III.PASSIONLESS REFORMERS.[1]

Samuel A. Barnett.

1Reprinted, by permission, from theFortnightly Reviewof August 1882.

Themention of the poor brings up to most people’s minds scenes of suffering, want, and misery. The vast number of people who, while poor in money, are rich in life’s good, who live quiet, thoughtful, dignified lives, are forgotten, and the word ‘poor’ means to many the class which we may call degraded. But the first class is by far the largest, and the wide East End of London (which the indolent think of only as revolting) contains at a rough calculation, say, twenty of the worthy poor to one of the degraded poor. It is curious how widely spread is the reverse idea. Many times have I been asked if I am not ‘afraid to walk in East London,’ and an article on the People’s Entertainment Society aroused, not unjustly, the anger of the East London people at the writer’s descriptions of them and of her fears for her personal safety while standing in the Mile End Road! One lady, after a visit to St. George’s-in-the-East and Stepney, expressed great astonishment to find that the people lived inhouses. She had expected that they abode, not exactly in tents, but in huts, old railway carriages, caravans, or squattedagainst a wall. East Londoners will be glad to know that she went back a wiser and not a sadder woman, having learnt that riches are not necessary to refinement, that some of the noblest characters are developed under the enforced self-control of an income of a pound or thirty shillings a week, that love lived side by side with poverty without thought of exit by the window though poverty had trodden a beaten path through the door, and that books and ideas, though not plentiful enough to become toys, were read, loved, and lived with until they became part of the being of their possessors.

But distinct from this class—among whom may be counted some of the noblest examples of life—there is the class of degraded poor. Here the want is not so much a want of money (some of the trades, such as hawking, flower-selling, shoe-blacking, occasionally bringing in as much as from ten to twenty shillings a day) as the want of the common virtues of ordinary life. In many of these poor, the mere intellectual conception of principle, as such, is absent; they have no moral ideal; spirituality to them is as little understood in idea as in word. Sinning (sensual low brutal sins) is the most common, the to-be-expected course. The standard has got reversed, and those who have turnings towards, and vague aspirations for, better things too often find it impossible to give these feelings practical expression in a society where wrong is upheld by public opinion; where the only test of right is the avoidance of being ‘nabbed’ by the police; and the highest law is that expressed by the magistrate.

How can these people be raised to enjoy spiritual life? Too often the symptoms are mistaken for thedisease. In times of illness, bad weather, or depression of their particular trade, their poverty is the one apparent fact about them, and tender-hearted people rush eagerly to relieve it. That poverty was but the natural result of their sinful, self-indulgent lives; and by it they might have learnt great lessons. The hands of the charity-giver too often, in such cases, act as a screen between a man and his Almighty Teacher. The physical suffering which should have recalled to him his past carelessness or sin is thus made of no avail. Mistaken love! gifts cannot raise these people. Better houses, provident clubs, savings banks, &c. are all useful and do necessary work in forming a good ground in which the seed can grow, but thought must be given lest such efforts leave the people in the condition of more comfortable animals. Materialism is already so strong a force in the world that those who look deeper than the material part of man should beware lest they accentuate what is, in whatever form it appears—whether in the low sensuality of the degraded or the enervating luxury of the æsthete—a circumscribed, ungodly life.

The stimulus of ‘getting on’ is also used, but it is a dangerous influence, sapping ofttimes the one virtue which is strong and beautiful in the lives of these people, their communistic love; and if adopted by minds empty of principle may become a new source of wrong. ‘Getting on’ regardless of the means is but another way of going back.

Influences calling themselves religious are tried, and chiefly, all honour be to them, by the evangelicals who, filled with horror at what they hold to be the ultimate fate of such masses, go fearlessly and perseveringly amongthem, preaching earnestly, if not always rationally, their special tenets. Heaven, as a material place, they still paint in the poetic terms which represented to the Oriental mind the highest spiritual happiness, and is offered as a reward to men imbued with the materialistic spirit of the age, and living coarse and sensual lives. Hell, as a place of physical suffering, is so often threatened that it becomes to many people the most likely thing that they shall go there. The story is perfectly true of the clergyman who, preaching to one of these oft-threatened congregations, tried to show them that sin (according to his explanation removal from God) was hell, and that the awfulness of hell did not consist in being a place where the body would be uncomfortable, but in being a state from which all good and God were absent. Walking behind some of his hearers afterwards, he overheard, ‘Parson says there be’ant no hell, Dick. Where be you and I to go then?’ Imagine feeling homeless because there may be no hell!

