions have not been able to keep pace in the exten- 
 sion of religious ordinances with the increase of the 
 population.^ No doubt, there has been great activity 
 during that period in church-building, especially on 
 the part of the Church of Scotland. Many new 
 
 ^ See Appendix I. 
 
2G PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 parishes have sprung up in towns and crowded vil- 
 lages. Great efibrts have been made to meet the 
 wants of the destitute population ; but for the poorest 
 of the poor — those who are utterly unable to help 
 themselves — there has not been a supply of Church 
 ordinances corresponding to that for the average 
 working man and the better classes. Hence, it is to 
 be feared that, notwithstanding the great improvement 
 in the waste places here and there effected both in 
 the physical and spiritual condition of many of the 
 poorest in our large towns, the spiritual destitution as 
 a whole has more than kept pace with the supply of 
 Church ordinances. But, taking the most charitable 
 view of the numbers of the lapsed — supposing even 
 that, instead of an increase, there has been a diminu- 
 tion since 1874, still, the problem before us of so 
 many thousands of our countrymen untouched by the 
 Churches is sufficiently appalling. 
 
 We now leave the region of statistics and address 
 ourselves to the sad inquiry as to the condition of 
 the Churchless, taking our descriptions either from 
 personal observation or from the reports of others 
 who have made themselves personally acquainted 
 with them. The remarks about to be made will 
 apply to the worst cases as a rule, because it is only 
 by sounding the deepest deeps that we can fathom 
 aright the misery and danger to which the neglect of 
 this class of the population leads. A mere statement 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 27 
 
 of numbers, especially of numbers so great tliat the 
 sum - total can hardly be taken in by the mind, is 
 little calculated to make us realise to the full extent 
 the degradation and misery of those who are our own 
 flesh and blood. We require to look at classes of 
 the lapsed more closely, and at isolated cases — to 
 weigh a large number of separate facts — to regard 
 the subject in the concrete, in order to estimate aright 
 the gravity of the situation and realise our individual 
 responsibility. 
 
 Among the non-church-goiug in towns, we must 
 distinguish various classes and conditions. It is an 
 error to class them all in the same category of the 
 physically and morally degraded. A considerable 
 number of those outside the Churches are to be found 
 among the well-to-do working men and among the 
 middle and upper classes — some of them persons of 
 great intelligence and highly respected in their own 
 social circle. A certain number of these — it is im- 
 possible to say how many — are attentive enough to 
 their private religious duties, though, for some reason 
 or other, they do not connect themselves with any 
 Church. In neglecting to do so, however, they 
 place themselves at an enormous disadvantage for 
 the cultivation of their spiritual life. They cannot 
 but be conscious that they are living in disobedience 
 to the injunctions of the Word of God, and refusing 
 to follow the example of His Son, Often, an en- 
 forced absence from the house of God for a certain 
 
28 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND TOOR 
 
 time begets religious indifference, and even creates 
 an unwillingness to return, so that a gradual lapsing 
 from Church ordinances is the result. The religious 
 condition of these does not present an insoluble pro- 
 blem. There is notliing in their outward circum- 
 stances to make reformation impossible. It is often 
 the want of Christian sympathy that is at the root 
 of their indifference. They are mingling with 
 Christian professors in tlie daily walks of life. They 
 are continually coming in contact with Christian 
 agencies, and though their repugnance to public 
 Church ordinances be difficult to surmount, the 
 Church requires no new agencies for their improve- 
 ment. The case of other classes of well-to-do 
 people neglecting Church ordinances will be con- 
 sidered farther on in Chapter X. 
 
 We now come to the consideration of a very 
 different class outside of religious ordinances — viz., 
 the poverty-stricken, the vicious, the irreligious, who 
 through poverty or vice are debarred, or debar them- 
 selves, from the house of God. We stand now look- 
 ing down into that " Woeland " which exists in all 
 our large towns side by side with our high Christian 
 civilisation. There is misery, there is degradation 
 here, such as the vast majority of the well-to-do 
 members of our Churclies have little conception of. 
 But, let it not be supposed that the physical and 
 moral darkness in tliose spiritually destitute regions 
 is unrelieved by any light ; for often here, even 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 29 
 
 amid the most desolate surroundings, there flourish 
 Christian graces as pure and bright as are to be 
 found in any rank of life.^ Sympathy, self-sacrifice, 
 contentment, and humble trust in God, are often 
 conspicuous among the poorest of our non-church- 
 going populations. I remember meeting, when visit- 
 ing in one of our large towns, as bright an instance 
 of humble piety, unfaltering trust in God, and 
 assurance of future bliss, in one who scarce knew 
 where she could get her next meal, as could any- 
 where else be found. Where piety does flourish 
 here, it is generally of the highest type, nourished 
 amid many outward disadvantages which deepen 
 religious fervour and strengthen faith. On many 
 a bed, with poverty stamped in every corner of 
 the apartment, lie pain-tossed patients, thankful for 
 the smallest pittance of charity, as trustful and 
 hopeful as if their life had been one bright sun- 
 shine. Many a well-to-do Christian, on whom God's 
 afflicting hand has not been laid, might learn by 
 such bedsides lessons of Christian faith and patience 
 and thankfulness which would do him a world of 
 good. 
 
 Turn we now to the darker side of the picture 
 in order to contemplate the wretchedness and the 
 vice that, lying at the base of our social fabric, 
 
 1 See cases of Sarah and Ann J , the one confined to bed for 
 
 sixteen years, and the other for thirty-one, as related in * Life 
 Work ; or, The Link and the Rivet.' By L. N. R. Chap. ii. 
 
30 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 poison the springs of existence, and make so large 
 a portion of our population a curse instead of a 
 blessing to the world. So injurious to life are the 
 conditions of the existence of those inhabiting many 
 of the most wretched localities, that but for the fact 
 of their being replenished by some above that are 
 every now and then sinking in the social scale, 
 their population would sensibly diminish. Now 
 and again families or individuals are emigrating 
 from the country with the flush of health upon 
 their cheek, and trained in church-going habits, into 
 our large towns in hope of remunerative employ- 
 ment. If they continue to enjoy health and strength, 
 if the seekers for work are fortunate enough to obtain 
 regular employment, then the demons of poverty and 
 misery may be kept from the door. But woe to them, 
 if smitten down with sickness, or thrown idle through 
 slackness of work, especially if they are the heads of 
 families who are dependent upon them. Manfully 
 will they struggle for a time to keep the wolf from 
 the door ; but by-and-by the terrible struggle against 
 poverty comes ; the children cry for bread, and there 
 is none to give them ; one piece of furniture after 
 another goes to the pawnshop to relieve a temporary 
 pinch ; hope struggles with despair, but misfortune 
 still broods over them. At length, the Sunday gar- 
 ments, in which the parents were proud to appear in 
 the house of God, must be pledged for bread and 
 sickbed expenses. The comfortable home must be 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 31 
 
 left. Poverty compels them to seek some hovel amid 
 the degraded classes of the population, where the 
 bad air and wretched surroundings make ill-health 
 a constant dweller, and they are seen in church no 
 more. Need we wonder if the sickening air and 
 depressing circumstances of their lot drive them to 
 the brink of despair, and they take to drinking to 
 afford them a temporary relief? If the history of 
 many a sad descent like this could be fully written, 
 it would be in language that would bring the tear to 
 many an eye.^ Besides ill-health, some that come 
 from the country to the large towns are lost to the 
 Church through neglect and want of sympathy. If 
 each Church had an agency that would lay hold of 
 every lonely stranger coming to the town, and at 
 once bring him into the brotherhood of the congre- 
 gation, this would lift and help to keep him up. 
 Many a one now ranked among the lapsed might 
 with such a help have been a respectable and re- 
 spected member of the religious denomination to 
 which he belonged. 
 
 But these, after all, are but isolated cases com- 
 pared with the many born and brought up in towns 
 that sink through drunkenness or improvidence from 
 a condition of comparative comfort, or want of work, 
 to the base of the social pyramid. Sad tales could 
 be told of even educated men, who once held a high 
 position in society, that through vice have sunk into 
 
 ^ See sad instance given in Appendix II. 
 
32 PKOBLEM OF THE CHUUCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 the lowest deptli.^ Again, there are multitudes on 
 the bonlers of this " Woeland " that from time to time 
 are found sinking into it, whom a little temporal 
 help, or even a little Christian sympathy, might 
 have rescued. Some of them are now almost liope- 
 lessly sunk in vice and misery, stung to madness 
 by the recollection of their once happier lot. This 
 Slough of Despond soon swallows up those that sink 
 in it. Their wail may for a time ring in our ear, 
 but it is soon drowned amid tlie louder sounds of 
 vice and misery that rise all around them. 
 
 Beneath the deep we have reached, there is one, if 
 possible, deeper, with its mass of living beings native 
 to the condition, nurtured amid the unliealthy phy- 
 sical and moral conditions of our city slums, with 
 weakened constitutions, insatiable cravings, hopeless 
 lives, and vice-stricken countenances. Select some 
 of the poorest localities in one of our large towns ; 
 visit by night the crowded rooms or miserable garrets, 
 and though much lias been done within the past 
 twenty years to improve the worst parts of these 
 cities, you will yet come upon scenes of human 
 wretchedness and degradation which you thought 
 could not have existed in any civilised community, 
 or have been tolerated by any Christian Government. 
 Here you find a room of a few feet square, crowded 
 with inhabitants of both sexes and of various ages ; 
 
 ^ Sec Appendix III., in which a very melancholy instance graphi- 
 cally related by Dr Gutlirie is given. 
 
IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 33 
 
 half of them, it may be, in rags ; no bed-clothes, but 
 a little dirty straw spread on a hard bedstead ; not a 
 whole article of furniture within the apartment ; the 
 atmosphere stifling ; the dust cleaving to the floor 
 and walls and windows ; the countenances of young 
 and old wan and emaciated, and perhaps one or more 
 me]nbers of the household reeling under the influence 
 of strong drink. Or go down into the underground 
 apartments ; it will be some time ere you can dis- 
 tinguish human objects amid the darkness ; and yet, 
 in places like these into which the sun never shines 
 and the fresh air of heaven never blows, many of the 
 poor, through the hard pressure of poverty, are com- 
 pelled to spend their dreary and monotonous exist- 
 ence. The rent which is charged for the merest 
 slums, utterly unfit for human habitation, is such as 
 should provide the tenants with comfortable homes. 
 But the high rents that can be obtained for the 
 better class of houses is such as the poor are unable 
 to pay, and so they have to put up with fever- 
 breeding hovels, where the want of fresh air and 
 of cleanliness engenders a constant craving for stim- 
 ulants, which finds its satisfaction only in strong 
 drink. Poverty also compels the crowding together 
 of numbers in one home of both sexes and of all 
 ages, which leads to the most deplorable results. 
 One instance I remember of an apartment about 
 8 feet by 6, in which lived a mother and her sod. 
 In that apartment was a bed which occupied three- 
 
 C 
 
34 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 fourths of the room, and at night the' son slept upon 
 the bed, and the mother under it. I have said that 
 poverty is the general cause of the lowest classes 
 of our population being huddled into such wretched 
 and unhealthy apartments. But it is not always so. 
 Among those who inhabit the most wretched dwell- 
 ings, there is often as much money earned as might 
 make the inmates tolerably comfortable. One house 
 you may find wonderfully comfortable and tidy. That 
 is inhabited by sober industrious people, with an 
 income that barely suffices to provide the necessaries 
 of life. Enter at the next door the apartment of 
 another family who are earning perhaps a great 
 deal more. There you will find every mark of dis- 
 comfort and poverty : the furniture scanty ; the bed- 
 clothes filthy ; the children in rags ; antl all because 
 the great part of what is earned goes for maddening 
 drink. Large sums which are obtained in a less 
 honest way, as by begging and stealing, go to feed 
 the vices in which many indulge to their ruin. 
 Follow to his home that child who with piteous 
 whine has been begging the whole evening at the 
 corner of the street, and you will find his parents in 
 some wretched hovel waiting his return. If lie has 
 failed in obtaining enough to gratify their drunken 
 appetite, he is soundly beaten, and sent forth again 
 into the street ; if he has brought home some hard- 
 earned coppers, the parents sally forth to spend them 
 in stroncr drink. 
 
IN OUK LARGE TOWNS. 35 
 
 Of all the deplorable aspects of this case, there is 
 none more sad than the condition of the children born 
 and brought up in these physically and morally un- 
 healthy slums.-^ If these could be taken away soon 
 after birth and trained under conditions favourable 
 to their future happiness and usefulness ; if they 
 could be thus early removed from the unhealthy 
 atmosphere, the depressing surroundings, and the 
 pernicious example and teaching of their homes, the 
 evil would in the course of a generation or two 
 almost cure itself. But what more sad than that, 
 without any choice of their own, they should be sub- 
 jected with their weakened constitutions to moral and 
 physical contamination — that, long ere they have 
 entered their teens, they should often be proficients 
 in vice ; and that they should be doomed to grow up 
 but to perpetuate the evils from which they suffer. 
 In the expressive words of Eev. Joseph Cook of 
 Boston, in his Monday Lectures, Fourth Series — 
 Lecture " On Death Traps and City Slums," " They 
 are brought up on the flagstones over which the most 
 impious men and women stagger to ruin. They look 
 out from the cradle into brothels ; they hear the 
 worst of men and women curse each other." 
 
 Another sad aspect of the case is the poverty 
 
 springing from ill-remunerated employment, which 
 
 compels many a respectable family to dwell among, 
 
 or in the immediate neighbourhood of, those contami- 
 
 ^ See Appendix lY. 
 
36 PKOBLEM OF THE CHUECHLESS AND POOR 
 
 nating dens. How many a poor .widow with her 
 young children, working day by day and into the 
 long night at matchbox-making or bootbinding, or 
 some other equally unremunerative employment, and 
 scarce able with the little she makes to keep body 
 and soul together, is forced into a wretched apart- 
 ment in a bad neighbourhood, where dishealth is 
 seldom absent from her little ones, and moral con- 
 taminations abound. Or, take the case of the single 
 worker. How many a poor sempstress working 
 through half of the long night, tired and lonely, is found 
 here dying inch by inch at her daily toil, till death 
 comes a welcome messensrer to free her from her 
 slavish toil. Wonderfully real is the picture which 
 Hood gives of such lonely toilers in his " Song of the 
 Shirt " :— 
 
 " With fingers weary and worn, 
 With eyelids heavy and red, 
 A woman sat in unwomanly rags 
 Plying her needle and thread. 
 
 Stitch, stitch, stitch, 
 Seam and gusset and band, 
 Band and gusset and seam, 
 Till over the buttons I fall asleep, 
 And sew them on in a dream. 
 
 Work, work, work. 
 My labour never flags ; 
 And what are its wages ? A bed of straw, 
 A crust of bread, and rags ; 
 That shattered roof and this naked floor 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 37 
 
 A table — a broken chair, 
 And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank 
 
 For sometimes falling there. 
 Stitch, stitch, stitch. 
 Would that these tones could reach the rich." 
 
 One of the saddest of the calamities that brood 
 over these regions is the vice of prostitution. Its 
 promoters are not by any means confined to the low- 
 est classes of the poor, nor even to those who make 
 no profession of the Christian name ; but it is among 
 the former class that its victims are chiefly found. 
 The conditions of life in the habitations which have 
 been pictured, arising from overcrowding, poverty, and 
 intemperance, are such that many are trained from 
 their early years to a life of shame. Missionaries, 
 Bible-women, and others, who have sounded these 
 depths, could tell sad tales of many a young life 
 hurried by this vice to destruction, and of their fail- 
 ure by all the means at their command to restore 
 the wanderers to the paths of virtue. Without en- 
 tering further on this subject — one of the most im- 
 portant to which philanthropy can devote itself — I 
 shall quote the following sentences regarding it from 
 Dr Guthrie's publication, ' The City, its Sins and 
 Sorrows ' : " Some of us are about to make a new 
 effort for the reclamation of fallen women. As a 
 preliminary step to this enterprise, we have procured 
 accurate statistics of the extent of this great sin and 
 sorrow of our large cities. Of them, I will say 
 
38 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 notliing more than this, that, while they were read, 
 men held down their heads with shame, or held up 
 their hands in horror, or burst into expressions of 
 deep indignation. . . . I do believe that, were 
 the villany and iniquity that are working and fester- 
 ing here and elsewhere in every such large city laid 
 bare before the eyes of public virtue, nothing would 
 restrain its indignation. Men would take the law 
 into their own hands, . . . and they would 
 sweep our cities clean of these panderers of vice and 
 dens of iniquity." 
 
 It is not to be forgotten that these homes of the 
 lapsed are many of. them the breeding-places of fever 
 and of other diseases. Ill - ventilated, dirty, over- 
 crowded, they are often charged with an atmosphere 
 so pestilential, that no one accustomed to breathe the 
 fresh air of heaven could remain in them for an hour. 
 In cases of sickness, the healthy cannot be separated 
 from the sick. All infectious diseases find here the 
 most favourable conditions of propagation. Nor are 
 the diseases which take their rise in these regions con- 
 fined to the homes wliere they originate. Ever and 
 anon they are carried to the homes of the classes 
 above, as if it were a natural retribution for their 
 neglect of their more unfortunate brethren. 
 
 To enter into further details here is, I hope, un- 
 necessary. If more are wanted, they will be found in 
 the Appendix. Enough has been stated to show that, 
 beneath the glitterins surface of our Christian civilis- 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 39 
 
 ation in our large towns, there is a seething mass of 
 misery and irreligion. Nor are the misery and irre- 
 ligion something which has relation only to the un- 
 fortunate subjects of them. Among the classes at the 
 base of our social system, there is a large amount of 
 class-hatred gathering and growing towards those above 
 them in the social scale, who, living in comfort and 
 often in luxury, never lend them a helping hand ; 
 some of whom, indeed, are growing rich out of their 
 miseries, by grinding them down with high house- 
 rents, while they do nothing for their physical and 
 moral comfort ; others are placing numbers of temp- 
 tations within their reach in the shape of public- 
 houses and licensed grocers' establishments which 
 flourish on their misery ; and others are taking 
 advantage of their poverty to sell them nauseous 
 and unhealthy food. 
 
 Need we wonder, that when these wretched creatures 
 venture in open day to look into our fine streets and 
 into the shops in which every article of comfort and 
 luxury is exposed for sale, and when they behold the 
 wealthy and the well-dressed and the happy moving 
 to and fro, and contrast the condition of these with 
 their own, — need we wonder that these outcasts from 
 all the decencies and comforts of civilised life should 
 find growing up within them a spirit of socialism, 
 which is too readily nourished by the vile literature 
 that sometimes finds its way to their homes — such a 
 spirit as seems to be just now pervading the lowest 
 
40 THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 classes of all European cities ; and whicli, maybe, is 
 only waiting some revolutionary crisis to make itself 
 be felt in a general upheaving of the basis of the 
 social fabric in disorganisation, bloodshed, and ruin. 
 How can the upper parts of that fabric be firm and 
 stable, when the foundations are insecure ? How 
 great the danger, when a social earthquake is heaving 
 below ! " Be sure that the spirit of socialism is abroad 
 here as elsewhere. If there are hundreds of thou- 
 sands whom we fail to reach with the Gospel of 
 Christ ; if there are hundreds of thousands who are 
 simply indifferent, there are at least tens of thousands 
 who are being indoctrinated with the so-called gospel 
 of the secularists and red republicans. There is not 
 a large workshop wherein that gospel is not dis- 
 cussed, or where it has not its apostles. There are 
 thousands of homes wliere the secularist press has 
 taken the place of the Family Bible. You have but 
 to know how many tons of such literature are de- 
 spatched daily from the headquarters of the propa- 
 ganda to measure the extent to which our manufac- 
 turing towns — in England especially — are being 
 deluged with its teaching." — From " Home Missions," 
 being the substance of an admirable and eloquent 
 address delivered by Dr Macleod of Park Church, 
 Glasgow, in moving the adoption of the Home Mission 
 Eeport at Assembly 1883. 
 
41 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRINCIPAL CAUSES OF THE PRESENT 
 CONDITION OF THE LAPSED POPULATION. 
 
 Here we tread on difficult ground. In considering 
 what affects the condition of this large class, causes 
 and effects so merge into each other, that we are 
 often in danger of confounding the two. We in- 
 vestigate some cause of spiritual destitution, or of 
 the miserable physical and moral condition of many 
 of the Churchless, and discover that which is a cause 
 in some cases to be an effect in others. Or, we find 
 some evident cause to be but one of a chain, linking 
 together two or more intimately bearing on each 
 other. I shall, therefore, while pointing out some 
 of the most evident causes of the present condition 
 of things, consider wherein these causes often become 
 effects resulting from some other causes tending to 
 the deterioration of the classes referred to. 
 
 No one who has any acquaintance with this class 
 of our population can have any difficulty in assign- 
 ing intemperance as one of the main causes of the 
 poverty, misery, and degradation of our outcast 
 
42 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 populations.^ An experienced visitor can almost at 
 a glance, on entering a room in the poorer districts 
 of a town, discern whether one or more of its in- 
 mates is the victim of intoxication. If he sees 
 disorder, dirt, scanty and broken furniture, an air 
 of utter discomfort, he can almost be sure that the 
 cause of such wretchedness is to be traced to intem- 
 perance. In visiting these slums of our large cities, 
 and becoming acquainted with the condition of the 
 homes and their inmates, one is amazed at the traces 
 of intemperance he finds on every side. Were it 
 possible to abolish every public-house, that with its 
 open door is a source of constant temptation to the 
 Churchless poor, and shut up every other means of 
 access to ardent spirits and other intoxicating drinks, 
 it may be safely affirmed that three-fourths of the 
 misery and crime of these abodes would disappear ; 
 health and happiness would hold their beneficent 
 sway where fever and misery now brood : every 
 Christian agency employed for their amelioration 
 would have tenfold more success ; the desolate places 
 now darkened by the shadow of irreligion and de- 
 spair would be lighted up with the sunshine of 
 comfort and love and joy. It has been already 
 stated what numbers of once happy, respectable, and 
 well-to-do families sink through the power of in- 
 temperance into this AVoeland, from which, unless by 
 almost superhuman efforts of Christian benevolence, 
 
 ^ See Appendix V. 
 
IN OUR LAEGE TOWXS. 43 
 
 they are never destined to rise. But for intemper- 
 ance, there would be very few accessions to the 
 class of the lapsed ; and many of those already 
 down could be easily raised. It is the great barrier 
 to the success of evangelical effort ; it is a moral 
 disease which with the drunkard's surroundings can 
 hardly be cured ; it is a vice which is continually 
 fed by the temptations which the apathy of the 
 public has placed in the poor man's way. 
 
 But on the other hand, intemperance is not only 
 a cause of much of the misery of the Churchless and 
 poor ; it is also an effect springing from many cir- 
 cumstances in their external condition. A family 
 driven through long sickness or other misfortune to 
 live in some poor locality, and to occupy, from in- 
 ability to pay rent, a small and uncomfortable apart- 
 ment into which are crowded all the members of 
 the household, and in which impure air and depress- 
 ing outward circumstances dull the spirits and ex- 
 cite a craving for stimulants — that family has a 
 strong temptation to indulge in intoxicating drink. 
 When the head of the house can find no comfort 
 in his home — when everything about him reminds 
 liim of his present misery, in contrast, it may 
 be, with the happy circumstances of his former 
 lot — when he finds just at his very door a public- 
 house with .flaring lights in the windows and clean 
 passages and luxuriantly furnished rooms where he 
 may lounge and drink and " remember his misery no 
 
H PROBLEM OF TUE CHUECHLESS AND POOR 
 
 more," is it any wonder that he should be tempted 
 again and again within that fatal trap, till the habit 
 of drinking is established, and he thinks only of 
 pandering to his fatal vice ? Or, is it any less 
 wonder that his poor wife, deprived night after night 
 of her husband's society, scarce able to obtain from 
 him at the week's end as large a pittance of his 
 wages as will keep herself and her children alive, 
 should in despair take to the bottle, and pawn article 
 after article for that drink which makes her happy 
 for a time and relieves her from the agony of per- 
 petual despair ? How many among those that re- 
 gard those poor miserable sinners with cold pity, 
 and like the Priest and the Levite with the 
 wounded Jew, pass them by on the other side ; how 
 many that themselves enjoy the pure air of heaven 
 and every comfort that wealth and society can afford, 
 would, if reduced to the circumstances of thousands 
 of the labouring poor, escape the temptations that 
 are spread so thickly in their path ? It is easy to 
 turn up the whites of one's eyes and talk with 
 horror of the state of society at the base of the 
 social fabric ; and, looking at their vicious counte- 
 nances and tattered garments, to thank God we are 
 not like these : but why has God made you, my 
 reader, to differ from them ? AVhy has He given 
 you all the comforts of home — your easy-chair to 
 recline in when weary ; your happy family to relieve 
 your weariness with their smiles ; your glass of wine 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 45 
 
 to cheer your heart ; your healthy busiuess to brace 
 your mind and give the required excitement to your 
 spirits; and your fellow -man, perhaps in the next 
 back street, to lead a life of wretchedness and de- 
 spair — to face temptations which he cannot possibly 
 resist, and to spend a wasted and miserable exist- 
 ence ? Why, but that you may have the privilege 
 of ministering to his wants — of helping to raise him 
 out of the mire — of extending to him the hand of 
 Christian sympathy and love. 
 
 Again, overcrowding is another of the special 
 causes from which much of the misery and the vice 
 of the lapsed populations spring. But while it is a 
 cause, it is also, like intemperance, an effect, which 
 results from the poverty of the inmates and the high 
 rents they have to pay for their wretched homes. 
 No one would live in an unhealthy crowded apart- 
 ment who could do otherwise. No one would con- 
 sent to pay a high rent for a habitation unlit for a 
 pig, that, for an equal or smaller rent, could obtain 
 a decent home. But what makes property of this 
 kind so profitable is, that it can be bought at a 
 cheap rate, as few care to make profits from such a 
 source, and that high rents can be obtained by its 
 subdivision into small apartments in which those 
 who cannot afford better are forced to live. Here, 
 we have in these overcrowded habitations the origin 
 and cause of much of the wretchedness and degrada- 
 tion that exist among the poorest of the poor. A 
 
4G ruOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AXD POOR 
 
 single family is unable to maintain itself and pay 
 the high rent at which these hovels are let, and so 
 they take in one or more lodgers to eke out their 
 scanty living. When, as generally happens, there is 
 but one room for all — for father and mother, chil- 
 dren of different ages of both sexes, and for the grown- 
 up lodgers — when from six to twelve are crowded 
 into a small apartment in which not more than a 
 couple could comfortably live, it needs no great 
 stretch of imagination to conceive the fearful evils 
 that must flow from the arrangement. The crowd- 
 ing of a number of persons into a low ill-ventilated 
 apartment must have a depressing influence on the 
 health and spirits, must create a craving for stimu- 
 lants and tend to the degradation of the moral 
 character. Children brought up under these in- 
 fluences cannot be either physically or morally 
 healthy. It is impossible that the decencies of life 
 can be observed. Hardening and degrading in- 
 fluences are at work on the children from the very 
 time of their entrance into the world. It must not 
 be supposed that this overcrowding, with its atten- 
 dant evils, is, in the lowest and most destitute 
 localities, an exceptional thing. All who have 
 sounded the depths of these slums have but one 
 tale to tell of its frequency and desolating effects.^ 
 Eesulting itself from poverty, overcrowding has a con- 
 stant tendency to perpetuate it. It weakens the physi- 
 
 ' See for instances and effects of tliis, Appendi.x VI. 
 
IX OUR LAKGE TOWNS. 47 
 
 cal and degrades the moral constitution. It paralyses 
 the energies of the grown-up men and women in the 
 household. It breeds fever and other diseases, and 
 in many cases, lays the foundation of evils too awful 
 to mention. Girls brought up under such influences 
 are often found entering at an early age on a life of 
 shame. Parents under its influence have been 
 known to become so degraded as to encourage their 
 children in prostitution for the sake of the gain it 
 brings. It is impossible to contemplate the evils 
 that flow from overcrowding without a shudder. 
 
 Another cause of the poverty and misery of the 
 lowest classes in our towns' populations is want of 
 remunerative work} Though there are many that 
 but for their vicious and degraded habits might 
 obtain regular and well-paid work, there are multi- 
 tudes of others, especially widows with young 
 families, and single women, that can hardly obtain 
 any work at all, or only such as by incessant and 
 killing labour is hardly enough to keep body and 
 soul together. It is a sad reflection on our Christian 
 civilisation, that, while the thousands and tens of 
 thousands of the upper and middle classes are enjoy- 
 ing their comforts and their luxuries with only 
 healthy labour, or with such gentle exercise of mind 
 and body as promotes their comfort and happiness, 
 there are many in these destitute localities ground 
 down to the dust by unremunerative labour, pining 
 
 ' See Appendix YII. 
 
48 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCH LESS AND POOR 
 
 out their short lives in daily slavery and pain. 
 Much there may be in some of these wretched 
 abodes to shock the senses and repel the delicate 
 sensibilities of refined men and women, but there is 
 surely also much to excite the deepest Christian 
 sympathies, and call forth the active benevolence, 
 of the Christian puljlic. The history of one such 
 poor family struggling hard against the inroads of 
 poverty, wasting their strength in almost super- 
 human efforts to keep the wolf from the door — of 
 their sighs and groans — of the dying off of the 
 weaker, till, it may be, only one or two of the 
 workers are left, weary and heart-broken, and sigh- 
 ing for the rest of the grave, — this might well bring 
 tears from the hardest heart and melt the most 
 avaricious into pity. 
 
 A farther cause of the misery of this class — one 
 of the many demons that prey upon them — is the 
 adulterated and unhealthy provisions their iwverty 
 forces them to ^purchase. While their poverty causes 
 them to submit to many degrading employments to 
 make a living, it compels them also to partake of 
 much food that is innutritions and nauseous. When 
 at any time they are able to obtain something better 
 and more nourishing than usual, their ignorance of 
 cooking prevents their obtaining the proper nourish- 
 ment from it. It is easy to descant on the wasteful- 
 ness of many of the poor, but that is often more their 
 misfortune than their fault. Their incomes are often 
 
IN OUR LAKGE TOWNS. 49 
 
 uncertain ; they have seldom or never the prospect of 
 laying aside a portion of their earnings for old age. 
 What they make by their grinding labour is immedi- 
 ately spent ; and it is easy to see how, even with the 
 best intentions, their scanty pittance which has to be 
 applied to many uses, fails to be applied in the most 
 economical way. ISTo doubt, simple, pure, and nour- 
 ishing food could often be provided at smaller expense, 
 but tlie bodily system that has been drugged with 
 impure air, and taxed to the utmost by grinding 
 labour, craves for something that is tasty and stimu- 
 lating, which is hastily devoured in an ill-cooked 
 state. But, as a rule, it is only the worst of the 
 higher -class provisions that can ever reach the poor 
 at the price they can afford to pay — that which from 
 its unwholesomeness or adulteration the classes above 
 them disdain. Unhealthy and ill-cooked food is, 
 under present conditions, at once a necessity and a 
 curse for the poor — a necessity springing from their 
 poverty, and a curse because, in combination with 
 other causes already mentioned, it weakens the bodily 
 and injures the spiritual constitution. 
 
 The paioishoij may here be noticed as one of the 
 demons preying upon the poor, and a powerful cause 
 of the misery they suffer. Whatever its uses may 
 be (and it is not here denied that, under a well-regu- 
 lated system, it may be attended with some advantage 
 to certain classes of the poor), its abuse is to many 
 
 D 
 
50 niOBLEM OF THE CHUECHLESS AND POOR 
 
 of theiu a cause of misery aud ruin. To the vicious 
 and the improvident, it is a constant source of temp- 
 tation. These are wl'U aware that for any decent 
 article of clothing or furniture, they can raise through 
 the pawnshop a certain amount of money to relieve 
 present necessities ; and the practice once established 
 of taking goods to be pledged, a rush is made at every 
 household pinch, till often everything of the slightest 
 value is landed in this omnivorous deposit. Kot 
 only the struggling family bowed down with afflic- 
 tion, but the drunken father or mother also, find in 
 these the means of raising money ; and as long as a 
 penny can be raised, everything is carried away to 
 pawn till scarce anything but the bare walls is left. 
 Many a sad story could be told of one member of the 
 household, in the other's absence, robbing the house of 
 everything valuable, carrying it to the pawnshop, and 
 spending the proceeds on maddening drink. An 
 industrious father returns home on Saturday night to 
 find his Sunday's coat or his Family Bible pledged for 
 money to purchase drink, and his wife and the 
 mother of his children reeling on the floor. Or the 
 poor housewife, toiling day by day to keep her house 
 clean and her children tidy, has gone out on some 
 necessary errand to find on her return that her 
 drunken husband has been there and carried off to 
 pledge for drink some marriage gift wliicli she had 
 hoped to retain as an heirloom in the family, and she 
 
IN OUli LARGE TOWNS. 51 
 
 almost breaks her heart over the loss. But for the 
 existence of this source of temptation, there would 
 be far less lapsing from church attendance and far 
 more thrift among the poor. The following graphic 
 account of the evils of the pawnshop from the per- 
 sonal observation of a town's minister appeared in 
 one of the early numbers of the parish magazine 
 ' Life and Work ' : " The evils of the pawnshop are 
 not merely pictorial. Its degrading influence can be 
 formulated, distinctly stated, and easily understood. 
 It tempts the poor to anticipate income ; and if bor- 
 rowing in any sense dulls the edge of industry, to 
 borrow on the capital of future labour takes the 
 spring of hope out of industrial effort. It is a means 
 of powerful support to the public-house. But for the 
 pawnshop, there would be a deal of enforced absti- 
 nence among the poor ; and though this is not a dis- 
 tinguished virtue, it is vastly better than the indul- 
 gence to which the institution directly ministers. . . . 
 It takes away from life the restraining influence of 
 healthy shame. It is with a fluttering heart and 
 downcast look that any one enters a pawnshop for 
 the first time. But the first blush is always the 
 deepest, and a few visits remove it altogether, and 
 leave life without one of its strongest guards. It 
 tempts the idle to steal, and the criminal to acts of 
 violence, in its ready market for all kinds of plunder. 
 It defeats the minister of the Gospel in his efforts to 
 
52 THE CHURCHLESS AXD POOR IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 bring the poor, with their limited kuowleilge and weak 
 wills, under the gospel of light and life and self- 
 denial."' 
 
 ^ For an excellent account of the evils of the pawnshop, see arti- 
 cle entitled, "The Poor Man's Banker," by John lloUingshead, in 
 'Good Words' for 1864, p. 179 ; as also, for the other side of the 
 question, the statement of a committee of pawnbrokers at p. 359, 
 with Mr HolUngshead's reply to tlie same. 
 
53 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 REMEDIAL MEASURES. SECULAR — (a) BY THE STATE. 
 
 The remarks already made on the condition of the 
 lapsed and the causes of that condition will be suffi- 
 cient, it is hoped, to show the existence among the 
 classes at the base of the social pyramid of a wretch- 
 edness and irreligion which may make us ashamed of 
 our selfishness, and of a growing spirit of revolution 
 which, if not soon checked, may well make us tremble 
 for the future of our country. The state of matters 
 existing side by side with our high civilisation is 
 indeed deplorable, but does it admit of no remedy ? 
 To doubt this would make us despair of the grace of 
 God and of the power of the Gospel. Are Christian 
 Churches, is a Christian State, appalled at the evils 
 and dangers, to settle on their lees, and attempt to 
 do nothing because they cannot all at once do every- 
 thing ? Not so do men act when they see a noble 
 vessel stranded on some rock near the shore, and 
 hear the wild wail of the crew and passengers for 
 help. The lifeboat may not be able to take off all 
 
54 rivOBLEM OF THE CHUKCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 the passengers ere the ship break up, but it is in- 
 stantly manned by a daring crew, who, at the risk of 
 their lives, push out into the boiling waves,, and by 
 almost superhuman efforts save a few from a watery 
 grave. They would have gladly saved all, but, in 
 default of that, they rejoice that they have been able 
 to save some. So the case of the Churchlcss and poor 
 is too urgent, time is too preciou.s for our waiting 
 and planning till some great and comprehensive 
 scheme can be carried out which shall bring the 
 whole outcast population within its scope. Mean- 
 while, through the apathy of those on wliom primarily 
 devolves the duty of coming to their help, the wail 
 of agony from thousands of our fellow-creatures con- 
 tinues to resound through those desolate regions; 
 multitudes, whose life might have been made a bless- 
 ing to themselves and to the State, are wearing out a 
 useless and wretched earthly existence ; children are 
 brought into the world only in large numbers to be 
 swept off by neglect or disease, or, if they grow up, 
 to become like their parents vicious and degraded ; 
 and the reproach against our Christian civilisation is 
 still gathering in force. We need not despair of a 
 future and full solution of this great problem, but 
 until it is taken up in earnest by the Churches and 
 by politicians earnest about their country's good ; 
 until it is made a battle-cry at parliamentary elec- 
 tions, and the subject of constant discussion in our 
 Church Courts ; until, in a word, the conscience of 
 
IN OUK LARGE TOWNS. 55 
 
 the country is fully roused, no drastic remediaLle 
 measures are likely to be applied. 
 
 In seeking for a solution or solutions of this 
 problem, we must take into account man's complex 
 condition and relations, both material and spiritual. 
 We find in all human experience that man's material 
 and spiritual natures act and react on each other, and 
 that no real improvement in his condition is possible 
 without taking both the one and the other fully into 
 consideration. We have already found that various 
 causes, some more, and others less, important, conduce 
 to the poverty, misery, and degradation of the out- 
 cast populations. And as the causes are manifold, 
 so must be the remedies. There are, it is true, 
 two or three great remedial measures that must 
 be applied, ere anything like a full solution of the 
 problem can be obtained; but, under each of these, 
 there are several of a subordinate character, all having 
 the same aim, and which may work together towards 
 the same result. 
 
 Experience teaches, that in a great many cases 
 physical causes are a great hindrance to the opera- 
 tion of spiritual remedies, and that, before spiritual 
 agencies can have due effect, these physical hind- 
 rances must be taken out of the way. How little, for 
 instance, can the offer of the Gospel benefit a starv- 
 ing man till you can first satisfy his hunger ! How 
 can you expect the gaunt mother, clad in rags and 
 occupying a wretched home, to listen to your spiritual 
 
56 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 counsels with any real profit, till you have first re- 
 lieved the awful pressure of worhlly work or carking 
 care that is weighing her soul to the dust ? Or how 
 can you expect religion to flourish in a home that is 
 crowded with human beings, covered witli filth, and 
 contaminated by bad air ? The Great Physician, 
 we know, ministered often to temporal wants as an 
 opening to the healing of the soul. Hence, before 
 spiritual agencies can have their due weight in rais- 
 ing those fallen multitudes, certain hindrances to 
 their due efficacy must be removed. The Word of 
 God, if it is to effect a great change among such, 
 must have " free course " ; devoted men and women, 
 going with the Word of Life to these perishing out- 
 casts, must not have to fight the demons of filth and 
 overcrowding, and public-house temptations in addi- 
 tion to the ordinary obstacles which the natural 
 heart presents to the truth. We must, therefore, 
 look to the State, as embodied in the Government 
 of the day, to do its duty by these outcast popula- 
 tions. It must not be allowed to forget that the 
 compact between it and the Church implies not only 
 certain advantages to each, but reciprocal duties to 
 be performed, Tlie Church established, for the 
 reasons given in the Introduction, has failed in 
 bringing in the great majority of the outcast poor 
 within her fold ; but has not the State equally 
 failed in its duty to these ? Though the Church 
 is by far the cheapest agent of reformation, and 
 
IN OUE LARGE TOWNS. 67 
 
 though, as was borne witness to by a committee of 
 the House of Commons in 1834, "no institution in 
 their belief ever existed which, at so little cost, has 
 accomplished so much good," yet the State has 
 neither supplied the Church with the means of over- 
 taking the work of evangelising the lapsed, nor 
 fully removed those hindrances which make her full 
 success possible. Of political reforms we have heard 
 abundance ; the rights of the upper and middle 
 classes have been respected and their peculiar temp- 
 tations taken out of the way ; but why has a 
 paternal Government so long allowed such a state 
 of things at the base of society as we have faintly 
 described to exist ? Why has it allowed so much 
 misery and vice to fester among the poorest and 
 most helpless of its subjects without lending them a 
 helping hand ? "Wliy has it allowed thousands and 
 tens of thousands to be subject to physical condi- 
 tions which make comfort and good citizenship im- 
 possible, punished them for breaking the law, and 
 multiplied the temptations that bring about their 
 punishment;^ and permitted, without some great 
 remedial measures, a spirit of socialism to exist and 
 gather force among the lowest of these abject popu- 
 lations ? Still worse, what shall we say of a Chris- 
 tian Government that for generations has been con- 
 
 ^ In the words of Dr Guthrie, ' Plea for Ragged Schools,' " It has 
 left them to be tempted to crime, and then punished them for its 
 commission. " 
 
58 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 tent to draw a large part of its revenue from the 
 vices of the people, without any earnest attempt to 
 remove the temptations to those vices ? It has been 
 gratifying to know how, once and again, the State 
 has interfered to protect those above this class in 
 social rank who, from their position or circumstances, 
 were unable to protect themselves. Beneficent laws 
 have been passed for the protection of females and 
 children in manufactories, of miners in mines, and 
 of our hardy seamen at sea. And when it was 
 found that gambling and lotteries were doing injury 
 to the upper and middle classes, they were put down. 
 But there are in our large towns and mining and 
 manufacturing villages thousands of human beings 
 equally, if not more, helpless to protect tliemselves 
 — fathers, the victims of strong drink, to which 
 innumerable temptations are allowed to remain ; 
 mothers struggling with poverty and dying ere their 
 prime ; little children born into the world with no 
 chance in life — all left to perish or fight the demons 
 that oppress them as best they may. Yet how little 
 has been done by Government to remove the tempta- 
 tions and miseries of the poor. If cruelty is exer- 
 cised towards the beasts of burden, it punishes the 
 perpetrators thereof ; but thousands of human abodes 
 are allowed to accumulate filth and breed fever, to 
 become dens of vice and misery, and yet, year after 
 year, the law allows this state of things to go on 
 without interference. The public-houses, the low 
 
IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 59 
 
 tippling-sbops, the licensed grocers' establishments in 
 the poorest localities, are killing off their victims 
 year by year, inflicting ruin and misery on many 
 homes, bringing pauperism, irreligion, and untimely 
 deaths, into those fever dens.^ 
 
 In making these charges, I am not ignorant of the 
 benevolent attempt to remedy some of the evils of 
 our overcrowded localities, by the Artisans' Dwellings 
 Act, originated and carried through by one of the 
 most high - minded of our' statesmen, nor of the 
 amendments to said Act which experience has sug- 
 gested to adapt it better to the purpose in view ; 
 nor of several other Acts, some of them local, in- 
 tended to serve a similar purpose.^ So far as re- 
 spects the class above the most degraded in our large 
 towns, this Act has been an almost unmixed bless- 
 ing wherever it has been introduced. It applies to 
 large areas that may be certified as unhealthy, and 
 requires that the buildings shall be taken down and 
 replaced by others to contain as many inhabitants as 
 the old. These new houses, however, are suited to, 
 and likely to be' occupied by, a better class of the 
 population than those that vacated the old. These 
 last must find new homes as best they may, and thus 
 often overcrowd the hovels that are left. " It is 
 notorious," says the writer of that intensely graphic 
 paper, ' The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,' " that the 
 
 1 See Appendix T. - See Appendix YIII. 
 
GO PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Artisans' Dwellings Act has, in some respects, made 
 matters worse for them. Large spaces have been 
 cleared of fever-breeding rookeries to make way for 
 the building of decent habitations, but the rents of 
 these are far beyond the means of the abject poor. 
 They are driven to crowd more closely together in 
 the few stifling places still left to them ; and so 
 Dives makes a greater harvest out of their misery, 
 buying up property condemned as unfit for human 
 habitation, and turning it into a gold-mine because 
 the poor must have shelter somewhere, even though 
 it be the shelter of a living tomb." Again, though 
 the larger areas of the slums may be cleared out by 
 the operation of this Act, there are in all our large 
 towns smaller areas scattered here and there, often 
 amid the habitations of a better - class population, 
 to which the Act would not extend. 
 
 But has not the Education Act, by which each 
 child of even the very poorest must be educated, 
 shown the interest of the State in the wellbeing of 
 the lapsed populations ? If the moral sense is equally 
 trained with the intellect, and the educated have the 
 opportunity of turning their acquirements to good 
 account, then education is a gi'eat blessing. But it 
 is a mistake to think that education, however uni- 
 versal among the young, will remedy all the evils 
 that have been here pointed out. No doubt, it will 
 help somewhat. In some cases, it will be a stimulus 
 to the young to raise themselves out of the mire, and 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 61 
 
 to bear themselves respectably in the world. But in 
 a good many cases, unless some means are taken to 
 j)reserve the young so educated from the contamina- 
 tion of their homes and surroundings, it will but 
 intensify the evil it is intended to cure. To train 
 their intellects, and then relegate them to their 
 old haunts, with all the temptations that surround 
 them, is often but to make them greater adepts in 
 crime. Then, think what, to these poor children, must 
 be the effect of our wretched religious differences 
 which have eliminated all positive religious teaching 
 from the ordinary work of the school, and relegated 
 it to an hour or half-hour before the ordinary school- 
 work of each day. To those who enjoy the blessing 
 of positive religious instruction at home, it may not 
 matter so much ; but what to these poor waifs can 
 be the meaning of a half-hour's separate religious 
 instruction when they come to obtain it, but that 
 religion is some unnatural excrescence which in their 
 ordinary work they are meant to avoid ? Some hope- 
 ful results may be expected from the universal educa- 
 tion of the children of the poorest classes, but as to 
 the dream of some educational enthusiasts that it will 
 prove a panacea for the evils that affect that class, I 
 fear it will be found a complete delusion. " As for 
 the dream," says Hugh Miller, in .speaking of tlie 
 effects of education, " that there is to be some extra- 
 ordinary elevation of the general platform of the 
 human race, it is simply the hallucination of the 
 
G2 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 age — the world's present alchemical expedient for 
 converting farthings into guineas simply by dint of 
 scouring." In fact, to a certain extent, the com- 
 pulsory education of these waifs, instead of remedy- 
 ing the evils with which the lapsed classes have to 
 contend, only intensifies them. Many a poor family 
 working together from morning till night were able 
 among them to make such a living as kept them from 
 utter want.^ The deft little fingers of the children 
 helped to swell the common store, and to provide 
 them with clothing and bread. But now, several of 
 the bread-winners are taken away to school, and the 
 pressure on the remainder becomes all the more severe. 
 And not only so, those who go to school must have 
 better clothing than their former rags, and pay the 
 weekly amount of school-fees ; and so, with the same 
 number of mouths to feed, and better clothing to pro- 
 cure for her children, and, in many cases also, school- 
 fees to pay, while the common means of obtaining a 
 livelihood are diminished, there is often such a strain 
 on the poor mother as brings her to an early grave. 
 If the State insists on the education of these children, 
 as doubtless it ought, there ought in some way or 
 another to be provided the means of clothing and 
 feeding them, as long as they are receiving education, 
 and then the Sta^e ought to see that their education 
 can be turned to profitable account. 
 
 Wherein, farther, may the State fulfil its duty to 
 
 ' See Appendix YII. 
 
IN OUR LAECxE TOWNS. 63 
 
 the unfortunate class of the lapsed and poor ? These 
 are often, as has been already pointed out, the victims 
 of a want of duty on the part of the owners of the 
 tenements they inhabit. The rents charged for the 
 very poorest rooms are such as ought to provide the 
 poor with decent homes. As regards tlie charging of 
 high rents for these tenements, it may be argued that, 
 like other property, the rental must depend on the 
 relations of supply and demand. Were the demand 
 for this class of habitations not so great, the rents 
 would naturally be less. Has not every man, it may 
 be asked, a right to take for his property what he can 
 get ? Yes. But property has its duties as well as its 
 rights. No proprietor of these dwellings, receiving 
 for them a larger percentage of rent on the original 
 cost than any other kind of property, has a right, 
 under these circumstances, to let for human dwellings 
 hovels often worse than pigsties. For the rent he 
 charges, he is bound to give fair value, and to see that 
 the rooms he lets are put and kept in such a condition 
 as not to be injurious to the physical and moral con- 
 stitution of the inmates. Whosoever lets such hovels 
 to human tenants is morally, and ought to be made 
 civilly, responsible for the consequences. It would 
 be unwise on the part of any Government to interfere 
 with the economic relations of supply and demand in 
 such a way as to regulate the rents that are to be 
 paid for these tenements ; but, by the institution of 
 suitable inspection, and by the stricter enforcement 
 
G4 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 of the sanitary laws already in existence, the State 
 could see that all the apartments for which rents are 
 charged are fit for human habitation — that the house 
 proprietors do their duty to their tenants, as well as 
 that the tenants do theirs, in keeping their houses 
 ordinarily clean. Th^ State can see that every house 
 or room that is let for human habitation has access 
 to the pure air and light of heaven ; and can prevent 
 the lettinof of those that are wantinfj in the ele- 
 ments of health. Or, when a house becomes un- 
 healthy or ruinous — not merely blocks of buildings, 
 but single houses — so as to be no longer fit for 
 hujnan habitation, the State can order it to be shut 
 up and rebuilt at the owner's expense, or sold at its 
 real value to those willing to rebuild. We have 
 inspectors of mines and railways, and other concerns 
 that may endanger public safety. Why should we 
 not have Government inspectors to watch over these 
 habitations and prevent them from becoming injurious 
 to the moral and physical health of the inhabitants, 
 and a danger to the State ? 
 
 But it may be said. What is the use of making 
 these rooms comfortable and olean for the inmates, 
 when after a few weeks, perhaps, every pane in the 
 windows will be broken, and the walls and floors 
 covered with filth ? But why is this so, but just 
 that the inmates know they can treat their abodes as 
 they please with impunity provided they pay the 
 rent ? But a law that dealt even-handed with pro- 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 65 
 
 prietor and tenant, that made both alike responsible 
 for the preservation and cleanliness of the homes, 
 wovild do much for the material and moral reforma- 
 tion of the inmates. If their abodes were kept as 
 clean as they might — if each of them was accessible 
 to the pure air of heaven, and no overcrowding was 
 permitted to vitiate the air and contaminate the morals 
 of the inmates — a great step would be taken in the 
 elevation of the poor. The State has surely a right 
 to see that the habitations of the people are not kept 
 as fever-dens, or as places of moral contamination to 
 breed disease and vice in many a neighbourhood. 
 
 Again, we have seen that one of the chief causes, 
 if not the very chief, of the degradation of the lapsed 
 in our large towns is the vice of intemperance. Much 
 of this arises from the craving for stimulants excited 
 by the confined air and filthy condition of many of 
 their homes, joined to the extraordinary facilities 
 which are put in their way for gratifying that crav- 
 ing by intoxicating drink. Select the most wretched 
 areas of our large towns, and you will find as a rule 
 that the more wretched the tenements, the larger is 
 the number of licensed houses for the sale of ardent 
 spirits. All these are thriving on the vices of the 
 poor — a constant source of temptation to the working 
 man. Now, why has the State, which is supposed to 
 have a paternal interest in the welfare of its subjects, 
 allowed such a multiplication of those sources of 
 pauperism, misery, and crime, to the working man ? 
 