But even if the talk of hell still awakens some fear and dread, it is again only a material horror—it but exaggerates the importance of the body, and projects into an after-death sphere the selfish animal life already being led. This will not cultivate spirituality. No! religion thus materialised is a dead-letter; it will not feed the spiritual needs of the people. We have forgotten the words of the Divine Teacher about casting pearls before the swine, and the swine have turned again and rent us. As an old Cornish coachman said the other day in answer to a question about the services of a church which we happened to be passing, ‘Ay, yes,there’s a great advance in church activity, no doubt of that, but little in spirituality somehow. The people’s souls have been preached to death.’

The religionists have taught until the people know all and feel nothing; they have talked about religion till it palls in the hearer’s ears. They have blasphemed by askingpityfor our Lord’s physical sufferings when His thoughts and being were atonewith God; when He was exulting (as only noble souls can faintly conceive of exultation) in His finished work.

Religion has been degraded by these teachers until it is difficult to gain the people’s ears to hear it. I have often watched congregations who, keenly interested so long as personal narratives are told, books discussed, or allegories pictured, relax their attention so soon as religion is reverted to, with an air which is told in every muscle of ‘knowing all that.’ The story once humorously told by the lamented Leonard Montefiore of his experience as a Sabbath-school teacher is a little straw showing withal the way of the stream. Feeling somewhat at a loss as to what to teach, the class being a strange one, he thought he would be safe in telling them a Bible story; so he began on Moses’ history, painting, as only he could paint for children’s minds, the conditions of the times, making Egypt, with its gorgeous palaces and age-defying temples, live again, showing the princess as a very fairy one, and letting them see through his well-cultivated mind the very age of Rameses. All went well, the children breathless with interest, until he came to the familiar incident of the little ark and the crying babe—‘Oh! ’tis only Moses again!’ cried one boy, and their interest vanished; they half felt they had been‘taken in,’ and for the remainder of the lesson they gave him a bad time.

The experience of many a popular preacher would, if he confessed honestly, be much the same as Mr. Montefiore’s. One body of evangelists, in order to attract the people, started a band which, playing loud, blatant marches or swinging hymn tunes, brought hundreds of people, who sat and listened with interest to the music. On its stopping and the preacher rising to speak, the people got up and poured out through the large open gate. The preacher paused, and on a sign the music recommenced and the audience sat down again. Three times was the effort made. No! though the preacher was advertised as the converted swindler or gipsy, or some such attractive title, it was of no avail. The people would not listen to the ‘old, old story’—‘Bless you, my children,’ said he, at last, sitting down in despair, ‘but I wish you’d mend yer manners.’ It was a larger rent than their manners which wanted mending. These people’s lives are already too full of excitement. There is no rest nor repose in them. Dignity has given way to hurry. To attract them to religion, further excitement is often resorted to, and sensationalism with all its vulgarity is brought to play upon the buried soul which we are told we should ‘possess in quietness.’

I was once present at a religious meeting where the preacher narrated, with much gusto, accounts of sudden and unexpected deaths and the ultimate fate of the dead ones, making the ignorant audience feel fearful that their every breath might be their last. Finding that even this did not sufficiently stir the people, he pleaded that God in His mercy ‘would shut the doors of hell—aye, evenwith abang!’—for a few moments until he had saved the souls before him. After the word ‘bang’ he paused in an attitude of attention as if listening to hear the slamming doors. The excitement was intense; many weak-minded people went into hysterics and others hastened to be converted and ‘made safe’ while the hell-doors were shut. To such means have some religionists reverted to teach the people the Gospel!

No, alas! the old channels are no longer available for the water of life; without it the people are dead, live they ever so comfortably. A spiritual life is the true life; as men become spiritualised, as the moral ideal becomes the source of action, the old words and forms may regain meaning. Phrases now to them meaning nothing or only superstition will then express their very being; but without a belief in the ideal they are but empty words, like ‘the sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.’