 £ 
 
G6 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Why, but that these houses, or rather the drink con- 
 sumed in them, yield a large revenue to tlie Crown ? 
 But this is a policy which can be justified on the 
 ground neither of justice, economy, nor of the well- 
 being of the body politic. The policy which draws a 
 large revenue out of the vices of the people cannot 
 be a healthy one. That policy which draws large 
 sums from the earnings of the spendthrift working 
 man to spend it on officers to keep him in order and 
 on prisons to confine him, cannot in the long-run be 
 a profitable one. How severe a rebuke to a Christian 
 State like ours was the noble reply of the Emperor 
 of China to those who were attempting to introduce 
 foreign opium into his country • — " I will never consent 
 to raise my revenue out of the ruin and vices of my 
 people." At the door of the State lies much of the 
 guilt of allowing that awful condition of the sunken 
 population which I have faintly attempted to describe. 
 Reduce the number of the public-houses by at least 
 75 per cent; withdraw from the grocers in these 
 localities their whisky licences, giving such compensa- 
 tion as may be deemed reasonable ; make the pub- 
 lican, as suggested by Dr Guthrie,^ on whose premises 
 it has been proved the head of the family has got the 
 drink, responsible for the consequences that flowed 
 from his intoxication to himself and his family ; make 
 it the publican's interest to keep his customers sober, 
 instead of often, as now, to drug them with intoxicating 
 ^ See Appendi.v IX. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 67 
 
 drinks, and we should have thousands of happy homes 
 where vice and misery and death now reign. 
 
 But how shall the Government be compensated 
 for the loss of so large an income drawn from the 
 vices of the poor ? Remove, it is answered, the 
 temptations to drunkenness from the labouring poor ; 
 encourage them to thrift and sobriety, and they will, 
 by sober industry and increased wages, be able to 
 purchase more taxable commodities of a useful sort ; 
 and, by living peaceably and honestly, save the State 
 a large expenditure on police and criminal prosecu- 
 tions. But for this horrid vice, pauperism and crime 
 would be reduced to their narrowest limits ; comfort 
 and contentment would take the place of misery and 
 treason. If, as statistics clearly prove,^ intemperance 
 is responsible for the greatest part of the thieving, 
 quarrelling, wife-beating, and murders which bulk so 
 largely in our police reports, then, remove the temp- 
 tations to it, make it difficult, almost impossible, for 
 the working man to become its victim, and the re- 
 sources of the country will multiply, the expendi- 
 ture on criminal establishments and for lunacy and 
 pauperism will sensibly diminish ; and in course of 
 time the Government revenue, drawn not from the 
 vices but from the sober industry of the people, will 
 sensibly increase. " Oh," but we are told, " an attempt 
 by the State to put down drunkenness to that extent 
 would be an unwarrantable interference with the 
 ^ See Appendix V. 
 
68 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 liberty of the subject ! Why should not the poorest 
 of the working men have the same right to indulge 
 their appetite as the upper classes have without re- 
 straint ? AVhy deny to the one that which you freely 
 give to the other ? " Most abuses which reijuire to 
 be put down with a strong hand are attempted to be 
 propped up by such arguments as these. But the 
 question comes to be, Is the indulgence in intoxi- 
 cating drinks a necessity to the working man, or is it 
 not ? Does it on the whole do him more good or 
 harm ? Has he the same power of self-protection, 
 the same amount of self-restraint, as those high 
 above him in the scale of life ? To those who con- 
 sider the matter dispassionately — to those who are 
 acquainted with the eflects produced by drunkenness 
 in the slums and fever - dens of our large towns, 
 these questions will be easily answered. Those who 
 are placed in the higher ranks of life have far fewer 
 temptations to intoxicating drink, and far less chance, 
 even when overcome by temptation, of ruining them- 
 selves and their families by drink. With pure air, 
 plenty of home comforts, abundant means of amuse- 
 ment and self-culture, they have not the same craving 
 after stimulants, nor the same want of self-restraint, 
 as the man who breathes the vitiated air of a confined 
 apartment, who has no comforts and no enjoyments 
 at home, and finds, as he returns home with his wages 
 on Saturday night, a source of temptation in many a 
 public-house by the way to lead him to ruin. For 
 
IN OUH LARGE TOWNS. 69 
 
 the well-to-do man to spend a few shillings, or even 
 pounds, in drink may not imply any diminution of 
 his own comforts or those of his family ; but for the 
 hard-working man to spend as much in self-indulg- 
 ence implies poverty, misery, perhaps ruin, to himself 
 and his household. The better classes can take care 
 of themselves ; the very poorest cannot. Wliat is 
 liberty, if it is only liberty to go to ruin ? What 
 evil is there in withdrawing the sources of temptation 
 from the working man, if, while it does not take away 
 from him any real pleasure or hinder in any way his 
 advancement in life, it only deprives him of that 
 which is fatal to his worldly prosperity, comfort, and 
 peace ? Never was anything more out of place than 
 the sneer about making people sober by Act of Par- 
 liament. No Act of Parliament will of itself make 
 people sober, any more than it will make them 
 honest or industrious ; but it can do much, very 
 much, in taking away hindrances and temptations, 
 or in punishing those who cast temptations in others' 
 way. Along with positive agencies, which can act 
 on the human will and train to industry and self- 
 respect. Acts of Parliament can do much in training 
 a virtuous, sober, and law - obeying people. This 
 temperance question, viewed in its relation to the 
 wellbeing of the State, and to the reforming powers 
 of the State, is one of the most important with 
 which any Government can deal ; and that Govern- 
 ment which, trusting to the natural expansiveness of 
 
70 PROBLEM OF THE CHUKCIILESS AND TOOR 
 
 a healthy fiscal system, and fearless of tlie influence 
 of vested interests in the sale of that which is 
 spreading havoc and ruin among the people, shall 
 legislate for tlie securing the greatest amount of tem- 
 perance, especially in the districts where the popula- 
 tion is most densely crowded, will descend to posterity 
 as the most beneficent of tliis generation. 
 
 By the removal of these two great hindrances to 
 the work of the Churches among the outcast poor, 
 the State will have done much to help in the solu- 
 tion of the problem of their complete amelioration. 
 But, in addition to the preventive agencies above 
 referred to, it is worthy of consideration how far it 
 might go in the way of providing or encouraging 
 positive means for helping in the cure of tlie physical 
 evils that oppress the poor. For instance, encour- 
 agement might be given to Eagged, as distinct from 
 Industrial Schools, by restoring the capitation grant 
 withdrawn in 1859.^ Although Industrial Feeding- 
 schools have now taken the place of Original Eagged 
 Schools, first instituted by the late Sheriff Watson 
 in Aberdeen, and established in Edinburgh after his 
 model by the late Drs Guthrie and liobertson of 
 New Greyfriars', Edinburgh, yet the latter were cal- 
 culated to serve. an excellent purpose in the elevation 
 of the lowest grades of society w^hich the former do 
 not. Being entirely voluntary associations, they are 
 managed by active philanthropists whose whole aim 
 
 ^ See Appendix X. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS, 7 1 
 
 is to rescue the young from a life of crime, give to 
 them an education both religious, intellectual, and 
 industrial, apart from the contaminating influences of 
 their early homes, and to set them out in the world 
 with every chance in life. Instead of being, like cer- 
 tified Industrial Schools, the receptacle for children 
 who have been before the magistrate for begging, or 
 charged with minor offences, or unmanageable by their 
 parents, these Ragged Schools are intended to lay hold 
 of children at an early age, and save them from beg- * 
 ging, thieving, and the degradation of a sentence by 
 the magistrate. In contrast with the training of the 
 Board Schools, from which the youthful waifs are 
 permitted to return night after night to all the evil 
 influences of their wretched homes, they are here 
 boarded, fed, trained in some useful industrial art by 
 men entirely devoted to their interests, and, instead 
 of returning on the completion of their education to 
 their old neighbourhood, where they run so many 
 risks of moral contamination, they are introduced 
 into respectable situations and watched over by 
 those who have a deep interest in their after- suc- 
 cess. Industrial Schools, established under the In- 
 dustrial Schools Act of 1866, though serving an 
 excellent purpose in the training of vagrant or crim- 
 inal young children, can never answer the same 
 purpose in the reformation of the lapsed as the 
 Original Eagged Schools. These, if existing in suf- 
 ficient numbers and possessing sufficient funds, would 
 
/2 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 be capable of giving a good account of every cliild 
 born in a home of poverty or vice, and of making them 
 a blessing instead of a curse to society. Those who 
 have read the reports of the great Eagged School 
 Union of London, of which Lord Shaftesbury has 
 been for so many years the president, and of Dr 
 Barnardo's Homes for Destitute Children, will see 
 what an agency for good these Eagged Schools may 
 become under prudent and Christian management. 
 
 Farther, if it is not provided for, as it does not 
 seem to be, in the Public "Works Loan Act or amend- 
 ments thereof, might not Government encouragement 
 be given to such counteractive agencies, established 
 in towns by municipal authorities, as would help to 
 elevate and instruct the poor, and keep them from 
 temptations to self-indulgence ? ]\Iany of these have 
 been established by private enterprise and are doing 
 a good work in helping to raise the poor ; but if 
 Government encouragement were given for the build- 
 ing and furnishing of halls and coffee-houses to help 
 the grown-up men and women of the wynds and 
 closes, as it is given for the building and furnishing 
 of schools to educate the young, much good would 
 result. 
 
 Most of those counteractive agencies which stand 
 in need of Government pecuniary help would soon 
 be made to pay, not only indirectly in the improved 
 habits of the sunken and Churchless populations, but 
 in return of good interest for the outlay. But even 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 73 
 
 if not, why should money be grudged from the 
 national exchequer to make war on the intemperance, 
 crime, and ungodliness of the land, when millions 
 are spent without a grumble in the wars which man 
 makes upon his fellow-men, carrying desolation and 
 misery in their train ? 
 
 Some action might be taken by Government to 
 relieve the overcrowding by the encouragement of 
 emigration. Eeference has been made to this by the 
 author in another publication.^ In many of our 
 colonies there are large tracts of land lying waste for 
 want of people to cultivate them ; and in our large 
 towns there are thousands of lives not only wasted in 
 idleness, but burdensome and ruinous to the country. 
 A twofold agency — one branch at home for selecting 
 and sending out gratis the most suitable of the over- 
 crowded population ; the other abroad, for receiving, 
 training the emigrants, and providing them with 
 work — might at length give happiness and means of 
 honourable livelihood to many now living in misery 
 and crime. 
 
 The preliminary to proper State action for the 
 relief of the sunken populations is a Government 
 Commission of inquiry.^ This cannot be much longer 
 delayed if the blot and stain on our Christian civilisa- 
 
 ' See Life Work of the Church of Scotland, p. 63. Messrs Black- 
 wood & Sons: 1871. 
 
 2 Since the above was written, a Government Commission on the 
 homes of the poor has been appointed on the motion of the Marquis 
 of Salisbury, but for England onlj'. 
 
74 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 tion is to be removed. Other portions of the com- 
 munity that sutler under any grt-ut and long-continued 
 grievance have ways and means of directing the at- 
 tention of the State to their wrongs. They form 
 powerful associations, and at public meetings, through 
 the press, and at Parliamentary elections, compel at 
 length the Government of tlie day to come to their 
 relief. But the class at the bottom of the social 
 pyramid have no such means of causing the State to 
 listen to their suirerings and wrongs. There is no 
 spirit of union among them which would bring them 
 together for such an end. They have not the intelli- 
 gence or education to enable them to harangue at 
 public meetings ; and they are ashamed to appear 
 before respectable society in their rags. Had they 
 possessed the power, as they have the will, they 
 would long ere now have compelled Government to 
 listen to their wrongs. " I am persuaded," says Dr 
 Barnardo in 'Night and Day,' December 1883, "the 
 State must and will interfere. England can no 
 longer tolerate such hotbeds of dangerous passions, 
 such seed-plots of revolution and disorder, to remain 
 among her crowded populations. Her own safety 
 demands their removal before the welfare of the 
 State is hopelessly imperilled. Nor can civilised 
 humanity in broadcloth be any longer content to 
 stand by unconcerned while brothers and sisters are 
 perishing (I cannot call it living) under the most 
 loathsome conditions, and while harpies in the dis- 
 
IN OUK LARGE TOWNS. 75 
 
 guise of respectable citizens fatten upon rents de- 
 manded for hovels unfit for habitations, and which 
 yield owners from 15 to 40 per cent on the original 
 outlay." Why, I ask, then, should not Parliament 
 at once grapple with the problem, and do its part in 
 removing the plague-spot from the country ? Na- 
 tional prosperity is but an illusion, so long as there 
 are such festering sores eating as a canker into the 
 heart of the social system. 
 
76 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 REMEDIAL MEASURHS. SECULAR— (/^) BY ASSOCIATIONS AND 
 PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS, AND BY THE POOR THEMSELVES. 
 
 The State, if it grapples firmly with the subject, may 
 do much in removing the hindrances to the operation 
 of the Gospel, but cannot do all. Much may also be 
 done for the same end by private associations, or even 
 by individuals, interested in the welfare of the poor. 
 So far as regards the removal of the great areas of 
 unhealthy habitations which have become a nuisance 
 to the neighbourhood, the State has so far done its 
 part in the passing of the Artisans' Dwellings Act. 
 But the application of this Act depends on complaints 
 made by the sanitary medical officer, or two justices, 
 or twelve ratepayers ; and as already stated, there 
 are in all large towns here and there small areas of 
 such unhealthy buildings, which this Act does not 
 seem to take cognisance of, or which are not likely 
 to be brouglit under the notice of the municipal 
 authorities by complainants. Not a little, however, 
 may be done, and has been done on a smaller scale, 
 by private associations, and even by private individuals. 
 
THE CHUECHLESS AND POOR IN OUIl LARGE TOWNS. 77 
 
 before this Act has been called into force, or even where 
 it has already operated. Starting from the principle 
 that property of this kind, even with all the necessary 
 outlay upon it to make the inhabitants comfortable, 
 may be made ordinarily remunerative, associations 
 have been formed for purchasing it whenever it could 
 be obtained. Then, under the care of those interested 
 in the wellbeing of the poor, that property has been 
 renovated and let under conditions which prevent 
 overcrowding, and secure cleanliness and health ; 
 and the tenants by judicious management have been 
 made to co-operate with the owners in keeping their 
 tenements clean and comfortable — a certain yearly 
 or monthly sum being laid aside from the rents to 
 expend on such improvements as the tenants most 
 desire. Here is a means of not only securing the 
 co-operation of the tenants in the gradual improve- 
 ment of their homes, but also of maintaining in them 
 a spirit of independence, better than any written law 
 can effect. The character of the inmates rises with 
 the improvement of their homes — the one acting and 
 reacting on the other. Those who would see how a 
 great social and moral improvement may be made on 
 the inhabitants of these tenements by private enter- 
 prise, and that too chiefly by the personal instru- 
 mentality of a benevolent lady, should read, * Homes 
 of the London Poor,' by Octavia Hill — Macmillan & 
 Co., 1883 — a work of deep practical interest, drawn 
 from experience in the application of the principle 
 
78 rUOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND TOOK 
 
 to which reference has been made. The following 
 sentences are quoted from the second chapter as a 
 specimen of the work, and a record of the success of 
 the experiment : — 
 
 " I feel most deeply," she says, " that the dis- 
 ciplining of our immense poor population must be 
 effected by individual influence ; and that this power 
 can change it from a mob of paupers and semi-paupers 
 into a body of self-dependent workers. It is my 
 opinion, further, that although such influence may be 
 brought to bear upon them in various ways, it may 
 be exercised in a very remarkable manner by persons 
 undertaking the oversight and management of such 
 houses as the poor habitually lodge in. In support 
 of this opinion, I subjoin an account of what has 
 been actually achieved in two very poor courts in 
 London. About four years ago, I was put in posses- 
 sion of three houses in one of the worst courts in 
 Marylebone. Six other houses were bought subse- 
 quently. All were crowded with inmates. The first 
 thing to be done was to put them in decent tenantable 
 order. The set last purchased was a row of cottages 
 facing a bit of desolate ground, occupied with wretched, 
 dilapidated cow-sheds, manure-heaps, old timber, and 
 rubbish of every description. The houses were in a 
 most deplorable condition ; the plaster was dropping 
 from the walls ; on one staircase, a pail was placed 
 to catch the rain that fell through the roof. All the 
 staircases were perfectly dark ; the bannisters were 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 79 
 
 gone, having been burned as firewood by tenants. 
 The grates, with large lioles in them, were falling 
 forward into tlie rooms. The wash-house, full of 
 lumber belonging to the landlord, was locked up ; 
 thus the inhabitants had to wash clothes, as well as 
 to cook, eat, and sleep, in their small rooms. The 
 dust-bin, standing in the front of the houses, was 
 accessible to the whole neighbourhood, and boys often 
 dragged from it quantities of unseemly objects and 
 spread them over the court. The state of the drain- 
 age was in keeping with everything else. The pave- 
 ment of the backyard was all broken up, and great 
 puddles stood in it, so that the damp crept uj) the 
 outer walls. One large but dirty water-butt received 
 the water laid on for the houses ; it leaked, and, for 
 such as did not fill their jugs when the water came 
 in, or wlio had no jugs to fill, there was no water. 
 The former landlord's reply to one of the tenants 
 who asked him to have an iron hoop put round the 
 butt to prevent leakage, was, that ' if he didn't like 
 it [i.e., things as they were], he might leave.' The 
 man to whom this was spoken — by far the best 
 tenant in the place — is now with us, and often gives 
 his spare time to making his room more comfortable, 
 knowing that he will be retained if he does well. . . . 
 Six or seven or eight weeks' rent was due from most 
 tenants, and in some cases, much more ; Mdiereas, 
 since I took possession of the houses (of which I 
 collect the rents each week myself), I have never 
 
80 PROBLEM OF THE CHUKCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 allowed a second week's rent to become due. ... As 
 soon as I entered into possession, each family had an 
 opportunity of doing better; those who would not 
 pay, or who led clearly immoral lives, were ejected. 
 The rooms they vacated were cleansed ; the tenants 
 who showed signs of improvement were moved into 
 them ; and thus, in turn, an opportunity was obtained 
 for having each room distempered and painted. The 
 drains were put in order, a large slate cistern was 
 fixed, the wash-house was cleared of its lumber and 
 thrown open on stated days to each tenant in turn. 
 The roof, the plaster, the woodwork, were repaired ; 
 the staircase walls were distempered ; new grates were 
 fixed ; the layers of paper and rag (black with age) 
 were torn from the windows, and glass was put in : 
 out of 192 panes, only 8 were unbroken. The yard 
 and footpath were paved. The rooms, as a rule, were 
 re-let at the same prices at which they had been let 
 before : but tenants with large families were coun- 
 selled to take two rooms, and for these much less 
 was charged than if let singly ; this plan I continue 
 to pursue. Incoming tenants are not allowed to take 
 a decidedly insufficient quantity of room, and no sub- 
 letting is permitted. The elder girls are employed 
 three times a-week in scrubbing the passages in the 
 houses, for the cleaning of which the landlady is 
 responsible. For this work they are paid, and by it 
 they learn habits of cleanliness. It is, of course, 
 within the authority of the landlady also to insist on 
 
IN OUll LARGE TOWNS. 81 
 
 cleanliness of wash-houses, staircases, and staircase 
 windows ; and even to remonstrate concerning the 
 rooms themselves, if they are habitually dirty. The 
 pecuniary result has been very satisfactory. Five 
 per cent interest has been paid on all the capital 
 invested. A fund for the repayment of capital is 
 accumulating. A liberal allowance has been made 
 for repairs ; and here I may speak of the means 
 adopted for making the tenants careful about breakage 
 and waste. The sum allowed yearly for repairs is 
 fixed for each house ; and if it has not all been spent 
 in restoring and replacing, the surplus is used for 
 providing such additional appliances as the tenants 
 themselves desire. It is, therefore, their interest to 
 keep the expenditure for repairs as low as possible ; 
 and instead of committing the wanton damage common 
 among tenants of their class, they are careful to avoid 
 injury, and very helpful in finding economical methods 
 of restoring what is broken or worn out, often doing 
 little repairs of their own accord." 
 
 This admirable work of Miss Hill's — so thoroughly 
 sensible and practical, combining self-denying labour 
 for behoof of the poor, with a profitable investment — 
 is strongly recommended to the attention of those 
 who are seeking a way by which, through purely 
 secular means, the poor in our own towns may be 
 raised in the social scale and help in their own 
 advancement. An association formed in each town 
 for buying ujJ property in the poorest localities, re- 
 
 F 
 
82 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND TOOK 
 
 building, if ruinous, or repairing and making the 
 rooms comfortable when not, and then, on the 
 principle adopted by Miss Hill, of gradually train- 
 ing the inmates to habits of tidiness and self-respect, 
 could not fail to be productive of much good. The 
 same work can also be done by private individuals 
 as well as by associations ; and if by one or more 
 owners of such dwellings in full sympathy with the 
 wretched inhabitants, why not by many ? Why not 
 by all who possess property of the kind, if they only 
 understood their duties, and then we should have a 
 speedy solution of the problem, so far as the physical 
 aspect of it is concerned ? 
 
 Another of the secular agencies for improving the 
 physical condition of the sunken populations is the 
 societies formed in several of the toivns for improving 
 the temporal condition of the 2^oor. These are unde- 
 nominational, and it is better that, having a primarily 
 temporal purpose, they should not be connected with 
 any religious denomination. At the same time, 
 they may, and do, seek to carry the agents of the 
 various Churches along with them in their work. 
 They are of great use in giving relief to those who 
 are in temporary difficulties, and who, without it, 
 might be converted into the lapsed masses. They 
 encourage those who are willing to do well, and 
 often give work to those who are willing to work. 
 They have kept many a family, especially such as 
 liave no claims for parochial relief, fr6m starvation. 
 
IN OUE LARGE TOWNS. 83 
 
 But, without a knowledge of the spiritual condition 
 of many of the claimants, which can best be obtained 
 by spiritual agencies, it is often impossible to dis- 
 tinguish the deserving objects from the undeserving. 
 It is in res;ard to this that these associations run 
 the greatest risk of failure. Still, a large experience 
 on the part of the distributing agents will give them 
 an insight into the true character and condition of 
 the class who require the aid ; and if the giving of 
 temporal benefit is accompanied with Christian sym- 
 pathy, these associations are indirectly a great help 
 to the Churches, especially where there is a proper 
 understanding between the one and the other. 
 
 Co-operative Societies for securing pure and cheap 
 food for the poor, is another important secular agency 
 for improving the condition of the lapsed popula- 
 tions. The ultimate success of these rests very 
 much with the poor themselves ; but it is the pro- 
 vince of philanthropy to set the machinery in motion 
 whereby the end can be effected, and to see that the 
 co-operation be started on sound and enduring prin- 
 ciples. There is no surer means of teaching them 
 self-respect and thrift. Not only directly, but in- 
 directly, have these co-operative societies, wherever 
 they have been established and conducted on right 
 principles, been a means of profit to the working 
 classes. True, they have been generally established 
 by, and for behoof of, a class above that whose 
 claims have been considered, but there is no reason 
 
S-t THE CIIURCIILESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 why they should not succeed among the very poorest, 
 and be an equal, if not greater, blessing to thera.^ 
 
 At all events, both in this and other ways, the 
 poor must not have everything done for them, but 
 must be taught that they can in many ways help 
 themselves. Without this self-help, unless they go 
 hand in hand with the various agents that are seek- 
 ing to lift them out of the mire, they will never rise 
 to the surface, or, if so raised, tliey will soon sink 
 into their former condition. " We often hear the cry 
 raised, ' Will nobody help us ? ' It is a spiritless, 
 hopeless cry. It is sometimes a cry of revolting 
 meanness, especially when it issues from those who, 
 with a little self-denial, sobriety, and thrift, might 
 easily help themselves. The mob orators who gather 
 the 'millions' about them, are very wide of the mark, 
 when, instead of seeking to train their crowds of 
 hearers to habits of frugality, temperance, and self- 
 culture, they encourage them to keep up the cry, 
 ' Will nobody help us ? ' The cry sickens the soul. 
 It shows gross ignorance of the first elements of 
 personal welfare. Help is in tlie men themselves. 
 They were born to help and elevate themselves. 
 . . . The poorest men have done it. Why should 
 not every man do it?" — Smiles' Thrift, p. 25. 
 ^ See Appendix XI. 
 
S6 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 REMEDIAL MEASURES. SPIRITUAL — (a) BY THE CHURCH OF 
 SCOTLAND. 
 
 There is, as we have seen in the two preceding chap- 
 ters, much that can be done and ought to be done by 
 the State, as well as by private associations and indi- 
 viduals, to ameliorate the condition of the Churchless, 
 and not a little help that can be afforded by the poor 
 themselves to remove hindrances to the Church's 
 operations out of the way. The Church (including 
 all the Churches) has a great duty to the Churchless, 
 but where powerful physical hindrances stand in the 
 way, as at present to a considerable extent they do, 
 her power of effecting a thorough reformation is 
 limited. It has already been shown how difficult it 
 is for people crowded into unhealthy localities, starv- 
 ing and in rags, many of them the victims of intem- 
 perance, to receive the Gospel as the glad tidings of 
 salvation ; and how hunger and impure surroundings 
 are influences so powerful, that you must in some 
 way counteract them ere the truth can be accepted. 
 You could hardly get the inmates of those miserable 
 abodes by any amount of persuasion to come out to 
 
86 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 church or hall, or even to private prayer-meeting. 
 As well attempt to fill up the Slough of Despond, as 
 work with any hope of full success under these 
 physical hindrances. Cases there may be here and 
 there of real spiritual improvement, but the great 
 mass will continue as unleavened as ever. What, 
 though you get the drunkard to promise to give up 
 his drunkenness, yet, when every day going to and 
 coming from his work he has to run the gauntlet of 
 half-a-dozen public -houses, the temptation to self- 
 indulgence may be too strong for his weakened will. 
 You may get the thief to promise to lead an honest 
 life, and for a time he may attend on your ministra- 
 tions, but the pinchings of hunger, or the meeting 
 with his old companions in guilt, prove too much for 
 his virtue, and returning to his old habits, his last 
 state is worse than his first. To bring the Gospel to 
 bear with proper eflect on the hearts and lives of 
 such degraded beings, you cannot allow them to be 
 brought face to face witli temptations stronger than 
 your own. It is always to be remembered that, even 
 though under ordinarily favourable circumstances for 
 the resistance of temptation, tliey are subjected from 
 hereditary taints and from the weakness of will en- 
 gendered by a depraved physical and moral constitu- 
 tion, to far greater trials of virtue than you would be 
 if placed for a time in their circumstances ; and that, 
 even under the most favourable conditions, the work 
 of raising them up must be gradual and slow. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 87 
 
 Again, it is to be noted that the Church, as a 
 spiritual institution for the improvement of the race, 
 is an imperfect instrument at the best. The treasure 
 of the Gospel is committed to " earthen vessels " ; and 
 hence, no ecclesiastical agency for the reformation of 
 the Churchless can be practically complete. True, 
 much more can be accomplished by one kind of 
 organisation than by another. The enthusiasm of 
 the members may make up for faults in organisation ; 
 and the Spirit of God working on the hearts of its 
 agents may effect what the best organisation fails to ac- 
 complish. Still, as the Spirit of God works by means, 
 and as the best organisations are naturally better fitted 
 to accomplish better spiritual results than the less per- 
 fect, it becomes us to inquire as to what experience 
 has found the most suitable for the purpose in view. 
 
 This is — 
 
 (1) The Church working territorially. — It is, as 
 we have already seen,^ the neglect of the territorial 
 principle in large towns and the adoption of the 
 commercial or shopkeeping system, that has been 
 at the root of much of the neglect of the lapsed 
 populations. Town churches are not now the 
 churches of the parishes in which they are situated, 
 but of the congregations that assemble in them from 
 whatsoever quarter gathered. This leads to the over- 
 lapping of spiritual work, and makes purely parochial 
 work, as distinct from congregational, impossible. 
 1 See Introductory Chapter. 
 
88 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Hence, as has been argued with irresistible force by 
 Dr Chahners, l)r James Ifobertson, founder of the 
 Endowment Scheme, the late Mr Whitelaw, Dr 
 Scott of St George's, Edinburgh, and others who 
 have made this subject their special study, it is 
 only by means of parishes in those localities small 
 enough in point of population to allow the full over- 
 sight of them by the minister, and by his working 
 parochially, that a complete account of the Cliurch- 
 less within them can be given. Not only ministers 
 and members of the Church of Scotland, but those 
 of other denominations wlio have made this subject 
 their study, have borne testimony to this fact. " The 
 true and only remedy for the irreligion of our city," 
 says Rev. James Johnston of Free St James' Church, 
 Glasgow,^ "is a return to the old parochial system 
 as it was devised and carried out by our reformers 
 and so eloquently advocated by Dr Chalmers." It 
 can easily be conceived that, though the lower and 
 more irreligious parts of a large town were planted 
 thick with churches and eloquent ministers on the 
 commercial or voluntary principle, each one would fill 
 his church of those who chose to come from any quar- 
 ter of the town, and the consequence would be, that, 
 not the lapsed, but the ordinary church-going people, 
 would form the great majority of his hearers. Under 
 this system, the minister himself would be helpless 
 
 ' See Rising Tide and How to Stem it. Glasgow : David Biyce 
 k Son. 1871. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 89 
 
 in the matter. He would feel it to be his duty to 
 give his week-day services to those who came under 
 his Sabbath teaching ; and though here and there a 
 few of the better classes of the non-church-going 
 might be gathered in, the great bulk of the lapsed 
 would remain outside as before. Any amount of 
 money might be spent, and any amount of Church 
 work might be undertaken, on these conditions, and 
 still the work of bringing in the lapsed would re- 
 main undone. Hence, the division of these regions 
 into workable ecclesiastical districts, the planting 
 within each of them of a full parochial machinery, 
 and the making the minister responsible for the 
 spiritual oversight of every individual within 
 the territory, not cared for by other denomina- 
 tions — in other words, the reverting to the old 
 parochial system devised by the Eeformers, and still 
 so well adhered to in country districts, is absolutely 
 necessary for the spiritual cultivation of these waste 
 regions of our large towns. "Without this, you may 
 have isolated effort doing something, but accomplish- 
 ing nothing effectually ; you will have, perhaps, the 
 representatives of two or three rival denominations 
 working in the same localities, and giving their 
 attentions to the same families, thereby demoralis- 
 ing instead of permanently improving them. Dr 
 Chalmers and others have suggested in regard to 
 this territorial church planted in the midst of the 
 lapsed populations, that, in order to make it answer 
 
90 PROBLEM OF THR CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 the purpose intended as fully as possible, the par- 
 ishioners should have certain advantages over non- 
 parishioners, such as free sittings or reduced seat- 
 rents, and the first attentions of the minister of the 
 parish ; but still, all this would be far from offering 
 a full solution of the problem. If full liberty is 
 given to residenters outside the parish to attend and 
 become members of the church (and if the minister 
 is an efficient one he is sure to attract some of the 
 better classes from beyond his parish), then, we have 
 here the thin edge of the wedge in the introduction 
 of the commercial principle, and the evil is perpetu- 
 ated, though it may be on a smaller scale. Besides, 
 if the worst of the Churchless population are to be 
 trained to church-going habits, they must not be 
 frightened away by the presence of strangers of a 
 better class. In fact, rather than allow them to 
 remain as they are, they should be taught to come 
 in their week-day clothes, that there may be no 
 excuse for their staying away. Moreover, the labour 
 of bringing them in, and the great amount of pas- 
 toral superintendence they require, must demand a 
 minister's whole time and strength, and he must not 
 be distracted by outside work nor allow the objects 
 of his care to be frightened away by the presence of 
 respectable strangers. Hence, to make the territorial 
 work effectual, the minister's work must, if possible, 
 as in country parishes, be entirely parochial. His 
 church must be understood to be for the inhabitants 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 91 
 
 of the parish only; and if others come to him from 
 beyond his parish, it must be understood that they 
 are to rest content with his Sunday's ministrations, 
 and have no claim to his pastoral visitations. Only 
 thus can there be any chance of an effectual spiritual 
 working of the territory committed to him. Only 
 thus can he give that account of that full parish 
 work which the Church should require of him as 
 the minister of the territory assigned to him. There 
 is a cry for the abolition of all seat - rents, but 
 I question if this would be altogether advisable. 
 Members of a church have a certain comfort in 
 occupying their seats when they know that they can 
 claim them as their own ; and, though in every 
 territorial church, such as has here been sketched, 
 there should be a considerable number of free sit- 
 tings, yet, since those who have been brought from a 
 lapsed condition to attend ordinances rise in self- 
 respect and generally improve in circumstances as 
 they continue church-going, many of them would 
 prefer to have seats they could claim as their own ; 
 and the fact of paying a small sum for them would 
 give them an increased self-respect. 
 
 The territorial labours of a devoted minister daily 
 going out and in among these poor people, cognisant 
 of their temptations, sympathising in their trials, 
 using every effort for their moral elevation, adminis- 
 tering the sacraments, must soon make his influence 
 be felt in the gathering in of many within his fold. 
 
92 TROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 One of the difficulties to be contended with is the 
 frequent migration of the poorest inhabitants from 
 one district to another ; and hence, the risk of many, 
 who have acquired church -going habits, relapsing 
 into their old condition when no longer under his 
 care. But the migration of the poor is very much 
 a result of their poverty ; and their poverty arises 
 in a great measure from their vice and irreligion ; 
 and therefore, as their character improves, so will 
 their condition ; and so, their need for moving about 
 will grow less. The very fact, also, of the minister's 
 personal influence over them, and of their love of his 
 ministrations, would retain many within his bounds 
 who would otherwise have migrated ; and great good 
 would also accrue to those who should actually re- 
 move, by the system of transference certificates which 
 would introduce them to the care of the minister of 
 the bounds. 
 
 (2) But, working on the territorial principle, and 
 the carrying it out with the greatest faithfulness, is 
 not enough. For the sake of the people, there must 
 also be endowment, and such an endowment as shall 
 leave the minister free from distracting cares, and in- 
 dependent of seat-rents and church-door collections. 
 In such a parish as has been sketched, the small 
 income accruing from these latter sources would be 
 all required to defray the necessary church expenses. 
 Now here, as can easily be supposed, is the great 
 difficulty in establishing endowed territories for the 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 93 
 
 lapsed and poor. How is such a permanent endow- 
 ment to be obtained as shall secure, not a novice, 
 but a first-rate experienced minister for the work, 
 and make him independent of church income ? In 
 wealthy districts, it is comparatively easy to raise 
 a permanent endowment, and to have the minister's 
 living in qiioad sacra parishes supplemented by seat- 
 rents and church-door collections. In these cases, 
 a small endowment of £100 or £120 may be all 
 that is necessary, because a large sum may be made 
 up from the two sources last mentioned. Thus, there 
 is not much difficulty in helping those who can help 
 themselves. " To those that have, it shall be given." 
 But, in those districts whose claims are beingj con- 
 sidered, the endowment must be large just in propor- 
 tion as other sources of income are small or not 
 available at all. And, then, the voluntary principle 
 can have no place here. To have the minister sup- 
 ported, even to the smallest extent, by those to whom 
 he ministers is simply impossible. But a minister of 
 experience cannot be asked by the Church to go down 
 into these desolate regions — to expose himself to many 
 discomforts and dangers, and, perhaps, by his unhealthy 
 labours, to shorten the natural term of his life, with- 
 out ample provision being made for his temporal 
 wants. He ought to have at least as much as his 
 services could command in any other sphere ; if not, 
 indeed, more. A sacrifice it is in one sense — a sacri- 
 fice of much ease and worldly comfort ; but, on the 
 
94 riiOBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 other hand, an office most lionourable in the sight of 
 Uod, and of all right-minded men. All honour to 
 those who, with the Word of Life in their hand, go 
 down to those depths to proclaim salvation to perish- 
 ing souls. How, then, shall these large endowments 
 be obtained ? This is a question worthy the serious 
 attention of all friends of the Church, and will occupy 
 (jur consideration in a future chapter. Meanwhile, 
 let the principle be accepted, that endowed territorial, 
 as distinct from congregational, work, is the only 
 efficient means of giving an account of the lapsed 
 populations. 
 
 (3) But, given a territory small enough in point of 
 population to be thoroughly worked, and a sufficient 
 endowment for the minister, something else is wanted 
 — viz., the church, or suitable huildiiig in which the 
 minister's Sundcaj services are to be held. In the work 
 among the poor and Churchless in large towns, it is 
 customary to appoint a missionary, generally a student 
 of divinity, who shall gather together the nucleus 
 of a congregation into some hall or schoolroom ; and 
 then, after licence and the obtaining a temporary 
 church, he is ordained to minister among them with 
 the prospect of obtaining a permanent church and 
 endowment in course of time. But this congregation 
 will in all likelihood consist only in a small part of 
 those who were non-church-going. Set down in the 
 midst of a dense population, the church will attract 
 many other members of other congregations, who for 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 95 
 
 the sake of convenience will attach themselves to it. 
 So, the work cannot in any sense be called parochial, 
 but is a farther development of the congregational or 
 commercial system. To properly work snch a terri- 
 tory as has been sketched, it would be best to reverse 
 the process. Let an iron or wooden church, of as 
 simple a nature as possible, if a permanent one can- 
 not be obtained, be planted in the centre of the 
 territory, with a minister at once ordained to it, and 
 as full a parochial agency as possible, so that he may 
 begin work with all the advantages of a full parochial 
 organisation. Then, the poor people around him will 
 soon come to regard him as their parish minister, 
 lovingly working for their good, and they will be 
 speedily gained over by his sympathy and friendship. 
 It is of the utmost advantage that any minister 
 working among them should be an ordained minister, 
 able to dispense the sacraments and to attach them 
 by membership to his church. Only thus will a per- 
 manent reformation be effected among them. Mere 
 missionary agency, however zealous, unless connected 
 with the work of an ordained minister as part of the 
 parochial machinery, goes for very little. 
 
 A workable territory, a permanent endowment, 
 and a church as plain as possible, with a minister of 
 experience labouring faithfully as minister of the 
 parish — these are the spiritual agencies which expe- 
 rience has demonstrated as most effective for the 
 ingathering of the lapsed populations. 
 
96 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 REMEDIAL MEASURES. SPIRITUAI. — (/>) BY SUBORDINATE AGEN- 
 CIES, DENOMINATIONAL AND UNDENOMINATIONAL. 
 
 As the family is the foundation of society, so is 
 endowed territorial work the foundation of all spir- 
 itual agencies for building up the Churcli among the 
 lapsed. Other means in subordination to this may 
 be most important factors in the process, but outside of 
 Church organisations, they lose much of their efficacy. 
 It is a pleasure to be able to record that, in all our 
 large towns, there is a large number of subordinate 
 agencies at work in the most needy districts, whose 
 agents are working with enthusiasm and with more 
 or less success far from the eye of the busy world. 
 
 Among the subordinate agencies that come under 
 our notice is that of what are called City Missionaries, 
 professedly undenominational, maintained by the zeal- 
 ous among the several Christian denominations, and 
 working independently of any Church organisation. 
 These city missionaries consist in a small part of 
 licentiates, or of those who are preparing to be such, 
 but chiefly of laymen and Bible- women — all of whom 
 
THE CHURCHLESS AND POOK IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 97 
 
 visit from door to door, and strive to gather the 
 lapsed into meeting-houses, and in other ways to do 
 them good. No one will deny the devotedness of 
 the great majority of these city missionaries, but 
 the results of their missionary efforts are very small 
 in proportion to their labours — the permanent results, 
 it is to be feared, hardly perceptible amid the 
 surrounding ungodliness. " For example, take the 
 Glasgow City Mission, which employs about fifty 
 agents who devote four hours each day to the visita- 
 tion of the careless classes, and hold two meetings 
 each week, besides having Bible-classes and Sabbath- 
 schools and other appliances for interesting and im- 
 proving all who choose to avail themselves of them. 
 And how many do these fifty agents succeed in draft- 
 ing into the fellowship of the Church during a year ? 
 About fifty represents the general average."^ Expe- 
 rience has abundantly shown that unless you can 
 attach the reformed among the lapsed to some church 
 by means of membership, and gain a permanent in- 
 fluence over them in this way, a great part of mere 
 missionary work is lost. Even as pioneers, these city 
 missionaries, however zealous, cannot effect any real 
 good proportioned to their labours. The influence 
 they exert is merely a personal influence, and hence, 
 owing to the frequent changes among them, most of 
 the work has to be done anew. They labour, but 
 
 1 From a pamphlet entitled ' Church and the Masses, ' by Rev. 
 David Pirret, of Burubank U.P. Church, Glasgow. 
 
 G 
 
98 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 their successors can hardly be said to enter into 
 tlieir labours. Let, therefore, these missionary agents 
 become connected with some church organisation for 
 gathering in the outcast as auxiliaries to the minister 
 of the parish or territory ; let the subscribers to 
 the City Mission funds give their support to such 
 churches of their own communion as are carrying on 
 the work territorially ; and every pound given for 
 such an end is likely to effect some permanent good. 
 Working as part of a parochial church organisation, 
 their work can be efficiently superintended and go to 
 swell the sum-total of that accomplished for the per- 
 manent good of the district. 
 
 As regards missionaries acting as ^jar< of a par- 
 ochial organisation, there is abundant scope for their 
 labours. Working among the lapsed, with the view, 
 by first bringing them out to halls or schools for 
 public service, of eventually drafting them into the 
 membership of the Clmrch, they are working with 
 permanent results. Thus labouring under the eye 
 of the minister and kirk-session, those of them that 
 are students of divinity or licentiates are thereby 
 undergoing an excellent training for the ministry. 
 They obtain a knowledge of the wants and miseries 
 of the poor, and acquire a true sympathy with them 
 such as no other experience can give them ; they get 
 an insight into human character which cannot fail to 
 be of use to them in their future ministry ; and they 
 are adding one and another to the list of those who 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 99 
 
 from the depths of a sad experience can help to in- 
 terest the Church at large in this great work. 
 
 In the enumeration of the subordinate agencies for 
 the reclamation of the lapsed none stands higher, 
 none is more worthy of attention, than the ministry 
 of women in the Church. For some departments of 
 the work, female agency is more efficient than any 
 other can be. Their great power of self-sacrifice, 
 their strong Christian sympathies, their intimate 
 knowledge of female wants and duties, qualify them 
 in a peculiar manner for helping the poor, the igno- 
 rant, the vicious, and raising them to a higher life. 
 Among the workers in this mission - field, woman 
 stands pre-eminent not only by the greatness of her 
 sacrifices, but by the largeness of her success. " Not 
 the least honourable duty in love's services is to suffer 
 with the sufferer, to analyse suffering in its minutest 
 details, so as to find out the most hidden fibre that 
 needs support and consolation, to bring comfort out 
 of small things, to show strength by becoming weak 
 with the weak, and vigour by becoming a child with 
 children, to persevere after every one's patience has 
 long died out, and to continue working with undis- 
 turbed calmness when the whole world around is 
 agitated with political questions, ecclesiastical contro- 
 versies, or financial panics. And who so entirely in 
 their right place at this work as women, who, created 
 as they are with a natural instinct for the work of 
 charity, have from their Saviour learned how to do it 
 
100 PROBLEM OF THE CHUKCHLESS AND TOOR 
 
 ill the right spirit, and where to look for the required 
 strength and wisdom ? " ^ Wliether this female min- 
 istry among the lapsed and poor be the " missing 
 link " to connect them with tliose above them, we 
 shall not venture to say ; but, at all events, it is an 
 important factor in helping to solve this hitherto 
 unsolved problem. The Bible - woman, under the 
 direction of her kirk -session, or other ecclesiastical 
 organisation, pious, prudent, full of enthusiasm, going 
 forth into the most wretched tenements to speak 
 words of life to her poor or depressed sisters, able to 
 enter into their peculiar difficulties or cares, sowing 
 the seed of Divine truth beside all waters — such an 
 agent cannot fail to make her influence be felt for 
 good. All the more as she comes among them as 
 one of themselves, not dressed in any outr6 fashion, 
 but by the exhibition of a Christian sympatliy makes 
 them feel quite at home in her presence. She is 
 often the pioneer into the wilderness untrodden by 
 Christian feet, and she leaves her foot -tracks that 
 others may follow in her path. Very true are the 
 following words uttered by a Betlinal Green clergy- 
 man concerning them : " I consider it a great advan- 
 tage to the Bible-women tliat there is nothing distinc- 
 tive or peculiar in their dress. They come to the 
 poor as one of tliemselves, sit down by them in sick- 
 ness, or any other trouble, as one of their neighbours; 
 tliey talk to tliem in their own language, and are, 
 
 * Liefde's Charities of Europe, vol. i. p. 126. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 101 
 
 and appear, as one of their own class. There is, there- 
 fore, nothing to disturb their intercourse, no prejudice 
 to be overcome, misunderstanding to be explained 
 away ; nothing diverts their attention from the sub- 
 ject, and if the Bible-woman is earnest and has tact, 
 she is quite sure to create an interest in her favour."^ 
 Let such agents of the right sort be multiplied ; let 
 them have the sympathies and help of the Christian 
 congregations that send them forth ; let the ladies of 
 the better classes sometimes accompany them to the 
 sphere of their labours to see how the good work is 
 going on ; and these Bible-women will be a mighty 
 help in the bringing in of the lapsed. 
 
 But female agency in the Church is not confined 
 to that of Bible- women going down into the depths to 
 speak the words of life. In this good work, there is 
 large scope for the work of those of a higher class. 
 In teaching the children in the Sabbath-schools, in 
 conducting mothers' meetings, in acting as district 
 visitors and tract-distributors, in organising and super- 
 intending cookery classes for the benefit of the poor, 
 and in many other ways, they can and do help in the 
 elevation of the lapsed, bringing joy and comfort to 
 many a home.^ Much as the higher female agency 
 has developed within the past quarter of a century, 
 there is yet much that remains to be done. There 
 are great capabilities for good, there is a large mine of 
 
 1 Quoted from ' Life "Work ; or. The Link and the Rivet,' p. 45. 
 ■^ See Appendix XIII. 
 
102 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Christian usefulness that yet waits to be developed 
 in female agency, systematically employed and forming 
 a part of our territorial Church organisations.^ 
 
 It is almost needless to speak of Sabbath-schools 
 as one of the most important agencies in the hands 
 of devoted Christian men and women for the reclama- 
 tion of the lapsed. Let them be planted thick wher- 
 ever the population is densest, but always on the 
 territorial principle — each Sabbath-school being uie 
 centre for the religious teaching of the young of a 
 well-defined district, and the teachers using all their 
 efforts to gather in all the young of the district into 
 their school. There would thus be a healthy rivalry 
 without any overlapping of work, and the power 
 would be afforded of seeing that all were gathered in. 
 There will be for a time much trying and dishearten- 
 ing work among this class of children, but not so 
 much as there once was, in consequence of the train- 
 ing they now get in the day-school, which teaches 
 them habits of obedience and self-respect. Than the 
 training the young in these districts Sabbath by Sab- 
 bath to a knowledge of God's Word and to a holy 
 life, there is no work more honourable, nor any that 
 will yield more pleasure and profit. I remember 
 well the starting of such a school in a certain back 
 street of a northern city a good few years ago. Every 
 endeavour had been made by those visiting the neigh- 
 bourhood to get the parents to send out their chil- 
 
 ' See under chapter ix. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 103 
 
 dren. On the opening Sunday, long before the adver- 
 tised hour, the hall was filled with a ragged, dirty, 
 and uproarious lot of boys and girls, some as old as 
 16 or 17, dancing, singing, playing all kinds of mis- 
 chief. Quiet could only be restored for a moment ; 
 and not until some of the worst behaved were ex- 
 pelled, could any order be obtained. The work of 
 bringing such a motley crowd into order and proper 
 training seemed hopeless, but the teachers were full 
 of hope and patience ; the superintendent appointed, 
 a plain working man, was full of enthusiasm ; and 
 ere months had passed away, a thorough reformation 
 was effected. The good seed here sown in faith and 
 with many prayers has doubtless borne fruit through 
 those many years, and teachers and taught have been 
 equally blessed. 
 
 Such imdenominational agencies as the Glasgow 
 Foundry Boys' Religions Society, which, starting from 
 very small beginnings, has spread a network of 
 spiritual agency for the youth of both sexes over that 
 great city, and others of a similar character in other 
 towns, are a great means of laying hold of boys and 
 girls just beginning life at a time when they are 
 most easily led astray, and combining them into 
 associations for their spiritual benefit. Many have 
 thereby been kept from falling, and many been fitted 
 to take their part as useful and respected citizens.^ 
 
 ^ See Appendix XII. , where a short account of the Glasgow Foun- 
 dry Bojs' Religious Society is given. 
 
104 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 There is a movement, still in its infancy, which, if 
 conducted with proper delicacy and prudence, may 
 be productive of great effects — viz., the JVliite-cross 
 Movement. It is one which will have much work to 
 do among all classes, but it is referred to here as an 
 .agency that may be of much use in instilling a purer 
 tone into that class whose claims we are considering, 
 and remedying some of those gross evils which have 
 their roots in the poverty and overcrowding of the 
 lapsed populations. But to do this, it must go hand 
 in hand with other Christian agencies ; and if in 
 union and full sympathy with the Churches, so much 
 the better. If it can stop or materially lessen the 
 awful prostitution that so much abounds in all our 
 larger, and in many of our smaller, towns ; if it can 
 raise up a band of devoted Christians who shall 
 imbue the community with a horror of this frightful 
 vice, and thus strike at the root of the social evil, 
 while at the same time it rescues the victims of this 
 vice from temporal and eternal destruction, it will 
 have accomplished a noble and blessed work. 
 