How can these degraded people be given these priceless gifts? The usual religious means have failed, the unusual must be tried; we must deal with the people as individuals, being content to speak, not to the thousands, but to ones and twos; we must become the friend, the intimate of a few; we must lead them up through the well-known paths of cleanliness, honesty, industry, until we attain the higher ground whence glimpses can be caught of the brighter land, the land of spiritual life.

Hitherto the large number of the degraded people have appalled the philanthropist; they have been spoken of as the ‘lapsed masses’; and efforts to reach them have not been considered successful unless the resultscan be counted by hundreds. But there is the higher authority for the individual teaching; He whom all men now delight to honour, whose life, words, and actions are held up for imitation; He chose twelve only to especially influence; He spent long hours in conversation with single persons; He thought no incident too trivial to inquire into, no petty quarrel beneath His interference. We must know and be known, love and be loved, by our less happy brother until he learn, through the friend whom he has seen, knowledge of God whom he has not seen. All this must be done, and not one stone of practical helpfulness left unturned, and

God’s passionless reformers, influencesThat purify and heal and are not seen,

God’s passionless reformers, influences

That purify and heal and are not seen,

must be summoned also to give their aid. Among these are flowers, not given in bundles nor loose, but daintily arranged in bouquets, brought by the hand of the friend who will stop to carefully dispose them in the broken jug or cracked basin, so that they should lose none of their beauty as long as the close atmosphere allows them to live: flowers (without text-cards) left to speak their own message, allowed to tell the story of perfect work without speech or language; all the better preachers because so lacking in self-consciousness.

Not second among such reformers may be placed high-class music, both instrumental and vocal, given in schoolrooms, mission-rooms, and, if possible, in churches where the traditions speak of worship, where the atmosphere is prayerful, and where the arrangement of the seats suggests kneeling; just the music without a form of service, nor necessarily an address, only a hymn sungin unison and a blessing from the altar at the close. To hear oratorios—St. Paul, theMessiah,Elijah, Spohr’sLast Judgment—I have seen crowds of the lowest class, some shoeless and bonnetless, and all having the ‘savour of the great unwashed,’ sit in church for two hours at a time quietly and reverently, the long lines of seated folk being now and then broken by a kneeling figure, driven to his knees by the glorious burst of sound which had awakened strange emotions; while the almost breathless silence in the solos has been occasionally interrupted by a heart-drawn sigh.

To trace the result is impossible and not advisable; but who can doubt that in those moments, brief as they were, the curtain of the flesh was raised and the soul became visible, perhaps by the discovery startling its possessor into new aspirations?

One man came after such a service for help, not money help, but because he was a drunkard, saying if ‘I could hear music like that every night I should not need the drink.’ It was but a feeble echo of St. Paul’s words, ‘Who can deliver me from the body of this death?’ a cry—a prayer—which given to music might be borne by the sweet messenger through heaven’s gate to the very throne beyond.

Then there are country visits; quiet afternoons in the country, not ‘treats’ where numbers bring wild excitement, and only the place, not the sort of amusement, is changed; but where a few people spend an afternoon quietly in the country, perhaps entertained at tea by a kindly friend; parties at which there is time tofeelthe quiet; where the moments are not so full of external and active interests that there is no opportunity to‘possess the soul’; parties at which there is a possibility of ‘hush,’ in which, helped by Nature’s ritual, perfect in sound, scent, and colour, silent worship can go on.

For people spending long years in the close courts and streets of ugly towns, the mere sight of nature is startling, and may awaken longings, to themselves strange, to others indescribable, but which are the stirrings of the life within.

The stories of great lives, and of other religions, very simply told, as far as possible leaving out the foreign conditions which confuse the ignorant mind, are sometimes helpful. It is generally considered wise to hide from children and untutored people the knowledge of other religions, for fear it should awaken doubts concerning their own; but in those cases where their own is so very negative, it is often helpful to learn of faiths held by the large masses of mankind. To hear that the great fundamental ideas of all worships are similar would perhaps suggest to the hearer that there might be more in it than ‘just parson stuff’ and lead him to inquire further; or, if it did not do this, it would be some gain to remove the ignorance which, more than familiarity, breeds contempt of the despised foreigner.