 This is the proper place to refer to such spiritual 
 agencies outside the Churches, for behoof of the 
 spiritually destitute, as the Blue Bihhon wnd Salva- 
 tion Armies. The former is an organisation for pro- 
 moting temperance through Gospel agencies, and in 
 this respect has, I believe, struck the right key-note. 
 The latter is an attempt, through the outward pomp 
 and pageantry and nomenclature of military estab- 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 105 
 
 lishments, to draw the attention chiefly of the lower 
 classes to the claims of the Gospel. With somewhat 
 that is objectionable in their organisation and mode 
 of working, they yet appeal powerfully to the senses 
 and the imagination of the poorer classes. They 
 give the objects they are seeking to benefit a sense 
 of human brotherhood such as other religious agencies 
 seem to have failed to impart. They seem, at any 
 rate, to have been able to stir the masses to their 
 very depths. It is something to have awakened to 
 a sense of their spiritual condition the multitudes 
 of our sunken populations, to have rescued many of 
 them from their sinful habits and made them re- 
 joice in the sense of Christian freedom. How far 
 this influence may be due to mere temporary excite- 
 ment, or how far it may effect a permanent im- 
 provement, time will show. The danger of all 
 these organisations is that, depending so much on 
 the energy and organising power of their originators, 
 they are apt to fall to pieces when deprived of their 
 personal influence. Another is, that of degenerating 
 into such extravagances as fairly undo all the good 
 work they have accomplished. This seems to be 
 already happening in the case of the Salvation 
 Army. Nevertheless, there is something wonderful 
 in the energy and self-sacrifice of its officers, in its 
 power of self-expansion, and in the enthusiasm with 
 which it endeavours to fultil our Lord's parting com- 
 mands to " Go into all the world, and preach the 
 
lOG THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 Gospel to every creature." Thougli there may be 
 much to avoid, there is also much that the Churches 
 may learn from these powerful agencies in the re- 
 generation of the lapsed. Two great lessons, at least, 
 the Christian Churches, working so long in estab- 
 lished grooves, may lay to heart. First, the greater 
 need of giving these classes to feel their sense of 
 brotherliood in tlie Elder Brotlier, in whose earthly 
 life, with its blessed power of human sympathy 
 and unselfish devotion to the help of the poor and 
 the outcast, they liave a guarantee for His present 
 sympathies and love. The other, the need of a 
 stronger appeal to the senses in the agencies em- 
 2:)loyed for their reformation. The Churches must 
 get more and more out of the old rut and adopt new 
 methods, if they ever hope to bring in the lapsed 
 whom they have lost. Certain it is, that if they 
 delay much longer in fulfilling the great work with 
 which they are intrusted, for the reformation of the 
 outcasts, it will be taken up and carried out by less 
 efficient organisations, which, in attempting to sow 
 the good seed, may mingle not a little tares. And, 
 in attempting to undertake this duty when too late, 
 the Churches may find that they have to undo not a 
 little evil they miglit have prevented, and thus have 
 a twofold enemy to contend with. 
 
107 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CO-OPERATION OP ALL THE EVANGELICAL CHURCHES, AND RE- 
 COGNITION OP EACH other's WORK, NECESSARY POR THE 
 COMPLETE SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM. 
 
 That tlie Church of Scotland has certain advantages 
 for the ingathering of the lapsed has been already 
 shown, and need here be only in a general way 
 alluded to. In her parochial divisions, her legally 
 defined jurisdiction, her fixed endowments, which, 
 though often small, yet allow the liberality of her 
 members to be exhibited more in the way of extend- 
 ing parishes than of supplying stipends for charges 
 already settled, she possesses advantages superior to 
 every other for supplying spiritual ministrations to 
 the lapsed and poor. In the case of Churches, all of 
 whose endowments or stipends are raised from the 
 contributions of their members, it is of great advan- 
 tage that charges should be planted where nearly all 
 or a considerable amount of stipend can be locally 
 raised. The less that can be raised in the locality, 
 the greater is the drain on the central fund. Hence 
 
108 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 the strong temptation unendowed Churches have, in 
 spite of tliemselves, to regard tlie maintenance of the 
 minister as one of the chief elements in the selection 
 of a locality for the establishment of a new charge. 
 When a permanent endowment large enough for the 
 support of a minister is obtained, then it matters 
 not how poor tlie locality in which his charge is 
 placed, for he can work independent of local aid, 
 seeking not the contributions of the poor but them- 
 selves. Hence, however great tlie difficulty on the 
 part of the Established Church in planting endowed 
 churches in the midst of the poorest localities, in tlie 
 case of the unestablished Churches it is greater far. 
 On the purely voluntary system, it is simply im- 
 possible. Experience has taught them, as it has 
 taught the Church of Scotland, that only as they 
 carry out the principle of endowed territorial work 
 among the lapsed populations, can they have any 
 real success. 
 
 But, working at random on the purely commercial 
 system, without any agreement among each other as 
 to the division of the territories to be worked, the 
 Churches can never fulfil their mission to the outcast 
 poor. No multiplication of edifices, no number of 
 agencies working independent of each other, can ever 
 solve the problem. Eor what is the fact patent to all ? 
 That there is much evangelistic zeal among many of 
 the members of all the Churches, will not be denied. 
 There is also a lar^e number of aj'encies at work in all 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 109 
 
 our large towns for the spiritual reformation of the 
 lapsed : and a considerable amount of money is ex- 
 pended for this end. But with what result ? Not only 
 are these large moral wastes still unreclaimed, but it 
 is to be feared that these, in some of the towns at 
 least, are increasing rather than diminishing. It is a 
 sad reflection, as already mentioned, that, were the 
 money yearly expended in evangelising those districts 
 often by rival Churches hindering each other's work 
 to be expended by those Churclies systematically and 
 in co-operation, that spiritual destitution would have 
 long ere now sensibly diminished, if it had not alto- 
 gether disappeared. For the end here sought, incor- 
 porate union is not absolutely needed ; but only a 
 union of method, and purpose, and a healthy rivalry 
 as to which should do most in this great work. The 
 spirit of Abraham is that which should actuate the 
 Churches in this benevolent crusade : " Let there be 
 no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee. ... If 
 thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the 
 right ; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will 
 go to the left." 
 
 We must deal with facts as they are. We must 
 accept the sad fact that these Churches have been work- 
 ing apart from each other, in no real spirit of friend- 
 liness, and that, because of the want of that united 
 action, the common enemy has come in like a flood ; 
 and the fields that should have been cultivated for 
 God have become a howling wilderness. How long 
 
110 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 because of tins want of union shall the enemy point 
 the finger of scorn ? 
 
 Now, on which of the Churches does the duty 
 devolve of making the first advances for co-operative 
 union in this grand work ? Clearly on the Church 
 of Scotland, by right of her position, of her age as 
 the mother Churcli, and the natural advantages she 
 possesses. Why should she not fairly and honestly 
 confess her inability alone and unaided to cope with 
 the ever-growing mass of irreligion in our large 
 towns ? There is no dishonour in such a confession 
 when the reasons of her failure are fairly weighed, 
 any more than it is dishonourable in the other 
 Churches, for the reasons stated, to confess their 
 inability. To that Church which shall invite the 
 co-operation of the other Churches in this great work 
 belongs the real honour. Let the Church of Scot- 
 land, then, consider it her duty and her privilege 
 to make offers for this Christian co-operation — to 
 hold out the right hand of fellowship to all that 
 will join with her in this campaign against the 
 kingdom of darkness — to say, that while she is 
 willing to bear her share, and more than her share, 
 in the burden, she is equally willing to divide the 
 land to be subdued with those that will come to 
 her help. The principle of successful working being 
 virtually acknowledged, there should not be great 
 difficulty in establishing a system of co-operation. 
 For this end, let a great Church association be 
 
IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. Ill 
 
 established in each town, composed of representatives 
 of each of the affiliated Churches, with consent of 
 the Church Courts concerned. Let this association, 
 thoroughly accredited and representative as it should 
 be, divide the territory to be worked into man- 
 ageable districts ; let the representatives of each of 
 the co-operating Churches say how many of these 
 selected districts they will take up to work on the 
 common principle adopted by the association ; let 
 those who have the several territories assigned them be 
 responsible for the establishment of suitable agencies ; 
 let them, as part fulfilment of their obligations, give 
 to the association, in an annual report, as accurate 
 statistics as possible of the amount of work done 
 and the amount yet to do ; let the association raise 
 as large funds as possible ; and whatever funds they 
 possess, let them be equally divided annually among 
 the Churches represented in it according to the 
 number of territories worked, partly for the pur- 
 pose of obtaining accurate statistics, and partly to 
 help in maintaining the several agencies employed. 
 Working thus side by side, not in opposition, not 
 interfering with one another's districts, but in healthy 
 rivalry, the Churches would come to know each 
 other better and recognise the value of each other's 
 services, instead of, as now, working very much at 
 random within the same territory and debauching 
 the poor, by each bestowing charity on the same 
 individual ; overdoing certain localities and leaving the 
 
112 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 others neglected. This association would not be 
 composed of heterogeneous elements gathered to- 
 gether by accident, or simply with a common pur- 
 pose, but ought to be properly representative of 
 the Cliurches, its members elected by the Church 
 Courts and responsible to the Church they repre- 
 sent. "Would it not be a welcome sight, even to the 
 outside world, to see our Presbyterian and other 
 Evangelical Churches working in healthy rivalry 
 side by side for so grand a purpose, even that for 
 wiping out that dark blot of moral waste which is 
 a disgrace to our Christian civilisation ? 
 
 The general interest that is now being awakened in 
 the elevation of the masses — the discussions regard- 
 ing it which will shortly take place in Parliament, 
 will do much to ripen public opinion ; and if the 
 Churches will not lead the van, and show their 
 earnestness by combination, they will be forced at 
 length to stand by and allow other agencies far less 
 efficient to take their place. One preliminary diffi- 
 culty to the hearty co-operation spoken of, is the cry 
 for Disestablishment which has been raised in some 
 of the Dissenting Churches, and which is already 
 showing its baneful effects in alienating from each 
 other those who should be friends and fellow- 
 workers ; and in withdrawing the agitators from the 
 real work which devolves on the Cliurches to which 
 they belong. Because of this public attempt to 
 injure the usefulness of tlie Church of Scotland, by 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 113 
 
 crippling her resources, and depriving her of those 
 very advantages she possesses for the ingathering 
 of the lapsed — because of this some excellent 
 ministers of that Church object to any such co- 
 operation as here proposed. Nor are they greatly 
 to be blamed. Co-operation, to be real, implies a 
 unity of spirit founded on mutual esteem and love. 
 But those who are moving in this agitation are 
 doing what they can to make real co-operation for 
 this or any other good work impossible. Had the 
 money spent, or proposed yet to be spent in this 
 miserable, and as yet futile, campaign, been spent in 
 arousing the country to a sense of its duty to the 
 outcast populations, and in co-operating with the 
 Established Church for their evangelisation, the pro- 
 blem would be near its solution. The Christian 
 Churches would then be seen to be worthy of their 
 position ; would have been drawing nearer, instead of 
 looking askance at, each other; charity and good- 
 will would have prevailed, and " God, even our God, 
 would have blessed us." To be fighting with each 
 other while the enemy is gathering strength — to be 
 weakening instead of strengthening each other's 
 hands in face of a common danger, is surely a 
 policy as unchristian as it is suicidal. A wooer 
 does not usually gain the object of his affection by 
 hard blows and calling of hard names ; by asking 
 her to renounce her dowry, that she may enter the 
 happy union as poor and crestfallen as possible. 
 
 H 
 
1 U THE CHURCIILESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 Wliy should the Church of Scotland be asked to 
 renounce the great advantages she possesses as an 
 Established Church for the sake of a sentiment, and 
 be for several generations incapacitated, through the 
 weakness engendered by Disestablishment, for en- 
 gaging in the work at all ? It has taken the greater 
 part of forty years to fill up the breaches made by 
 the secession of 1843 ; and now that she has gained 
 more than her former strength, and is in a better 
 position than she has been any time previous in her 
 liistory to cope with this spiritual destitution, she 
 would be thrown back farther tlian ever, should the 
 policy of Disestablishment become at any time suc- 
 cessful. If the disestablishing clergy (and it is 
 ministers that have been the prime instigators . and 
 most active promoters of this movement) are so 
 blind as not to discern that their attempts are 
 making ecclesiastical union impossible, and only 
 promoting emulation and strife instead of peace and 
 goodwill among men, the matter will appear in 
 a different light to the intelligent laity who have a 
 cooler judgment and are less blinded by ecclesias- 
 tical prejudices.^ 
 
 ^ The Disestablishers, it seems, are desirous of opening; a new cam- 
 paign against the Established Church by raising £20,000 to supjdy 
 the sinews of war. Wouhl sotfie good genius suggest to them that 
 it might be more usefully employed in making wiir on tlie intem- 
 perance and godlessness of the land, and in preaching a gdspel of 
 peace and goodwill to those manj' thousands in our dens and alleys 
 whom all the Churches liave neglected ? 
 
115 
 
 CHAPTER Vm. 
 
 WHEREIN THE CHURCH OP SCOTLAND NEEDS A NEW DEPARTURE 
 IN HER EFFORTS TOWARDS THE RECOVERY OF THE LAPSED 
 — (l.) IN THE INTRODUCTION OF NEW, OR THE EXPANSION OP 
 PRESENT, AGENCIES. 
 
 Has the Church of Scotland, even by herself, as yet 
 exhausted all the means at her disposal for the in- 
 gathering of the lapsed ? No one who considers her 
 advantages as a National Church and the resources at 
 her command will venture to say so. The unavoid- 
 able causes of her failure have been already consid- 
 ered in the Introduction to this volume ; but there 
 are others over which she has proper control that 
 may suggest thefiaselves to dispassionate critics. One 
 of these is, that the Church as a Church is only 
 slowly coming to the realisation of the importance of 
 the problem with which she has to deal. In viewing 
 the past work of the Church of Scotland, it is im- 
 possible to overlook the renewed energy with which, 
 since recovering from the first effects of the lamentable 
 secession of 1843, she has girded herself to almost 
 every kind of Christian work that lay to her hand. 
 
116 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 In the large iiuml)er of parishes added to her eccle- 
 siastical economy ; in the zeal of her ministers and 
 members in promoting many a good work within their 
 several parishes ; in the increased interest taken in 
 her foreign and many of her home enterprises ; and 
 in her desire to work hand in hand with all who are 
 serving her great Master and Head, she has shown 
 herself a living and progressive Church, worthy, in 
 some measure, of her high position in the country. 
 But the Home Mission work of the Church has as 
 yet failed to touch the very lowest classes of our 
 towns as it has tliose in social position above them. 
 It has done a large amount of good among those who, 
 but for its agencies, might soon have sunk into the 
 condition of the lapsed — the dwellers in many of the 
 crowded localities of our mining and manufacturing 
 populations ; and not a little, also, among tliose who 
 can afford to pay for religious ordinances. Now, let 
 it be granted to its fullest extent, that it has accom- 
 plished among these classes a large measure of good 
 — that it has evoked a liberality on the part of the 
 richer classes by the help afforded, wliich would other- 
 wise have lain dormant — that it has helped to plant 
 with churclies and churcli ordinances nearly all the 
 localities in towns and crowded villages where the 
 people have been more or less able to supplement 
 Home Mission grants. Let all this be granted to 
 its fullest extent, as also the wisdom, energy, and 
 enthusiasm with whicli our Home Schemes have been 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 117 
 
 administered. But there now faces ns the problem 
 of the Churchless poor — of the many thousands cen- 
 tered in the most densely peopled districts of our 
 large towns, who have neither the will nor the means 
 to supplement Home Mission efforts. Among the 
 churches that have been built and endowed, very few 
 are for those only who have no power whatsoever of 
 helping themselves. Districts where the pressure of 
 human beings is so great that the pure air of heaven 
 cannot be breathed, and the decencies of life cannot 
 be observed ; where hunger and misery stalk like 
 gaunt skeletons, and vice rears her horrid crest ; 
 where children either die off in infancy, or if sur- 
 viving, have little chance in life — these^ are still to 
 be found in our large towns unoccupied by any of 
 the churches, or with, perhaps, only a missionary 
 agency employed for their reformation. This state 
 of matters does not arise from intentional neglect, 
 but from the difficulty referred to in chapter v. of 
 raisino- such a sum for church-buildinf? and endowing 
 of such parishes as shall be sufiScient to maintain an 
 experienced minister without seat-rents and church- 
 door collections. Where there is money enough in a 
 district to build and endow a church with the aid of 
 the Home Mission and Endowment Schemes, there is 
 little difficulty in obtaining a quoad sacra parish with 
 its full parochial equipment ; and what is wanting in 
 the endowment for the full support of the minister 
 is locally obtained ; but here, the money to build 
 
lis PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 and endow churches and establish needful parochial 
 agencies in the poor and spiritually destitute districts 
 must all come from sources beyond it. 
 
 How, then, are the requisite funds to be raised for 
 such a purpose ? To do this, the Church must take 
 ways and means of impressing her members with 
 the needs of the Churchless, and interest them in 
 the cause. We know, as a matter of experience, 
 that money is seldom wanting for any Christian 
 purpose for which a good cause is fully made out. 
 Experience has also shown that the best way of 
 interesting the Christian people is to bring the facts 
 and bearings of the case fully before them. This, 
 then, in the cause referred to, re(iuires to be more 
 fully done. Isolated attempts have been made ; 
 one kirk-session liere and another there has taken 
 full account of the number and condition of the 
 non-church-going within its territory, and has made 
 earnest, and generally successful, appeals to the 
 members for the support of the missionary opera- 
 tions. Parish missionaries who have sounded the 
 depths, have now and then described in plain and 
 truthful language the condition, physical and moral, 
 of those lying outside the Churches whom they have 
 visited ; but the reports have seldom found their 
 way beyond the kirk-session archives. Individual 
 ministers, also, deeply impressed with the state of 
 tliose uncared-for multitudes, have sounded a note 
 of alarm, but their appeals have not gone with the 
 
IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 119 
 
 full weight of tlie Church's authority. The Church, 
 as a Church, has not as yet given injunctions to her 
 office-bearers in our towns, nor afforded the means, , 
 to take a periog^cal account of tlie Churchless within 
 their several bounds. True, the Committee on Chris- 
 tian Life and Work made some years ago a praise- 
 worthy effort to obtain accurate statistics, and were 
 warmly seconded by a number of town ministers ; 
 but want of funds to cover the expense of a peri- 
 odical investigation into the number and condition 
 of all the Churchless, and of power to see that its 
 injunctions are carried out, has been an obstacle to 
 the completion of this necessary work. In appealing 
 for pecuniary help, it is necessary that the Church 
 should lay bare to the full extent the awful con- 
 dition of those multitudes of human beings livino- 
 without religion and dying without hope. There 
 are revelations in some of these regions which, if 
 truthfully and faithfully made, as the revelations 
 that are now being made of the condition of the 
 outcast poor of London, .would thrill the hearts of 
 the most lifeless members of the Church, and pro- 
 bably evoke a liberality to improve their condition 
 now unexampled. We have been working hitherto 
 round the hard outer crust of the volcano, scarce 
 venturing to look down into the fires that are 
 slumbering in the crater below. 
 
 It has more than once been suggested that means 
 should be furnished to kirk-sessions of all the town 
 
120 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 parishes in which the Churchless in any number 
 exist, for a periodical investigation into their re- 
 ligious condition ; and that the Church, having 
 furnislied these means from her Home Mission 
 Funds, should require from these kirk-sessions an 
 account of their work. This would be the first step 
 towards the recognition of the Church's responsibility 
 to the Churchless and poor. It would help to dis- 
 pel the apathy that reigns among her members 
 regarding their duty to this class of the community ; 
 it would show from time to time the work that has 
 been fully accomplished, and what yet remains to be 
 done. None but the agents of the Churches could 
 furnish this information aright. None but those 
 who have had considerable experience in sounding 
 the depths of our lapsed populations, and l)y personal 
 interest in them have gained their confidence, could 
 give anything like an adequate account of their 
 number and condition. 
 
 In order that much greater liberality may be 
 evoked in behalf of the Churchless, it is necessary 
 not only that their number and condition be fully 
 and periodically made known, but also that a special 
 channel be provided through which that liberality 
 may flow. A new Home Mission Scheme has been 
 suggested by the Moderator of the General Assembly 
 of 1883, Dr Eankine, in his excellent closing ad- 
 dress.^ Preferable, I think, would be a special 
 
 * " May not a new Home Scheme be instituted — missionary in the 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 121 
 
 branch of the old Home and Endowment Schemes 
 for the promotion of endowed territorial work among 
 the lapsed populations. Too many separate schemes 
 are apt to confuse and dissipate the gifts of the mem- 
 bers. But, until some such expedient as this is 
 adopted, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to test 
 the interest of the members of the Church in this 
 branch of her work. 
 
 The very fact of the helplessness of this class in 
 reference to the supply of spiritual ordinances ought 
 to establish a strong claim on the liberality of the 
 Church, compared with the claims of those who can 
 in some way or other help themselves. The work of 
 reclaiming the outcasts by all the agencies at the 
 Church's command would constitute a real Home 
 Mission — a mission for the spiritually helpless who 
 know not God, as much as the Foreign Mission 
 proper is for the conversion of the heathen world. 
 
 Another new departure required of the Church in 
 her duty towards the vicious and Churchless is a 
 much greater and mpre universal effort than has yet 
 been made to counteract the temptations to i7itemper- 
 ance. It can hardly be doubted that the Churches of 
 the land, if united in their efforts to lessen the temp- 
 tations to this terrible vice, could form a strong 
 public opinion on the subject, sufficient to influence 
 
 highest sense, as directed to the recovery of the most lapsed masses ? 
 Support would not be awanting. The public Christian conscience, 
 now so disquieted, would seek relief by liberal gifts." — P. 17. 
 
122 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 any Government in their favour. It is sometimes 
 said that the Church herself is a great temperance 
 association, and that all her members are pledged to 
 temperance by the very terms of Church member- 
 ship ; and that, hence, the establishment of any 
 special Church agencies for diminishing intemperance 
 is unnecessary. But so is the Church a missionary 
 association, and a governing body; but this does not 
 prevent her establishing missionary associations and 
 subordinate courts of government. If the Church 
 is in herself a temperance association, requiring no 
 special temperance agencies, why is it that she has 
 allowed the gigantic evils of intemperance to grow 
 and flourish in the land ? This plea for inactivity is 
 wellnigh exploded ; and the action at length taken 
 by the Church of Scotland and other Churches against 
 the evils of intemperance is sufficient to show that 
 they attach no weight to this laissez /aire argument. 
 It is, indeed, but late in the day that the Established 
 Church has taken up the question of temperance as a 
 distinct branch of her organisation, and the slight 
 favour she has shown this most important scheme 
 proves her still only half-hearted in the matter. It 
 has been left to separate and undenominational organ- 
 isations to originate and carry on the movement 
 until it has secured the popular ear. The Gospel 
 Temperance and other associations have done not a 
 little to diminish drinking among the poorer classes 
 and to create a sound public opinion. Mistakes have 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 123 
 
 been made, and exaggerated statements have sometimes 
 been put forth, which have created more or less pre- 
 judice against the movement, and for a time kept 
 men of position and influence from joining it. Evil 
 has been done by sometimes committing the cause 
 to men with crotchets, not amenable to reason, and 
 attempting to drive, instead of leading, public opinion ; 
 but the time for sneering at the movement, and 
 judging of it by the weak zeal of some of its leaders, 
 is past ; and those zealous men who have been di- 
 recting the temperance crusade outside the Churches 
 have now found their reward in the arresting of 
 public attention, and in the combination of various 
 forces for the promotion of national temperance. To 
 give the movement, however, anything like na- 
 tional success, two conditions seem to be absolutely 
 necessary. First, that it should be distinctly a 
 Gospel movement — a branch of the great Gospel 
 scheme for human salvation. Intemperance is so 
 directly an effect of the radical taint of sin in human 
 nature, that no other agency but that which effects 
 the conversion of man from sin unto God can ade- 
 quately cope with it. Eesults have often been 
 wrought on the unchanged heart in shutting it out 
 from the temptations to intemperance. From worldly 
 motives, from the fear of mere natural consequences, 
 from the force of public opinion, men have sometimes 
 been induced to give up drinking, who have not seen 
 the evil in the light of God's judgment ; but there is 
 
124 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 no real barrier against this vice, no radical and uni- 
 versal cure, but a change of heart. Therefore, in 
 making the attack upon the demon of intemperance 
 a Gospel temperance crusade, the reformers of the 
 present day are, without doubt, on the riglit track. 
 But this being so, it follows, in the second place, 
 as a natural consequence, that the best organisation 
 for making a successful inroad on this national vice 
 should be one in connection with the Churches. If 
 it be granted that the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ is the only effectual remedy against this 
 and the other evils springing from the radical taint 
 of human nature, it follows tliat the Church, as a 
 divinely appointed organisation for the propagation 
 of the Gospel, should be the best for the suppression 
 of national intemperance. The connection also of 
 the reformed drunkard with the Church by member- 
 ship, imparts to him one of the strongest motives for 
 maintaining his self-respect, and brings liim at the 
 same time under the eye of those who can watch his 
 progress and help him on by Christian sympathy. 
 A temperance crusade outside of the Churches may do 
 much to attract public attention and secure a large num- 
 ber of present results, but to make them permanent, 
 the reformed must not be left as mere units to sink 
 out of sight and keep themselves up as best they may, 
 but be laid hold of by Church agencies to bring them 
 into the fellowship of the general body of believers. 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 125 
 
 Now, it is here, I conceive, that the Church of 
 Scotland, as a spiritual organisation for the reforma- 
 tion of society, has failed to realise her great power 
 for good, and has left very much to organisations 
 outside of all the Churches the honourable task of 
 being pioneers in the temperance movement. Both 
 directly and indirectly, the Church may wield an 
 enormous influence for good in fighting the demon 
 of intemperance. She may do much indirectly in 
 helping to create a sound public opinion on the sub- 
 ject — in so setting forth the evils of intemperance and 
 proclaiming the duty of the temperate towards it as 
 that the heart of the nation shall be stirred, and the 
 Legislature be at length compelled to take all hind- 
 rances to the action of the Churches out of the way. 
 She may do much, also, directly in instituting tem- 
 perance societies side by side with other Christian 
 agencies, and may make her efforts for the promoting 
 of temperance co-ordinate with those for preaching 
 the Gospel among the lapsed. But before this result 
 can be attained, she must take up the temperance 
 question in earnest as one of the grandest and most 
 needful of her schemes ; it must occupy a large share 
 of her councils and bulk largely in her annual re- 
 ports. If this vice is a truly national vice, as every 
 one cognisant with its widespread effects must admit 
 that it is, it surely claims first the attention of the 
 National Church ; if it is productive of more misery, 
 
12G THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 more poverty, more crime, and more lapsing from 
 Church ordinances, than all the other vices put to- 
 gether, it is surely high time the Church were buck- 
 ling on her armour, and gathering all her forces to 
 " come to the help of the Lord against the mighty." 
 
127 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 WHEREIN THE CHURCH NEEDS A NEW DErARTURE IN HER 
 EFFORTS TOWARDS THE RECOVERY OF THE LAPSED — (ll.) 
 IN THE VAST MULTIPLICATION OF INDIVIDUAL MISSIONARY 
 EFFORT ON THE PART OF THE MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 It has sometimes been remarked, that it is the neglect 
 of duty on the part of the members of the Church 
 that makes Home Missions necessary at all.^ If all 
 the members of onr Christian Churches recognised 
 their duty as home missionaries for bringing in the 
 outcasts, then there should be hardly a household in 
 the land without the blessings of family religion and 
 public worship. Not only the giving freely of their 
 means, which is an easy thing for many to do, but 
 the giving of themselves to the work of evangel- 
 isation, is what the Church of Christ as an ag- 
 gressive agency requires. For the field of Foreign 
 Missions, the Church must send her representatives 
 to bring in the heathen into the fold ; for the Home 
 Mission field, the great missionary agents should be 
 the members of the Church themselves. Whatever 
 
 ^ See sermon on Home Missions in 'Creed and Conduct,' by Rev. 
 Dr Story, Rosneath. 
 
128 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 minor agencies there Le for the reclamation of the 
 lapsed, it is, after all, the Gospel faithfully proclaimed 
 and diligently practised that is the surest remedy for 
 all tlie moral evils that afflict our race, liut when 
 people speak of the effects of the Gospel on the 
 outcast populations, they often talk very much at 
 random, as if it were some vague supernatural in- 
 fluence exerted they know not how, and penetrating 
 they know not whither. The Gospel, it need hardly 
 be said, has its chief influence as reflected in the 
 pure and self-sacrificing lives of Christian professors. 
 When the truths of our holy religion are deeply felt 
 in the hearts of men, they burn with a natural desire 
 to communicate that which has been the means of 
 their own spiritual healing to others. The truth is, 
 therefore, self - propagating. As the seed must be 
 planted in the soil ere it can germinate and mul- 
 tiply itself in the production of similar fruit, so it 
 is only as it takes root in men's hearts that the 
 divine seed can grow and multiply. In the previous 
 chapter, there has been shown the need that exists 
 for the awakening in the members of the Church of 
 a deeper interest in the Churchless populations, and 
 the re(juirement for this purpose of a proper repre- 
 sentation of their number and condition in order to 
 the evoking of a greater liberality and to a more 
 earnest grappling with the problem. But this is 
 not enough. Those who have the means and the 
 opportunity must give not only their money, but 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 129 
 
 themselves. In other words, each member of the 
 Church, enjoying as such his or her Christian privi- 
 leges, must be, in fact, a home missionary. We need 
 in each of our large towns a great Christian army, 
 composed of all who have a little time on their 
 hands — if not on the week-days, yet on Sabbath 
 afternoons (and this will comprise the great majority 
 of Church members), and not one or two here and 
 there, to go forth in the name of the Lord to pene- 
 trate the homes where the Churchless congregate, and 
 by the power of individual Christian sympathy, by 
 the strong influence of Christian self-sacrifice, strive 
 to bring the wretched inmates to a condition of 
 comfort and Christian hope. Even in those town 
 parishes which contain a large number of respect- 
 able church-going people, there are generally some 
 localities inhabited by the Churchless and poor. On 
 whom should these have so strong a claim as on the 
 members of the congregation who worship in the 
 church of their parish ? In most cases, especially 
 where there is some missionary agency at work, the 
 number and condition of those could be easily ascer- 
 tained. If then, say, every two or three members of 
 the congregation imbued with a missionary spirit 
 were to take as many, or more, of such families 
 under their special charge, and make themselves 
 responsible for visiting them, helping them in their 
 temporal difficulties, encouraging them in habits of 
 cleanliness and self-respect, and stimulating them to 
 
 I 
 
130 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 attend on Christian ordinances, soon would the power 
 of Christian effort manifest itself in a thorough refor- 
 mation of those families and their homes. Though 
 the minister of tlie parish be forced from the nature 
 of his congregation to do chiefly congregational in- 
 stead of parochial work, he would still be able, by 
 such a grand instrumentality as this, to give an account 
 of all those within his parish who did not receive the 
 careful attention of other denominations. By this 
 combined and well - regulated missionary effort, a 
 double benefit would accrue, both to those who give 
 their services and those who receive them. As 
 bearing upon the practicability of this scheme of 
 individual missionary effort, and of adopting of poor 
 families, the folloM'ing sentences may be quoted from 
 one of the earlier reports of the Port-Dundas Mission 
 in connection with Park Church, Glasgow : " The 
 plan of ' adopting ' families," it goes on to say, " has 
 been continued with good effect. The intercourse 
 thus necessarily caused between the rich and the 
 poor is fraught with the highest good to both. In 
 regard to the mode of working this charity, we can- 
 not do better than quote from the last report : ' Let 
 the charity be given with manifestation of personal 
 sympathy, not officially, not coldly, not through 
 servants or third parties ; but let the rich go and 
 see the homes they bless, and the poor will neither 
 be the only nor tlic chief gainers by the inter- 
 
m OUR LARGE TOWNS. 131 
 
 Double service on the Lord's Day, as has been 
 suggested, might well be given up, if the members of 
 the congregation were to occupy the afternoons in 
 practical Christian work. There is not a church- 
 going family but might find a suitable sphere and 
 abundant scope for its Christian energies in real 
 missionary work among the old and young of our 
 sunken populations. If there were not sufficient 
 scope in their own parishes, some of which might 
 contain but comparatively few of the lapsed and poor, 
 there would be abundance in such a parish as has 
 been sketched in chapter v., specially endowed for 
 the poorer districts. The ministers of these could 
 not but welcome the aid of Christian workers from 
 the wealthier congregations, and would be always 
 willing to assign them special districts in which to 
 work, or destitute families for whom they might 
 care. The home missionary spirit, if properly evoked 
 among the members of the Church, will not want 
 outlets for its manifestation. If but a tithe of the 
 good were done by each member so labouring in the 
 Master's cause and working according to an under- 
 stood arrangement, which has been done by some 
 voluntary workers, many of whose good deeds are 
 known only in the homes of the poor, a great part of 
 the spiritual destitution which now lies as a blot 
 upon our Christian Churches would disappear.-" 
 What was it gave such an impulse to the spread 
 1 See Appendix XIII. 
 
132 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCH LESS AND POOR 
 
 of Christianity in the first three or four centuries of 
 the Christian era but just that each one, whose 
 heart the Divine truth had touched, considered him- 
 self a missionary to proclaim the truth abroad ? 
 Kindling with emotion at the reception of the truth, 
 he burned to communicate the good news to others ; 
 and so, not in arithmetical, but in geometrical, ratio, 
 did the Word of God prevail. By untiring labours, 
 by constant self-sacrifice, by unflinching deaths, the 
 testimony of the early witnesses for Christ prevailed 
 over the heathenism of the Eoman world, and Chris- 
 tianity was enthroned in the palace of the CVesars. 
 There is too little, far too little, of that universal 
 missionary spirit existing now. Self-sacrificing men 
 and women there still are, the very salt of the earth, 
 spending and being spent for the IMaster's cause. 
 But it is needful that the large majority also should 
 act in their spirit. True, many give their sixpences, 
 or half-crowns, or even pounds ; there are examples 
 here and there of munificent liberality for the Home 
 Mission cause ; but to give money requires little or 
 no self-sacrifice on the part of many. How few of 
 those who give their money with more or less 
 willingness give themselves ! It may look like a 
 paradox, but it is true nevertheless, that the need 
 for the existence of a Home ]\Iission Scheme is a 
 reproach to the Christianity of our age. We can 
 hardly conceive of a Home Mission Scheme taking 
 its rise in the first and second centuries when each 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 133 
 
 Christian man and woman was a living and self- 
 sacrificing witness for Christ. 
 
 The last half-century has witnessed a vast increase 
 of the wealth of the country. New discoveries and 
 scientific inventions have supplied the means of 
 adding to our comforts and ministering to our 
 luxuries. In a comparatively small number of 
 years, vast fortunes have been accumulated. Eiches 
 have flowed into the coffers of the upper and middle 
 classes. And with suddden increase of riches, there 
 has come the strong temptation to self-indulgence. 
 The habits acquired through the vast increase of 
 wealth, of luxurious self-indulgence, are hurtful to 
 the individual and to society. By this, the gulf 
 between the rich and poor has been widened and 
 not lessened. Pdches acquired or inherited, if not 
 applied with a liberal hand to the benefit of society, 
 are a source of weakness to the possessor. The gulf 
 that has been widening through increasing national 
 prosperity between higli and low can only be bridged 
 by a large amount of self-sacrifice on the part of the 
 rich towards the poor. Until this spirit more widely 
 prevails, and finds its manifestation not only in 
 money-giving but in personal work — in the lending 
 of a helping hand to lift up the outcast poor — the 
 problem of their restoration will remain unsolved. 
 
 But, while the duty of personal labour on the part of 
 those to whom God has given the time and the means is 
 abundantly clear, it is equally the duty of the Churches 
 
134 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 not only to fan the spirit of self-sacrifice, but to give 
 it proper direction. For this, the ministers and kirk- 
 sessions have a great responsibility and a clearly 
 defined duty. Any great work left to individual and 
 isolated effort is sure to fall short of the success in- 
 tended. Unless the families requiring the attention 
 and missionary efforts of the members of the con- 
 gregation are registered by the kirk-session, and the 
 workers properly told off for the duty, so that there- 
 shall be no willing workers left out of account, and 
 none needing help neglected, tlie work will l)e but 
 imperfectly done at the best. To adopt the nomen- 
 clature or foolish pranks of the Salvation Army would 
 be suicidal on the part of the Christian Church ; but 
 would it not be a delightful thing to witness each 
 congregation assuming the character of a Christian 
 army, going forth to make war upon poverty, vice, 
 irreligion, and using all the means that Christianity 
 has put in their power for the suppression of intem- 
 perance and the promotion of purity, cleanliness, and 
 Christian well-doing, till the voice of praise and prayer 
 shall be heard in regions where now are heard too 
 often drunken maledictions, and the wail of misery 
 and of despair ? 
 
135 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE church's mission TO THE CULTURED AND SCEPTICAL 
 CLASSES OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES. 
 
 Were the whole of the Churchless comprised within 
 the regions of the poorest and most wretched of our 
 large cities, the problem of their ingathering would 
 be simpler than it now is. It would still be a diffi- 
 cult one ; but as it is, the fact that there is a con- 
 siderable number of well-to-do people — many of them 
 most intelligent and respectable, some highly cultured 
 — that for one reason or other remain outside the 
 Churches, vastly increases the difficulties of the solu- 
 tion of the problem. It is sometimes affirmed with 
 a great amount of assurance, that the culture of the 
 age is outside the Churches. This is a statement 
 entirely misleading. The fact of a cultured man 
 being connected with no Church is often specially 
 noticed, but if he is a Churchman, his being so is 
 taken as a matter of course ! There cannot be a doubt, 
 that the great bulk of the intelligent, the learned — 
 of those well versed in literature, and even in the 
 
136 I'ROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 natural sciences, is within the pale of the visible 
 Church. Among these are comprehended men emi- 
 nent for their piety, exemplary in all the relations 
 of life, commending by their character and high 
 station religion to all. But this cannot blind us to 
 the fact that there is a considerable, and, it is to 
 be feared, an increasing number, of intellectual and 
 well -to -do people who claim connection with no 
 Church — who, for one reason or other, refuse sub- 
 mission to the Christian faith ; of whom some are 
 not neglectful of tlie private ordinances of religion 
 though they have discarded the public for some 
 reason satisfactory to themselves ; others of whom 
 have discarded revealed religion ; and if they believe 
 in any religious sanctions at all, hold by the uncertain 
 dictates of natural religion. Some have become so 
 impressed with the universal prevalence of natural 
 law, that they fail to recognise the laws of the 
 spiritual world, or even the presence of a Divine 
 Lawgiver at all. The natural with them has pushed 
 out, and taken the place of the supernatural. A 
 revelation ab extra given to the world through 
 human instrumentality and attested by miracles, 
 seems to them an impossibility, if not an absurdity. 
 The wide prevalence of present-day scepticism, what- 
 ever its origin, cannot but be a source of weakness 
 to the Church. The fact of men of great name 
 ignoring the claims of religion has no little influence 
 on the unthinkincr and weak. The laws of the 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 137 
 
 natural world are easily cognisable by shallow and 
 unspiritual minds ; spiritual laws, lying beyond the 
 region of the senses, require for their full recognition 
 a mind and heart in harmony with spiritual realities. 
 " The natural man receiveth not the things of the 
 spirit of God : for they are foolishness unto him : 
 neither can he know them, because they are spirit- 
 ually discerned." The very fact of some of our 
 most eminent scientists attempting by their natural 
 theories to solve all human phenomena, unduly ex- 
 alting the material and ignoring the spiritual in man, 
 is apt injuriously to affect some minds and lead them 
 to a cold and selfish materialism. Because the influ- 
 ence of natural theories, propounded with every assur- 
 ance, is for the most part hidden in its effects on 
 men's minds, we are not therefore to ignore it. How 
 far this is helped by the apathy of the Churches and 
 their strifes with each other, it is impossible to deter- 
 mine. People of a sceptical turn of mind are apt to 
 believe that that religion cannot be true which exhibits 
 itself in so many antagonistic factions, each fighting 
 for the mastery, and each proclaiming its own superi- 
 ority to the others. Were the Christian denomina- 
 tions of this country to exhibit more unity, and to 
 study more profoundly those great questions of the 
 relations of the outward to the invisible world — of 
 reason to faith — which are so agitating the minds of 
 many in the present age, certain it is that they would 
 have more weight in checking the spread of scepti- 
 
138 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 cism, and that tliey would be a source of strength 
 instead of weakness to each otlier. 
 
 But besides a speculative, there is also a practical, 
 infidelity that keeps many aloof from the membership 
 of the visible Church. Scepticism is often a thing 
 more of the lieart than of the head. Men's religious 
 views often spring from their conduct, instead of 
 their conduct from their creed. " The fool hath said 
 in his heart, there is no God " — often, because his 
 iniquitous life has made him wish it so. These 
 people are not much affected by infidel theories, 
 except so far as they find in them a corroboration 
 of the scepticism of their heart. They are, perhaps, 
 profoundly ignorant of many of the sceptical specu- 
 lations around them, and yet they are none the less 
 unbelievers, living so long amid the shadows that 
 they are fain to take them for the substance. With 
 this class, the difficulty is not so much to convince 
 tlieir minds as to remove the prejudices which warp 
 their hearts. 
 
 Then, again, there is a large class, embracing also 
 some of those last mentioned, that are kept outside 
 the Churches by tlie degrading and often immoral 
 literature with which their minds and hearts are 
 constantly steeped. The influence of degrading 
 literature is one of the most subtle and dangerous 
 anti-Christian influences with which the Churches 
 have to deal. Its cheapness brings it within the 
 reach of the poorest ; its corruptions fascinate the 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 139 
 
 natural heart. Much of the literature that circulates 
 among the classes referred to, especially in the lower 
 ranks of life, is not only degrading but communistic 
 in its tendency, calculated to do away with all moral 
 restraints and to open the flood-gates of revolution 
 and impiety. All who have taken the trouble to 
 inform themselves of the extent and influence of this 
 anti-religious force have reason to dread its baneful 
 effects. The zeal of its agents is equal to their 
 effrontery. At the very gates of the General As- 
 semblies, a shop has been opened for the sale of 
 materialistic and other anti-religious literature, as if 
 in defiance of the Churches. Atheism holds up its 
 head in society, maintaining a literature to advocate 
 its claims. The Churches and infidelity are now 
 brought face to face, and the battle that shall decide 
 the victory on the one side or on the other must soon 
 be fought. 
 
 Tliese are some of the anti-religious forces that are 
 weakening the Church of Christ by keeping many 
 outside of it who might be its ornament and strength. 
 What is the reason, then, why amid so much ecclesi- 
 astical activity and so great extension of Christian 
 agencies, this multiform scepticism is one of the chief 
 anti-Christian forces of the present age, and why all 
 the work of the Churches is hardly touching the 
 spring of its life ? 
 
 One reason may be, as already hinted, the want of 
 concert which distinguishes the action of the present- 
 
140 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 day religious sects. Each battaliou of the Christian 
 army is fighting for its own hand, and so fails to 
 make any impression on the common enemy. In 
 union, they would have been strong, and their unity 
 would have proved to the outside world the oneness 
 of the Christian faith ; disunited, they become a 
 subject of reproach to the professors of unbelief. 
 Another reason is, that the Churches have not 
 availed themselves as they might of a powerful 
 weapon ready to their hand. A widely diffused 
 irreligious literature has been the bane ; an equally 
 well-diffused religious literature should be the anti- 
 dote. Much, no doubt, has been done by a religious 
 press to counteract the effect of an irreligious litera- 
 ture, but, have the Churclics taken the advantage of 
 their high position and grand organisation to second 
 a religious press that they should ? It is to be 
 feared they have not. Of the abounding Christian 
 agencies, how few have been instituted with the 
 express purpose of counteracting the effects of a 
 low and immoral literature ! Why should not every 
 congregation have its pure literature agency, as well 
 as its missionary or temperance agency ? Or, why 
 should not its accredited missionary agents have a 
 commission to disseminate, wherever their operations 
 extend, those literary productions directly written to 
 counteract the influence of the degrading literature 
 so widely diffused ? The latter finds its way by its 
 natural attraction for tlie depraved heart on the prin- 
 
IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 141 
 
 ciple of supply and demand ; but that which shall 
 supply a counteracting influence being uncongenial 
 to such a heart requires a special agency to dis- 
 seminate it. There exists in some quarters a col- 
 porteur agency partly for this purpose, limited, 
 however, in its operations, and chiefly working in 
 the rural districts. But this miglit well be so en- 
 larged and extended as to be co-ordinate with mis- 
 sionary operations under each of the kirk-sessions of 
 the town parishes. The agents required for such 
 a work would need to be men of some education, 
 able to grapple with the strong forces of irreligious 
 literature that keep many from receiving the truth. 
 But an agency like this would reach only one 
 class of sceptics — those who have generally little 
 power of original thinking, and who are influenced 
 by the shallow or immoral literature of the age. 
 But what of men of a higher range of thought — men 
 who are above all temptation to what is low and 
 degrading, who have thought out their theories for 
 themselves, and are ready to maintain them against 
 all comers ? Has the Church no weapon wherewith 
 she may successfully contend with these ? She has 
 in her hands the weapon of truth. If she has not 
 this, she is utterly useless either for attack or de- 
 fence. Now, truth, if properly presented, is calcu- 
 lated in the end to prevail over error — must, indeed, 
 finally prevail. Furnished with this weapon, the 
 Churches stand on a high vantage-ground in their 
 
142 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 contest with error, even though the latter is con- 
 genial to the natural heart. But the force of truth 
 depends partly on the manner of its presentation, 
 and partly on the nature of the organisation formed 
 to propagate it. The Church — each separate section 
 of the visible Church — is a large combination of 
 those who in tlie great essentials of religion believe 
 very much alike. It has a series of agencies for 
 doing its work. It can lay hold of a number of 
 forces, both material and spiritual, for this purpose. 
 One of the Church's grand agents for propagating 
 the truth is, the pulpit ; another is, the press. It 
 is not correct to say that the pulpit in the present 
 age has lost its power. It would be nearer the truth 
 to say that it has failed to put forth all the power it 
 possesses for combating unbelief. The Church needs 
 to give herself to a more vigorous and more thorough 
 study of those scientific problems, and their relation 
 to revealed truth, which are exercising the minds of 
 so many in the present age. It is useless, it is fatal, 
 to ignore them. All those materialistic and phil- 
 osophic theories which attempt to strike at the root 
 of divine revelation, must be met even in tlie pulpit, 
 and refuted. The evidences for the Christian faith 
 require to be considered anew in reference to the 
 scientific and other objections of the present age. 
 Geology, biology, chronology, and antiquarian dis- 
 coveries in the East, have all a most intimate bear- 
 ing on Bible truth, and ought to be carefully con- 
 
IN OUK LAEGE TOWNS. 143 
 
 sidered by the Church in their bearing upon it. The 
 Church of former generations grappled manfully with 
 the sceptics of the day, and that of the present day 
 is all the stronger for the battles that were then 
 fought and won. There should be learning enough 
 in all the Churches now to maintain the truth of 
 God against all comers. But to do this aright — to 
 enable their ministers to keep abreast of the scientific 
 theories and discoveries of the present day — we re- 
 quire a special branch of instruction in our Divinity 
 Halls. Chairs for instruction in the relations of 
 science to theology are absolutely required, if our 
 ministers are to hold their own in the battle for 
 truth. In addition to this, public lectureships for 
 the delivery of popular lectures to counteract the 
 sceptical scientific views of the day are very much 
 needed. The subject is one which is stirring the 
 most active minds of the present day, and the pulpit 
 will lose its power if it does not faithfully and suc- 
 cessfully grapple with it. 
 
 But besides the pulpit, the Church is furnished 
 with another weapon — the press — for fighting the 
 battle of truth. So far as concerns the counteractives 
 to degrading, immoral, and communistic literature, 
 its influence has been already considered. Not a 
 little has been already done in the way of combating 
 sceptical, scientific, and philosophic theories by the 
 learned of the Church of Scotland and other Churches, 
 but much yet remains to be done. There is no one 
 
lU PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 who has gained higher hiurels in this field than 
 Professor Flint in his two volumes of Baii'd Lectures, 
 entitled ' Theism ' and ' Anti-Theistic Theories.' Had 
 the Baird Trust done no more good than promoting 
 and publisliing these lectures, it would have done an 
 invaluable service to religion in the present day. 
 With a simplicity and clearness of style that makes his 
 reasoning plain to almost the meanest capacity, the 
 writer shows himself thoroughly at home in the wide 
 range of present-day philosophic and scientific in- 
 quiries. He treats his opponents with the utmost 
 fairness, but overturns their theories with incontro- 
 vertible arguments. Those who have carefully read 
 these volumes will have no fear of the result in the 
 battle of orthodoxy against scepticism. But we need 
 other similar defenders, — defenders who will battle 
 with each new sceptical theory as it shows itself in 
 the advance of scientific discovery. "With the re- 
 production of many of the old worn-out arguments 
 against Christianity, there is ever and anon some 
 new rampart raised from which it is assailed. We 
 cannot depend, therefore, on tlie grand defences of 
 the Christian religion erected in a former age. Some 
 of them are, indeed, permanent — as effectual now 
 as ever. But, while keeping these in the foreground, 
 the Church requires to adapt lierself to those methods 
 of attack which the ever-varying forms of scepticism 
 in the present day presents. In doing this fearlessly 
 
IN OUR LAEGE TOWNS. 145 
 
 and faithfully — in summoning to her aid the highest 
 sanctified talent, and encouraging the most learned of 
 her sons to enter the arena of contest, she will be 
 doing her duty to her Divine Head, and must at 
 length prevail. 
 
H6 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 CONCLUSION — SUMMARY AND APPEAL. 
 
 I SHALL now, in this concluding chapter, gather 
 together and present in as brief a space as possible 
 the chief points and arguments of the previous chap- 
 ters, in order to found on these an appeal to professing 
 Christians and the Christian Church at large. The 
 Church is an organisation, not only for edifying the 
 body of believers of whom its membership is com- 
 posed, but also for gathering the Churchless into its 
 fold. For this purpose, it is supplied with a most 
 potent instrument — viz., the Gospel of truth ; and it 
 is the object of the Church to supply the best possible 
 organisation for manifesting the truth to the hearts 
 and consciences of men. A hard-and-fast system of 
 Church government and worship, such as belonged to 
 the exclusive and temporary Jewish economy, would 
 not suit the propagation of a religion that is to exist 
 through all time and become the common religion of 
 all mankind. Hence, in the New Testament, while 
 the principles of all Church government and organisa- 
 
THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 147 
 
 tion are clearly laid down as those on which all the 
 branches of the Church of Christ are to be founded, 
 there is a large scope given in the carrying out of 
 details and adapting Church organisations to the wants 
 and conditions of men in every age. The positive 
 rites laid down and commanded are few and simple ; 
 principles take the place, for the most part, of com- 
 manded outward observances. Hence, there is large 
 room for sanctified human wisdom in devising such 
 ecclesiastical organisations as shall be best suited to 
 the functions of a Christian Church in the age in 
 which it is established and the ages through which it 
 is to extend. Tliat Church is nearest to the divine 
 ideal which can best fulfil the twofold function of 
 a Church of Christ, already mentioned — viz., the 
 edifying of the body of believers within, and making 
 the most successful inroads on the kingdom of dark- 
 ness without. True, all ecclesiastical organisations 
 savour more or less of human imperfection, being 
 more or less the work of imperfect human instru- 
 ments ; but it has pleased God in all ages to manifest 
 His truth, not through angels, but through fallible 
 and imperfect men — all but the Son of God Himself. 
 This very fact, instead of creating a feeling of narrow- 
 ness and bigotry among the ministers and members 
 of the different sections of the Church, ought to 
 gender a spirit of humility and brotherliness and 
 toleration, and also of mutual help. No one of the 
 several Churches, so far as I can see, can claim exclu- 
 
148 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 sive divine sanction, nor has exclusive responsibility 
 for bringing in the Churchless. The Church of Scot- 
 land as an Established Church, with her settled 
 endowments and legal territorial divisions, which she 
 has the power of multiplying at will, has the best 
 means of fulfilling this responsibility, and conse- 
 quently, the highest obligation, to extend the bless- 
 ings of religion to the lapsed. The best human 
 organisation, as has been attempted to be shown in 
 an early part of this publication, is cndcnvcd territorial 
 work — the minister working within a well-defined 
 territory, limited in extent and population, in those 
 districts where the Churchless most abound — that 
 minister raised by sufficient endowment above worldly 
 distractions, able to give his whole time and atten- 
 tion to his parish, accountable for the oversight of 
 his whole territory, and by his labours among the 
 neglected poor, constituting himself their friend and 
 pastor and bringing them into church-going habits. 
 Unestablished Churches may set on foot an organi- 
 sation of this kind, and in not a few cases have done 
 excellent work among the Churchless poor, but to do 
 this, they labour under serious difficulties and dis- 
 advantages compared with the Established Church. 
 Along with the labours of the minister in this 
 endowed territory, there is required a variety of sub- 
 ordinate agencies, if possible under his direction and 
 that of his kirk-session, all having the same object of 
 helping to raise the fallen — to bring the Churchless 
 
IN OUli LARGE TOWNS. 149 
 
 under the influence of religion, and to unite them 
 to some branch of the visible Church. Those subor- 
 dinate agencies, having been already specified, need 
 not further be alluded to here. They are not the 
 exclusive property of any branch of the Cliurch of 
 Christ, but in the great work of reclaiming the 
 Churchless, may be employed with profit by all. 
 
 It has been further shown that the work of bring- 
 ing in the Churchless is one that cannot possibly be 
 done by any one branch of the Church of Christ 
 in the present divided state of the Churches. The 
 Church of Scotland, being possessed of certain advan- 
 tages, may do much, but cannot do all. It is, there- 
 fore, her duty and her privilege to ask others to 
 unite with her in this work on principles which 
 experience has shown to be most effectual ; and since 
 there is scope for the labours of all, the spiritually 
 destitute districts may be so divided that each branch 
 of the Church willing to co-operate may have an 
 assigned territory, so that in its working it may not 
 interfere with the action of the others, and all may 
 work in healthy rivalry for the same end. It is 
 surely far better that the Churchless should be gathered 
 into the fold of some rival denomination, than that 
 they should remain outside of all the Churches. But 
 it may be said that, constituted as the Churches now 
 are, this scheme is but a pious imagination. Great 
 changes in the spirit of some of their rulers, greater 
 unity of purpose, and deeper sense of responsibility, 
 
150 PROBLEM OF THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 must ensue ere such a consummation can be readied. 
 (Jranted ; but surely the hmguage of hope, the endea- 
 vour to point out their interest and their duty to 
 their Great Head, are more likely to bring about 
 that co-operation of the Churches tlian the language 
 of uncharitableness and despair. The day may 
 seem distant — that day so much desired by all true 
 Christians — wlien the Churches, laying aside their 
 jealousies and antipathies, shall be found working 
 side by side for the great object here pleaded for, and 
 so fulfilling one of the great ends of their existence ; 
 but every attempt to show the unreasonableness of 
 their standing aloof, and to point out the methods by 
 which an approachment may take place, will surely 
 be helping it on. Great changes in human opinion 
 often take place, or appear to take place, suddenly, 
 and we live in an age when, by reason of the oppor- 
 tunities afforded for the intercliange of opinion, great 
 impulses are easily communicated from the centre to 
 the circumference of society. The jn-esent revived 
 interest in the problem of the amelioration of the 
 lapsed and poor is sufficient to inspire a hope that 
 the Churches will be brought more into accord in 
 doing their part to work it out. 
 
 Common action on the part of the Cliurches will 
 necessitate a common organisation — the formation of 
 one great association, if not for the country at large, 
 at least for each of tlie larger towns, for the gather- 
 ing of funds to be applied in stimulating the work to 
 
IN OUE LARGE TOWNS. 151 
 
 be done by eacb of the associated Churches. Union 
 in action will give strength, and will help to smooth 
 all asperities. Let there be a truce in the face of 
 the common enemy to all sectarian jealousies ; let 
 the harsh cry of Disestablishment be hushed in the 
 presence of this scandal and danger to all the 
 Churches ; and let all who regard the interests of 
 Christ's truth above sectarian and selfish interests 
 combine in the work, and there will be far more 
 chance of an eventual external union than there 
 ever will be amid the upheavings of an ecclesiastical 
 revolution. " There can be no question that the 
 awful spiritual destitution which all lament is trace- 
 able in great part to the sad disunion in the Pres- 
 byterian Church. It is therefore the duty of each 
 portion of it very seriously to inquire, not, as 
 has been hitherto too much the custom, how far 
 other Churches are to blame for this, but how far 
 itself has been to blame. There can be as little 
 question that the true road to union lies, not in dis- 
 cussing the respective theories of each denomination, 
 but in active and immediate endeavour to grapple 
 with and to remedy that destitution." — Dr Scott's 
 Endowed Territorial Work, p. 7. 
 
 The need of this hearty co-operation in home mis- 
 sionary work is, therefore, great ; in fact, imperative, 
 when we consider the condition of a large number of 
 the Churchless as already faintly described. But pen 
 cannot describe, nor imagination conceive the stern 
 
152 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 reality. Were a voice to be given to the woes and 
 vices and wrongs of the miserable thousands that 
 crowd our slums and fever-dens, it would startle us 
 all. By an unpardonable laxity on the part of suc- 
 cessive Governments, multitudes of human beings 
 have been allowed to be crowded together under con- 
 ditions which make health, comfort, freedom from 
 debasing vices, impossible. And, as if this were not 
 enough, the poorest districts have been allowed to be 
 planted thick with public-houses and spirit-shops, as 
 a continual source of temptation to the poor. The 
 State draws a large revenue from the vices of those 
 it has made so miserable. The cry of philanthropy 
 to shut up those houses which grow rich on the vices 
 of the poor has long been unheeded. Those who 
 have gone down into those depths of spiritual desti- 
 tution to fight the demon drink, have had to en- 
 counter him weighted with the obstacles which the 
 State has allowed to the drunkard's reformation. 
 The Churches have had to fight a losing battle with 
 the wretched and depraved, because the State has 
 not done its duty in removing temptations out of the 
 way. Here and there, Christianising agencies have 
 rescued the degraded, but the many temptations 
 placed in the poor man's way by the wretchedness of 
 his dwelling and tlie multiplication of whisky-shops, 
 has given the victory in the race too often to vice 
 and irreligion. There is, perhaps, no vice so hard to 
 cure as intemperance, especially where temptations 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 153 
 
 to it abound. The only chance, almost, for the 
 drunkard is to remove those temptations out of the 
 way and allow spiritual agencies to do their work ; 
 but how many are the chances against him when 
 day by day he has to pass scenes of temptation, in 
 the shape of public-houses, where his craving appe- 
 tite has been formerly indulged I " I could get my 
 Bill," said a poor heart-broken working man's wife, 
 ' past one public, but oh, sir, I can't get him past 
 ten ! " ]N'ever will the State become alive to its 
 duty to remove these temptations out of the poor 
 man's way, till the great heart of the country beat 
 true, and public opinion, arising like a hurricane, 
 shall compel Government and Parliament to sweep 
 this nuisance from the earth. 
 
 Nor less needed is the action of the State in pre- 
 venting overcrowding as a cause of much of the 
 demoralisation of the poor, and in compelling the 
 owners and occupiers of such homes to make and 
 keep them in a healthy and comfortable condition. 
 The safety of the State, the wellbeing of the multi- 
 tudes at the base of our social fabric, require that 
 those causes which breed discontent and fever and 
 many other evils, shall be removed. Talk of electoral 
 rights, but it is surely the right of the poorest that 
 the home which shelters him and in which he is to 
 rear his family, shall be such as shall enable him to 
 perform the duties of a citizen and have a chance in 
 life. It is for the interest of the State, for the inter- 
 
15-4 PROBLEM OF THE CirURCIILESS AND POOR 
 
 ests of society at large, that this should be seen to ; 
 just as it is that society should be protected from the 
 reckless use of poisons, or the careless handling of 
 explosives. It is surely cheaper, more humane, more 
 Christian, to spend the money of the State, or exer- 
 cise the power of the State, in preventing evil, than 
 in paying for its effects — in diminishing temptations 
 to crime than in punishing it. Every one raised out 
 of tliese depths to become a useful and respected 
 citizen is an advantage to tlie State ; every one that, 
 through the temptations placed in his way, is allowed 
 to grow up in vice and crime, is a loss and weakness 
 to the State. State aid is not here clamoured for in 
 any matter in which the poor can help themselves. 
 It is better far that they should rely upon them- 
 selves for much in the improvement of their condi- 
 tion. But, as already stated, the State may give aid 
 for emigration to relieve the congested populations ; 
 it may encourage counteractive agencies, by lending 
 money to municipalities, or legally constituted asso- 
 ciations, at a moderate rate of interest, for improving 
 the condition and raising the tone of the poor. It 
 may give still larger encouragement to thrift and 
 economy ; and something, perhaps, in tlie way of 
 training the mothers and daughters in the principles 
 of plain cooking. 
 
 Let the State, then, take the obstacles to the social 
 and moral elevation of the poorer classes out of the 
 way ; let it give the poor at least a chance of helping 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 155 
 
 themselves ; let it try preventive instead of punitive 
 remedies ; let it call upon municipalities, on house- 
 proprietors, on the poor themselves, to do their duty 
 as to improving and keeping pure their now miser- 
 able dwellings ; and then, when all secular agents 
 have done their duty, let it summon the Churches — 
 the Church as Established and the others that are 
 willing to lend a helping hand — to use every spir- 
 itual appliance at their command, that all the forces 
 material and spiritual may be arrayed in this crusade 
 against the kingdom of darkness. Here would be a 
 union of Church and State to which only the very 
 bigoted could make objections. 
 
 These improvements, if they do come, as I humbly 
 conceive they must, will require time to mature and 
 carry out. But what about the present state of 
 matters ? Is it to be allowed to continue till public 
 opinion become ripe for some great movement ? Pub- 
 lic opinion, unless hurried on by some universal 
 impulse, is slow to move. For generations back, the 
 State as well as the Church has stood face to face 
 with this mighty problem, and with the honourable 
 exceptions already referred to, has given little serious 
 consideration to it. But now, thank God, it is com- 
 ing to the front. Statesmen of the front rank are 
 beginning to consider it from a political stand-point. 
 Devoutly is it to be wished that this great social 
 question may be kept aloof from the strifes of party. 
 Since the former part of this treatise was written, the 
 
156 PliOBLE.M OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Marquis of Salisbury in the House of Lords has inti- 
 mated a motion for a Commission of inquiry into the 
 subject. Yet this generation may pass away ere sub- 
 stantial remedies are provided ; and, meanwhile, the 
 evils of overcrowding, impure air, drunkenness, and 
 miserable homes, when not at once remedied, are 
 intensified. Souls are lost, lives are made useless 
 and wretched, crimes are hatched, while the great 
 upper world, busy with gain and enjoying the com- 
 forts of life, are leaving their wretched brothers and 
 sisters alone. But, are the Churches in tlie mean- 
 time to do nothing because they cannot do every- 
 thing ? Surely not. None have so little excuse for 
 being apathetic. Let them seek the wisest and most 
 practical organisations ; let them unite their forces ; 
 let them, if possible, double their agencies ; and by 
 their earnest working, even amid the hindrances to 
 complete success that meet them on every side, they 
 will have a stronger claim on the State to do its part. 
 In fact, there are, or should be, no instruments more 
 powerful than the Churches in forming a sound 
 public opinion on this question. Let them use, then, 
 the great power God has given them, till the con- 
 science of the country is thoroughly roused, and 
 Governments are no longer allowed to trifle with the 
 problem — no longer to spend their time in strength- 
 ening and beautifying only the upper strata of the 
 social fabric, while the base is left to rottenness and 
 corruption. 
 
IN OUK LARGE TOWNS. 157 
 
 This is a question in which, not the great towns 
 only are interested, but the country districts as well. 
 The true interests of all classes of society are indis- 
 solubly linked together. Wliat affects one part of 
 the community is sure in course of time to affect the 
 other. Wlien a poor crop is reaped, the disaster is 
 felt throughout the towns as well as the rural dis- 
 tricts in the dulness of trade ; and when disasters 
 fall upon the mines and manufactories — on those 
 who, when in receipt of good wages, could command 
 not only the necessaries, but also some of the lux- 
 uries of life — they are immediately felt in the coun- 
 try districts, in the slow demand for, and consequently 
 the cheapening of, beef and other articles of country 
 produce. So, in the solution of this problem, so 
 nearly affecting great towns, the rural districts have 
 a deep interest. The decennial census clearly proves 
 that, as the towns and mining and manufacturing 
 districts are increasing beyond the natural increase of 
 the population, so the purely rural parishes are de- 
 creasing somewhat in a like ratio. If we except 
 those that are drained out of the country by emigra- 
 tion — a comparatively small number — the rest are 
 drawn into towns, often whole families ; frequently, 
 only the younger members. Now, what becomes of 
 all those who are pouring healthy and vigorous from 
 the country districts into the large towns ? Some of 
 them are fortunate in rising to good stations, and 
 in founding comfortable, or even luxurious, homes. 
 
158 PROBLEM OF THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR 
 
 Others, by a hard struggle, manage just to keep them- 
 selves atioat. But, there is a considerable number 
 that, from want of work, family sickness, and some 
 from intemperance, sink down and fall into the num- 
 ber of the lapsed populations, to fill up the gaps 
 which vice and disease are constantly making in their 
 unhealthy homes. Missionaries, Bible -women, and 
 others, who have sounded those deeps, are often 
 meeting with such instances — sad cases of those who 
 have lost all hope in the struggle for existence, and 
 have been condemned to live in hovels they would 
 once have tliought not good enough for their pigs. 
 Many that are dwelling in their comfortable country 
 homes have either friends or acquaintances thus 
 reduced to poverty — once happy church-attenders, 
 now among the lapsed ; once healthy and comfortable, 
 now diseased and miserable ; but whether or not, all 
 have surely hearts to feel the claims of their miserable 
 fellow-men, and ears to hear their sighs and groans. 
 
 In this appeal to the Christian sympathies and 
 Christian liberality of all the church - going classes 
 in town and country, I do not leave out of account 
 the great amount of individual benevolence and of 
 individual labours among the classes whose claims 
 are here advocated. There has seldom been an age 
 distinguished by more genuine sacrifices and more 
 interested services among a ce<'''«in class in behalf 
 of the poor than the present. Those who have 
 occasion to visit the localities where they abound in 
 
IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 159 
 
 an official capacity have constant opportunities of 
 witnessing the self-denying gratuitous labours of 
 men and women who have given not only their 
 money but themselves to the work of elevating the 
 poor, whose names are household words in their 
 wretched dwellings. These people are, indeed, the 
 very salt of the earth.-^ But something more is 
 required than individual and isolated effort. These 
 self-sacrificing Christians, instead of being scattered 
 units, hopelessly fighting the battle with godlessness 
 and vice, should be but the vanguard of a great 
 Christian army, of which each congregation is a 
 regiment, and each individual member a soldier, 
 going forth to the " help of the Lord against the 
 mighty." But, the number of an army is nothing 
 without discipline and organisation ; and so it rests 
 with the Churches to supply the needed organisation 
 to those Christian forces, and afford to the benev- 
 olent and the self-sacrificing the proper channels 
 through which the Christian activity may flow. The 
 kingdom of darkness, as existing in the dens and 
 slums of our large towns, cannot be successfully 
 assailed without far more general effort and without 
 the proper direction of that effort. But, let the 
 Church without delay call out her volunteers and 
 muster her hosts ; let no dark spot remain un- 
 assailed, no master' -ice remain ungrappled with, and 
 let there be no rest till each home of the poorest in 
 
 1 See Appendix XIII. 
 
IGO THE cnuRCHLESS and poor in our large towns. 
 
 the land be not only a comfortable, but a Christian 
 home. Let there, in fine, be a great and earnest 
 call on the part of all the Churches for the Spirit of 
 the living God to descend in the plenitude of His 
 power to awaken in every Cliristian heart a genuine 
 interest in our great Home Mission — to breathe life 
 into every organisation for carrying on this campaign 
 against the powers of darkness ; and success, though 
 now apparently far distant, will be eventually sure. 
 Then " God, even our God, shall bless us, and all the 
 ends of the earth shall fear Him." 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 I. 
 
 It is pretty clear, that in our largest towns, at least, 
 churcli-building has not kept pace with the increase 
 of the spiritual destitution. Without a very great 
 deal of inquiry on the spot, it is difficult, if not im- 
 possible, to obtain anything like accurate statistics 
 regarding; the amount of religious destitution that 
 exists, but an approximation to the truth will be 
 a verification of the statement made in the text. 
 Take, for example, Edinburgh and Leith. In eleven 
 years, from 1871 to 1882, the population of the 
 combined towns had increased by about 50,000, or 
 at the rate of upwards of 4500 a-year. Allowing 
 an average of 2000 of a population for every church 
 and chapel built during those eleven years, there 
 should have been twenty-five new churches built to 
 absorb the whole increase of the population ; but 
 there were in reality only twenty-three of all de- 
 nominations, some of them but small mission chapels, 
 leaving at least 4000 unprovided for, without any 
 farther room for accommodating the large numbers 
 of the religiously destitute that had been accumulat- 
 
 L 
 
162 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 ing for several generations. In the other large 
 towns, Glasgow included, although there has, dur- 
 ing the period referred to, been great activity in 
 church-building, the accommodation of the churches 
 added has, like the case of Edinburgh, hardly been 
 sufficient for the rapidly increasing inhabitants, far 
 less, for sensibly reducing the large spiritual destitu- 
 tion known previously to exist. 
 
 II. 
 
 As a corroboration of the statements in the text, 
 the following graphic and melancholy extracts are 
 given from a record of the exjierience of a city 
 minister in volume i. of 'Life and Work,' page 26. 
 After stating that he liad been summoned late at 
 night to visit the deathbed of a drunken motlier, 
 and graphically relating some of the scenes he wit- 
 nessed on his way, of the public - houses having 
 just turned out of their glaring saloons a ragged, 
 wretched, maddened crowd of profane men and foul- 
 mouthed women, laughing, cursing, weeping, or fight- 
 ing, as the unclean spirit moved them, he adds, " I 
 knew every one of the worn damp steps in the long 
 stair, and soon found myself in the wretched home 
 where the woman was dying. The room was nearly 
 filled with people, and almost every one of them was ' 
 saturated with strong drink. The bed on which 
 the woman lay, and a wooden box beside the fire- 
 place — for there was no fire — were all tlic furniture 
 
APPENDIX. 163 
 
 in tlie house. The husband and father sat on the 
 wooden box in the weeping stage of intoxication. 
 Old withered women stood round the befl phrasing 
 about religion. Sons and daughters, with the affec- 
 tion sinned out of them, stood apart trying to shed 
 tears. The woman on the bed had reached, through 
 a course of polluted womanhood and degraded 
 motherhood, the reckoning of conscience and the 
 fear of death. ... I stood and held that blue 
 cold hand till the life went out with the tide that 
 bore it to the farther shore. . . . And where did 
 the story that so sadly ended begin ? It began 
 thirty years before in a village in the county of Fife, 
 when the gamekeeper's daughter was married to the 
 coachman's son, and when the happy pair left for life 
 in the city. The husband was to be coachman to an 
 eminent physician, and the wife was to assist in 
 the doctor's household. Their after-history was an 
 illustration of the influence of strong drink. They 
 had twelve children, and at the date of the mother's 
 death, her husband was a third-rate cabman, and all 
 her children were alive, and not one of them doing 
 well" 
 
 III 
 
 Few more graphic and heartrending accounts of 
 the effects of drink upon a man of talent and educa- 
 tion, reducing him and his family to the condition 
 of the lapsed populations, can be read than that 
 given by Dr Guthrie in his ' Second Plea for Ragged 
 
164 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 Schools.' " In the forenoon of a winter day," he 
 says, " some years ago, I received a note urging me, 
 if I wished to save his life, to hurry to the abode of 
 the writer. I knew Inm. He was a man of talent, 
 and had an uncuninion knowledge of Scripture. 
 After seeing a great deal of the world, he had re- 
 turned to spend his days at home, possessed of 
 what, with a little industry on his part, would 
 amply suffice for the maintenance of his family. A 
 prudent, tidy, sober, sensible wife, with two or three 
 fine children, made up his domestic circle ; and a 
 sweeter happier home might not have been in all 
 Edinljurgh. But what availed these ? He was a 
 drunkard. On my first visit to his district, I found 
 him a woe- begone wretch, sitting idle and gloomy in 
 a foul apartment ; his wife heartbroken, and he him- 
 self the terror of his children, who, clad in rags, 
 waited on no ministry and went to no school. In 
 the course of time, a very remarkable change was 
 wrought on his home and habits. The wilderness 
 had become an Eden, and the desert a garden of 
 the Lord. And it was a pleasant sight to see that 
 man on the Sabbath - day — his family beside him, 
 roses blooming on their cheeks, and their rags 
 changed for comfortable and becoming attire. I 
 have often looked at him with wonder as he sat 
 before the pulpit, drinking in the truth, his glisten- 
 ing eye fixed upon the speaker. His house was now 
 comfortably and fully furnished. . . . Such liad been 
 the state of matters before I received this ominous 
 note. It was with dark forebodings that I hastened 
 to the house, and climbed five flights of stairs to tlie 
 room where drunkenness and poverty had driven this 
 
APPENDIX. 165 
 
 man, and where, though brighter days had dawned, 
 he still resided. His poor wife — her eyes consumed 
 with grief, with three children clinging in terror to 
 the mother, was the jfirst sight that met me. She 
 put her finger on her lips, and led me into a neigh- 
 bour's room. There I heard all. He had been mad 
 with drink for several days. Trembling for her own 
 and her children's lives, she had to seek an asylum 
 beneath a kind neighbour's roof. The door of his 
 room was bolted, but he opened it when I knocked 
 and announced my name. What a scene was there ! 
 No furniture, no bedding ; the fire quenched on the 
 hearth ; the very grate removed from the cold black 
 chimney — all sold for drink. And, amid this deso- 
 lation stood the man himself that cold winter day, 
 without coat or vest or stockings — the sleeve of his 
 shirt rolled up to the shoulder and a large knife in 
 his hand. He had resolved on suicide, but stood 
 uncertain how to leave the scene ; whether by the 
 knife, or by the window thrown up for the dreadful 
 leap, or by a rope and noose that hung ominous and 
 frightful from a post of the bedstead. I dealt as best 
 I could with this ominous and troubled spirit. His 
 conscience was again awakened. Affection to his wife 
 and children resumed its sway. He threw himself at 
 her feet. He kissed his little ones, and accused himself 
 of being the veriest and vilest wretch on earth. The 
 scene, which would have melted a heart of stone, 
 afforded some hope that, from the new struggle with 
 an old enemy, he might at length come off victorious, 
 earning the blessing of his family and the praise of 
 Him who hath said — ' He that ruleth his own spirit 
 is better than he that taketh a city.' Alas ! his 
 
166 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 goodness was like the morning cloud ; and by-and-by 
 he abandoned his home, adding another to the vast 
 number of miserable families which have been de- 
 serted by their natural protectors. In time, he was 
 forgotten as a man out of mind. Yet we met again. 
 Engaged one day in visiting in the Grassmarket, I 
 entered a low lodging-house, kept by an Irishwoman. 
 While conversing with some of her countrymen, the 
 mistress said that a lodger in the back room wished 
 to see me. She lighted a candle, and stooping, fol- 
 lowed by me, she entered a low, long, dark, narrow 
 apartment, with beds as thick as they could be placed, 
 ranged on each side. She stopped by a bed on which, 
 under a dirty coverlet that was drawn over the face, 
 lay a human form like a corpse beneath the shroud. 
 A hea^y sigh was the only answer to the question, 
 * Who wishes to see me ? ' The face w\as at length 
 uncovered, and the light of the candle fell on the 
 haggard death-stamped features of the wretched man 
 who once seemed to have been saved. I was shocked 
 at the sight, and shaU never forget his piteous tone 
 and despairing look as he asked, ' Is it possible, sir, 
 after all, I can be saved ? ' " 
 
 IV. 
 
 " Little do many know what misery, what bitter 
 homes, what biting cold, what brutal usage, is summed 
 up in its (the street Arab's) short experience. This 
 elHike creature, whose infancy was neither cradled 
 nor caressed, that stands here with naked feet and 
 
APPENDIX. 167 
 
 tangled locks and ' uncouth features, and meagre, pale, 
 and wild,' has suffered day by day the most brutal 
 usage — usage such as, if inflicted on child, brother, 
 or sister of yours or mine, would stir the very depths 
 of passion, and make our eyes flash with angry fires. 
 What mothers they have ! One night the street along 
 which I walked was suddenly filled with loud piercing 
 shrieks. A poor starved-like boy, whose mother was 
 going with her paramour to drink, had followed her, 
 remonstrating with her. She turned on him like a 
 wild beast. I found her beating him most savagely. 
 And I well remember with what rage, when I had 
 thrust myself between them, and flung her back, she 
 turned on me to justify her brutality, alleging, that 
 as the child was hers, she might treat him as she 
 liked." — Dr Guthrie's ' Second Plea for Eagged 
 Schools.' 
 
 " It was an awful thing to see a mother, who hung 
 over a sick boy's couch and fondly kissed him, drop 
 on her knees and passionately pray to God that he 
 might never rise from that bed, but die — die there. 
 No wonder. Eleven summers had gone over that 
 young head, yet life had been all winter to him. He 
 had been starved by a drunken father ; forced on the 
 street ; forced into crime. None of those who went 
 to church wrapped up in comforts, Bible or prayer- 
 book in hand, had cared for him, poor wretch. He 
 had to steal or starve, do wrong or die. And, seeing 
 no prospect for him but the cold hands of the hang- 
 man working about that young neck, what wonder 
 that his mother wished him dead, willing rather to 
 trust him to the mercy of God than to what they call 
 the justice of man. Think of the miseries that wrung 
 
168 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 such prayers from a mother's lips, and hasten to our 
 help ; it is ' the help of the Lord against the mighty.' " 
 — Dr Guthrie's ' Third Plea for Eagged Schools.' 
 
 See also quotations from Appendix to * Pasing Tide,' 
 in Appendix VI. 
 
 V. 
 
 Intemperance. — "Wlien will the influential and well- 
 to-do classes discern the penalty we pay for allowing 
 the temptations to intoxicating drinks ? When will 
 sober Christian professors learn, that, what they think 
 to be a harmless luxury to themselves, is the cause of 
 the most awful calamities from which the country 
 has ever suffered — of untold misery to hundreds and 
 thousands of our countrymen — our own flesh and 
 blood — of the ruin of their body and soul for time 
 and for eternity — a ruin for which all the sober and 
 the respectable are in some degree responsible ? There 
 is hardly an evil from which the lapsed populations 
 of our country suffer but may be traced directly or 
 indirectly to intemperance. (1) It is the cause of the 
 most of our crime. " I believe," says Justice Mellor, 
 " that nine - tenths of the crime in this country is 
 engendered inside the doors of public-houses." " But 
 for drink," said the Lord Chief-Justice of England, 
 " we might shut up nine out of ten of our gaols." 
 Mr Justice Denman mentions that, " on one occasion, 
 in a northern county, he sat to try a calendar of 63 
 prisoners, out of which 36 were charged with crimes 
 
APPENDIX. 169 
 
 of violence, from murder downwards, there being no 
 less than 6 murderers for trial among those 36. In 
 every single case, not indirectly but directly, those 
 offences were attributed to excessive drinking." For 
 two or three years back, the ' Alliance News ' has 
 culled from neutral newspapers throughout England 
 the list of murders, assaults, casualties, and every 
 other kind of crime or calamity caused directly by 
 intoxicating drink during the last week of the old 
 year and the first of the new. This year, it has given 
 52 columns of such. In these black lists are in- 
 cluded 74 assaults on women through drink, 70 
 assaults on constables, 94 deaths, 18 cases of suicide 
 attempted, 15 cases of suicide completed, and 12 
 manslaughters or murders. A ghastly list truly ! 
 but the murders and the wife-beatings and the as- 
 saults still go on, and they produce but a mere ripple 
 on the wave of public opinion. (2) Drunkenness is 
 the fosterer of some of the most common and terrible 
 forms of disease. We have the high authority of Dr 
 Norman Kerr for the statement that, out of 1540 
 cases of gout, only one was in the person of a total 
 abstainer from wine, and he inherited the disease 
 from his wine-loving ancestors. To drink, also, he 
 says he has been able to trace three-fourths of all his 
 cases of heart disease ; and nine out of ten cases of 
 paralysis he has been able to trace directly or in- 
 directly to intoxicating drink, (3) It is the cause of 
 the greater part of our lunacy. "In the last 20 
 years," says Mr Hoyle, " our lunacy has doubled." 
 " Out of 300 idiots whose family history was care- 
 fully examined, 145 — nearly half — were the children 
 of habitual drunkards ; and in one case, where both 
 
1 70 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 parents were drunkards, no less tlian seven children 
 were born idiots." "GO out of every 100," says 
 Lord Shaftesbury, for sixteen years chairman of the 
 Commission in Lunacy, " come to these asylums 
 directly through drink." (4) Besides being the cause 
 of a large proportion of our pauperism, drunkenness 
 is responsible directly or indirectly for at least 120,000 
 deaths per annum throughout Britain, of which 49,700 
 are caused directly, the remainder from accident, vio- 
 lence, starvation, or disease, caused from the intem- 
 perance of others. (5) Intoxicating drinks, in their 
 production and consumption, and in the losses direct 
 and indirect caused by them, involve a loss to the 
 nation of nearly £250,000,000 per annum. " I have 
 shown," says Mr William Hoyle, the most eminent, 
 perhaps, of living authorities, " that, during the last 
 50 years, we, as a nation, by our drinking habits, 
 have wasted upwards of thirteen thousand millions of 
 pounds sterling — an amount of wealth as great, and 
 half as great again, as the total wealth of the United 
 Kingdom. And, what has been the return for this 
 payment ? Social demoralisation has been engen- 
 dered, disease and premature deaths have largely 
 been caused, Avhilst morality, religion, education, 
 have been obstructed and frequently blasted. If the 
 nation, priding itself upon its high Christian char- 
 acter, its intelligence, and great common-sense, had 
 paid this sum to be saved from these evils, it would 
 have been praiseworthy conduct ; but to buy them, 
 and at such a price, is conduct that is so irrational 
 as to be incredible, were it not manifest before 
 our eyes." 
 
 It is true that, during the past ten years, the con- 
 
APPENDIX. 171 
 
 sumption of wine and spirits has sensibly diminished 
 within the United Kingdom — a fact that cannot but 
 be gratifying, so far as it goes, because it is due, in a 
 considerable measure, to the agitation of temperance 
 reformers ; but the diminution rather represents the 
 result of total abstinence on the part of many in the 
 middle and upper ranks of life, than an improvement 
 in the habits of the poor, though, among many of 
 them, also, it is pleasing to note, total abstinence has 
 taken root. One of the most deplorable aspects of 
 the vice of intemperance, is that so many of its 
 victims are women. In an eloquent sermon on 
 intemperance by Archdeacon Farrar, entitled, ' A 
 Nation's Curse,' he states that in four hours in one 
 city, 36,803 women were seen going into public- 
 houses. In Edinburgh, it is stated, the arrests of 
 women for drunkenness in 1877 showed an increase 
 of 43 per cent as compared with 1871. With all 
 that has been done among the poor and lapsed 
 classes in the way of temperance reformation, the 
 effects of drunkenness among the classes inhabiting 
 the wretched dwellings of our crowded alleys are 
 simply appalling. " If you would know," says the 
 Venerable Archdeacon Govett, from whose pamphlet, 
 entitled ' Strong Drink and its Eesults,' I have 
 quoted a good many of the facts above set forth, — 
 " If you would know what drinking habits bring, go 
 into the courts and alleys of our great cities ; go, see 
 whole populations, men, women, and children, with 
 faces bloated, sodden, brutalised, savage, and but half 
 human. See women, or creatures that had once been 
 women, shrieking, fighting, blaspheming, pawning the 
 shawls off their backs, and the very bed on which 
 
172 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 their children lie, — poor, ragged, emaciated, lost to 
 health, lost to respectability, lost to shame. Or, 
 follow that mau just reeling from the gin -palace. 
 Witness the squalid misery of that bare, foul room, 
 which, but for drink, might have been a happy 
 cottage home ; see his children, as they hear his 
 step on the stairs, fly from him terror - stricken, 
 and huddle away out of sight in the corner, in the 
 street, anywhere ; look at that poor, frightened, 
 shuddering wife ! Hark ! hear you that cry ? But, 
 great God ! the picture is too horrible. What then 
 the reality ? . . . And, had you seen these scenes 
 with your own eyes, your heart, however strong, 
 would sink within you, at this widespread, terrific 
 misery, this eating canker of our country's life." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Miseries of Ovcrcroioding. — In an address delivered 
 several years ago on ' How to bring the Gospel before 
 the Masses of London,' Lord Shaftesbury says : " I 
 maintain that the grand and leading mischief is the 
 domiciliary condition of large masses of the people of 
 London. I have seen as many as twenty persons 
 living in a single room ; and, is it possible, I ask, 
 when such cases not only exist but abound, to insti- 
 tute purity of life, of thought, of action, or observe 
 any of the demands of domestic duty ? This is the 
 besetting evil that surrounds us all ; this is the great 
 and overwhelming mischief that is bringing corrup- 
 
APPENDIX. 173 
 
 tion on the populations, which is one great cause of 
 that which is the main curse of our country — those 
 habits of drinking and inebriety. The filthy physical 
 state, the depression of the nervous system, the mis- 
 ery brought on by that mode of life, drive people to 
 find artificial stimulants in the beer-houses and the 
 gin-shops." 
 
 The following extracts are from the published 
 records of those who have personally examined into 
 the condition of the poorest classes in our large cities, 
 it being premised that, though not many such extreme 
 cases are now found as some of those here referred 
 to, yet, in the densest and most squalid quarters they 
 are still met with in our largest towns. They are 
 here given as pictures of the home-life of the in- 
 habitants, whom penury or vice has driven to inhabit 
 the worst of our city slums. (1) From letters in 
 the ' Daily Mail,' by that paper's special corres- 
 pondent, published some years ago, and quoted in 
 Appendix to ' Eising Tide, and how to Stem it,' by 
 Kev. James Johnston, Free St James' Church, Glas- 
 gow. " Men and women alike are here living in a 
 most wretched condition of squalor, and what is most 
 pitiable of all is to see young children of every age, 
 from the sucking infant to the child of six, huddled 
 up on the damp cold floors of these miserable habita- 
 tions. Many of these children are quite dwarfed, 
 and attenuated to mere skeletons ; their crooked 
 limbs and wasted and little claw-like hands all com- 
 bine to give them a weird appearance which is both 
 painful and touching to look upon. . . . One house 
 which we visited was inhabited by a very decent- 
 looking Irishwoman and her family. Her husband 
 
174 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 worked at the wharf during the day, and she took 
 in washing. Slie lived in one of the two-storeyed 
 h-ouses containing one apartment. This apartment 
 was also overcrowded, but the inmates consisted ex- 
 clusively of the woman's own family. The atmos- 
 phere was very close and oppressive, and on asking 
 her why she did not keep a little of her window open, 
 she said, she dare not open it for the stench that would 
 come from outside. "VVe asked her if she enjoyed 
 good health. ' Oh yes,' said she, ' but the children 
 are sometimes bad, and I lost a fine little girl last 
 year from a kind of decline. She was always sick, 
 and when the scavengers came, she used to take very 
 bad.' We asked her, ' Did she not find any evil re- 
 sults from the cleansing of the middens ? ' ' Well, 
 surs,' says she, ' it isn't pleasant, and it sometimes 
 takes my heart. But, thank God ! although it's twice 
 a-day, he doesn't come at meal-times.' " 
 
 (2) The following quotations as to overcrowding 
 are from reports of missionary operations in New 
 Greyfriars' Parish, Edinburgh, during the incumbency 
 of the late Dr Robertson. In one of the excellent 
 reports of the minister of the Working Man's Church, 
 Grassmarket, it is stated, " Very great improvements 
 have been effected on the parish by the various ben- 
 evolent evangelising schemes which have for many 
 years been in operation in connection with the New 
 Greyfriars' congregation, and much good has been 
 done by the demolition of many miserable dwellings. 
 Still, both the moral and physical condition of many 
 inliabitants of the Grassmarket is bad enough. Very 
 many families have only one apartment, and many 
 dwellings are damp, dark, filthy, and excessively 
 
APPENDIX. 175 
 
 crowded. . . . The following brief extract from my 
 note-book refers to a quarter by no means so bad as 
 others : ' Short stair ; only six families ; thin, rickety 
 partitions and floors ; no ceiling. Eoom No. 1 — 
 Garret, barely high enough to stand in highest part ; 
 no furniture, but a loathsome-looking bed, covered 
 with a few rags ; floor so littered with cinders, straw, 
 and moist filth, that shovel would be needed to 
 clean it ; tenant, a widow, wdth sister and eight chil- 
 dren, fourteen years and under ; . . . two of them, 
 three and five years old, without a shred of clothing; 
 mother out washing all day, and her sister drunk in 
 bed with the baby ; about 60 feet of air to each indi- 
 vidual. . . . No. 6 — All available space crowded 
 with wretched beds ; widow and daughter keep pro- 
 miscuous lodging-house of indescribable character.' " 
 
 According to the census of 1881, 41 per cent of 
 the families in Glasgow, and about 25 per cent of 
 those in Aberdeen, were living in houses of one room, 
 — facts which speak volumes, especially in the former 
 case, of the evils of overcrowding ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 Want of Remunerative Work. — The grinding and 
 slavish work of many poor families and individual 
 sempstresses and others to obtain the barest neces- 
 saries of life is very graphically pictured in that 
 thrilling pamphlet, which has directed so much atten- 
 tion to the problem we are considering, ' The Bitter 
 
1 7G THE CIIURCHLESS AND POOR IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 Cry of Outcast London,' recently published. "A child 
 seven years old is known easily to make 10s. 6d. 
 a- week by thieving, but, what can he earn by such 
 work as match-box making, for which 2^d. a gross is 
 paid, the maker having to find his own fire for drying 
 the boxes, and his own paste and string ? Before he 
 can gain as much as the young thief, he must make 
 56 gross of match-boxes a- week, or 129G a-day. It 
 is needless to say that this is impossible, for even 
 adults can rarely make more than an average of half 
 tliat number. How long, then, must the little hands 
 toil before they can earn the price of the scantiest 
 meal ? Women, for the work of trousers' finishing 
 {i.e., sewing in linings, making button - holes, and 
 stitching on the buttons), receive 2|d. a pair, and 
 have to find their own thread. We ask a woman 
 who is making tweed trousers how much she can 
 earn in a day, and are told, one shilling. But what 
 does a day mean to this poor soul ? Seventeen hours. 
 From five in the morning to ten at night — no pause 
 for meals. She eats her crust and drinks a little tea 
 as she works, making in very truth with her needle 
 and thread, not her living only but her shroud. For 
 making men's shirts, these women are paid lOd. per 
 dozen ; lawn-tennis aprons, 3d. a dozen ; and babies' 
 hoods, from Is. 6d. to 2s. a dozen. In St George's- 
 in-the-East, large numbers of women and children, 
 some of the latter only seven years old, are employed 
 in sack-making, for whicli they get a farthing each. 
 In one house was found a M'idow and her half-idiot 
 daughter making palliasses at Ifd. each. Here is a 
 woman who has a sick husband and a little child to 
 look after. She is employed at shirt-finishing at 3d. 
 
APPENDIX. 177 
 
 a dozen, and by the utmost effort can only earn 6d. 
 a-day, out of -which she has to find her own thread. 
 . . , With men, it is, comparatively speaking, no 
 better. ' My master,' says one man visited by a 
 recent writer in the ' Fortnightly Eeview,' gets a 
 pound for what he gives me 3s. for making.' " 
 
 " ' My mother and myself and eldest child, who is 
 lame,' said a match-box maker to a London visitor, 
 'can only make six gross a-day, which, at lid., is 
 7^d., out of which we have to find paste and hemp, 
 and firing to dry them when finished : but, God 
 knows, it is but little firing we can have ; as you see, 
 we have none to-day. We have to pay Is. 6d. per 
 week rent. It is not living, sir — it is starving. The 
 children can't go to school, even if their clothing 
 would permit, because they must earn a few pence at 
 home.' " — From ' Forty Years' Mission Work among 
 the Outcast Poor of London.' 
 
 VIIL 
 
 Artisans' Dwellings Act.-^T\\Q preamble of this 
 Act sets forth, that in various jDortions of our cities 
 and burghs, the buildings are so densely inhabited as 
 to be injurious to the moral and physical welfare of 
 the inhabitants — that, in consequence of the want of 
 b'ght, air, ventilation, and proper conveniences, fevers 
 and diseases are generated, and that the several 
 houses, or courts, or alleys often belong to several 
 owners, whereby one owner cannot make those altera- 
 
 M 
 
178 THE CIIUKCIILESS AND TOOIi IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 tions that are needful for the public health, — that the 
 public health requires many such places to 'be pulled 
 down and reconstructed, and that, in connection with 
 this reconstruction, it is expedient that provision be 
 made for the dwellings of the working classes who 
 may be displaced in consequence thereof. The Act 
 applies only to royal and parliamentary burghs in 
 Scotland having a population of 25,000 or upwards. 
 If two justices or twelve ratepayers complain, the 
 local authority's medical officer must examine and 
 report whether in his opinion it is, or is not, an 
 unhealthy area. If satisfied of the truth of this 
 representation, and of the sufficiency of their resources, 
 the local authority shall jiass a resolution that it is 
 an unhealthy area, and forthwith proceed to make a 
 scheme for its improvement. It must in this scheme 
 make provision for the accommodation of at least as 
 many of the working classes as may be displaced, in 
 suitable dwellings within the same area, or vicinity 
 thereof The scheme may be carried out by the owner, 
 or with the concurrence of the owner, of any property 
 therein, under the superintendence and control of the 
 local authority upon such terms as may be agreed on. 
 Notices have to be served on the owners, and jjetition 
 for confirmation has to *be laid before the Secretary 
 of State. The latter, if he approves, directs a local 
 inquiry, and on report, may make such modifications as 
 he tliinks fit, except that no additional land be taken. 
 The provisional order must be sanctioned by Parlia- 
 ment. Provision has to be made for costs properly 
 incurred by the owners of lands compulsorily taken. 
 If the local authority fail or refuse to pass an im- 
 provement scheme, the Secretary of State may make 
 
APPENDIX. 179 
 
 inquiry on official representation to tliem by their 
 medical officer of health. The remaining provisions 
 of this Act have reference to details in working out 
 the scheme. From this very brief abstract of it, it 
 will be seen that it is a scheme calculated to be of 
 the greatest practical benefit to large towns ; but that 
 its initiation may be tedious, and the practical diffi- 
 culties connected with it considerable. 
 
 IX. 
 
 The suggestion of Dr Guthrie referred to in the 
 text is found in Appendix to ' The City : its Sins and 
 Sorrows,' and is as follows : " The interest of the 
 dram-seller lies in inducing them (the drinkers) to 
 become frequent and regular customers of his shop. 
 The more they drink, the worse for their families, but 
 the better for him. ... As the drunkard is held respon- 
 sible for all that he does in a state of drunkenness, 
 the law should declare that the keeper of the drink- 
 ing-shop, within which he got drink, shall share in 
 his responsibility. Xo man can have a right, for the 
 sake of money, to convert another into a madman, 
 and having turned him out on society, to say of 
 whatever offence in his madness he commits, ' My 
 hands are clean.' It is strange to see how society 
 stands by and allows so many to waste their life, 
 their wages, their substance, on drink, and thereby 
 throw the burden of maintaining their families on 
 
180 THE CUURCHLESS AND POOR IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 the sober and imlustrious part of the community. . . . 
 Virtue with us is taxed to support vice." 
 
 X. 
 
 Bagged Schools. — Tlie Eagged School Union of 
 London for the institution and support of Eagged 
 Schools was instituted in 1844, just forty years ago. 
 At the time it was started, it was calculated that 
 there were in London more than 100,000 youths of 
 both sexes growing up untaught and uncared for. 
 The object of the Union was to give such youths 
 some knowledge of the commonest principles of 
 morality and religion. "Some few years since, it was 
 ascertained, as the result of careful inquiry, that 
 more than 300,000 children had been taken off the 
 streets of London, and put in the way of earning an 
 honest livelihood, who, but for the Eagged Schools, 
 would have sunk into the ranks of those who in 
 Paris are called the dangerous classes." — See ' The 
 Dens of London ; or. Forty Years' Mission Work among 
 the Outcast Poor of London.' The following testi- 
 mony of Lord Shaftesbury, who from the first was 
 appointed president of the Union, comes with all the 
 weight of his long services to the cause of humanity, 
 and of his high and noble character : " Having 
 known and watched the Eagged Schools from their 
 very beginning, and having, during many years, 
 devoted days and nights to the advancement of 
 their interests, I conscientiously assert that I believe 
 
APPENDIX. 181 
 
 their existence in full vigour to be, in the strongest 
 sense of the words, absolutely essential to the sav- 
 ing from sin and misery tens of thousands of chil- 
 dren at present in the most degraded and unhappy 
 condition." 
 
 The recommendations of the Commission on Ee- 
 formatories and Industrial Schools, in their report to 
 Parliament recently issued, would so far obviate the 
 objections stated in the text to Industrial Schools ; 
 bvit entirely voluntary institutions, like Ragged 
 Schools, paid, if possible, by Parliament for educa- 
 tional results, appear to be the only agencies capable 
 of effecting a thorough reformation of the young 
 brought up in the slums. 
 
 XL 
 
 Co-oycrative Stores for the Poor. — A few facts 
 regarding one of the most successful of the working 
 men's co-operative stores — viz., that established at 
 Eochdale, England — may be of interest to the reader. 
 It originated in 1844, during a time of depression in 
 trade, with twenty-eight poor weavers, who met and 
 formed themselves into a society for turning their 
 hard-made earnings to the most profitable use. They 
 had agreed to club together and purchase some of the 
 necessaries of life at wholesale prices, and then sell 
 them at the retail prices to each member of the society 
 without adulteration. They desired that the profits, 
 which go into the pockets of the retail dealer, should 
 
182 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IN OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 go into their own. Under the credit system, tlie good 
 payer has to make up for the defects of the bad. So, 
 tliey resolved that nothing shouhl be sold but for ready 
 money. Their weekly subscription was 2d. each, and 
 as soon as the money they had clubbed together was 
 sufficient to buy a sack of meal, it was sold out to 
 the members at cost price. Gradually their business 
 extended ; others joined as members, and they were 
 able to deal in all the ordinary necessaries of life. As 
 the society prospered, it extended its operations, always 
 laying aside a portion of its gains for the literary im- 
 provement and otherwise of the members. By 1857, 
 thirteen years after it was started, the association had 
 a capital of nearly £2,500,000. The cost of man- 
 agement is only one per cent on the returns. Be- 
 sides establishing libraries, news-rooms, and reading- 
 rooms, for the benefit of its members, it has set on 
 foot a large number of branches in or near the town. 
 In 1866, it had 6246 members, and an income from 
 goods sold of £249,122, and a profit of £31,931. 
 ]]esides benefiting the members directly, it has had a 
 most important effect in promoting temperance and 
 thrift; and has led to the establishment of many 
 similar societies throushout the north of England. 
 
 XII. 
 
 Glasgoio Foundry Boys Religious Society. — This 
 great benevolent society for tlie benefit of working 
 boys and girls of llie lower classes in Glasgow, was 
 
APPENDIX. 183 
 
 originated in 1865, although attempts on a smaller 
 scale to benefit the young of that class had their 
 origin at an earlier date. It was instituted " for the 
 religious, educational, and social elevation of the vast 
 numbers of boys employed in the foundries and work- 
 shops of the city." It is properly a religious society 
 — the other departments, viz., the educational, the 
 provident, and the social reform, being all subordinate 
 to the first, and intended as helps to it. It is not 
 denominational, but all its managing members must 
 be in full communion with a Protestant Evangelical 
 Church. Its administration is vested in a Board of 
 Directors of not more than 18, chosen for three 
 years by the members from among themselves. 
 Though undenominational, it is always wishful to 
 connect itself with the religious denominations of the 
 districts in which its meetings are held, and to hold 
 its Sunday meetings in the halls of such churches. 
 Space does not permit of my entering into details of 
 tliis admirably managed institution, which has been 
 the means of Christianising and making useful mem- 
 bers of society thousands of boys and girls, who, but 
 for this, might have sunk into the ranks of the lapsed. 
 Particulars will be found in the annual reports and pro- 
 grammes of daily and weekly operations published by 
 the Society. Everything is done in the various meet- 
 ings held throughout the city (which are held simulta- 
 neously, and in which exactly the same programme is 
 gone through), to interest the boys and girls in religion 
 and in benevolent and missionary schemes. Suffice 
 it to say, that for the year 1882, there were 90 
 Sabbath meetings — i.e., meetings held in 90 different 
 places throughout the city ; a membership of boys 
 
184 THE CHURCHLESS AND POOR IX OUR LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 and girls of 19,818, and of workers 2178, showing 
 an immense progress since the first year of institu- 
 tion, when there were only two Sabbath meetings, 
 560 boys and girls in membership, and 14 regular, 
 with 130 occasional, workers. During the same 
 year, 1882, the income, including some small balan- 
 ces, amounted to £3421. In this was included, of 
 voluntary contributions by the members for the So- 
 ciety's funds, and for infirmaries and other home 
 benevolent institutions, £780 ; and for missionary 
 operations abroad, £345. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The author might have confirmed most of the 
 statements made in the text rej^rardinc; the condition 
 of the poor and lapsed, from his own experience, but 
 has preferred to give the corroborative testimony of 
 others. 
 
 The following brief extracts from his own journal, 
 written at the time of his visitation of a city parish, 
 now a good few years ago, are quoted as praiseworthy 
 examples of individual missionary action. " In all 
 my rounds, nothing is more refreshing than the cheer- 
 ing accounts everywhere obtained of the kindness of 
 the lady visitors. There is scarcely a home within 
 the parish where sickness or destitution prevails, but 
 they enliven and make happy by their kind deeds 
 and soothing words. They go about from house to 
 house in the poorer districts, distributing tracts, giv- 
 
APPENDIX. 185 
 
 ing clothing to the destitute, speaking kind words of 
 Christian sympathy, and reading the Scriptures and 
 pious books to the sick and dying." Here follows 
 from the same source a testimony to the pious and self- 
 denying missionary labours of a plain working man. 
 He and his wife had come from the country and 
 settled down in a resi3ectable but rather poor neigh- 
 bourhood. " The husband and wife are both eno-a^ed 
 in Sabbath-school teaching ; and it was affirmed to 
 me by one who had an ojDportunity of knowing, that 
 the husband devotes a large portion of his wages (they 
 had no family) to the purchase of tracts and useful 
 books for the young ; and that on a recent occasion, 
 when he received a present from his fellow-workmen, 
 he devoted a part of it for the same noble purpose." 
 What might an army of home missionaries do if 
 animated by the same spirit ! 
 
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