Once, after a talk about Egypt and its old religion, the Osiris worship, the beautiful story of the virgin Isis, and her son Horus, who was slain by Set, the King of Evil, and rose again from the bosom of the Nile, I heard it said, ‘They thought the same then, did they? only called them different names.’ The largeness of the idea caught the hearer; its universality bore testimony to its truth. Would it not be helpful if our religious teachers, instead of spending their precioustime denouncing the errors of other religions, would take the truths running through the great stories common to them all, and in an historical attitude of mind show the growth of thought, the development of spirituality till his hearers are brought face to face with the Founder of our religion, who set the noblest example; taught the purest doctrine; lived the highest spiritual life; was in Himself, to use the Bible words, ‘the way, the truth, and the life’?

Again, to be quiet, to be alone are among influences that purify. Every one when abroad has, I suppose, felt the privilege of being able to go into the churches whenever they wished. In our great towns the privilege is equally needed, and, where the poor live, doubly so. When one room has to be shared by the whole family, sometimes including a lodger, there can be no quiet, and loneliness is impossible. Some of the clergy are recognising this want, and open their churches at other than service times, but the practice is still rare. A notice outside our church tells how those may enter who ‘wish to think or pray in quietness.’ About ten a day use the permission, some of them kneeling shyly in the side aisle, as if their attitude were unwonted and caused shame; others sitting quietly for a long time, as if weary of the grind and noise outside; while sometimes men come to make their mid-day prayer. Here again is a means with invisible results; but quiet and loneliness are possessions to which every one has a right, without which it is difficult, almost impossible, to ‘commune with God,’ and the gift of which is still to be given to the poor.

Then there is the beauty of Art, now almost entirelyabsent from the dwellings of the poor, and yet by them so felt as a pleasure; the beauty of form and colour, which it is possible to show in schoolroom and church decoration; the beauty of light and brightness, the beauty of growth to be seen in gardens and churchyards. Outside our church are planted two Virginia creepers; poor things they are, hardly to be recognised by their relations in kindlier soil. But once, in a third-class carriage, I was surprised to hear the church described as the one ‘where the jennies growed.’

It is easier now (thanks to the Kyrle Society and Miss Harrison’s generous gifts of work) to make school and mission rooms pretty. A beautiful workroom is a very strong, though invisible, influence. One girl, who had to leave our school on account of moving from the neighbourhood, said quite naturally, among her regrets at leaving and her description of the new school, ‘It is so ugly it makes one not care.’

The pictures in a schoolroom should be various, and, if possible, often changed. Pictures of action or of historical incidents are the most generally appreciated, but pictures of flowers, fairy tales, landscapes, and sea are suggestive.

Picture galleries have hitherto been thought of chiefly as pleasure places for the educated, or as schools for the student. They can become mission-halls for the degraded. It is easy to arrange visits with a few people to the National Gallery, to the Kensington or Bethnal Green Museums; it is not an unpleasant afternoon’s work to guide little groups of people, just pointing out this beautiful picture, or putting in a few words to explain this or that historical allusion. I once took a girl—amerry lassie, light-hearted, fond of pleasure, but in danger of taking it at the expense of her character—to the National Gallery. The little picture of Raphael’s, where the women acting as the angels stand over the sleeping knight, offering him the protecting shield, opened to her a new truth. Here was a fresh possible relation between man and woman, not the one of rough jokes and doubtful fun, but a new connection not to be despised, either, where the province of the woman was to keep the man safe; a large lesson taught by dumb lips and dead hands.

When Sir Richard Wallace lent his pictures to the Bethnal Green Museum, he not only brightened the eyes of many used only to the drear monotony of East London, but he taught one poor wretched woman with a whining baby hanging on her thin breast a large lesson. Dirt on child and mother showed her condition, and was a dreary contrast to the Madonna with lovely crowing baby before whom the little group paused. ‘Ah, yer could easy enough “mother” such a baby as that now,’ was her apologetic remark, showing that the picture had conveyed the rebuke, and that the reverence born of faith in the painter’s heart had not yet finished bearing fruit.

It is but feebly that I have tried to show how such means could be used to teach spirituality to the lowest classes. It is not necessary to speak of school-lessons, lending libraries, mothers’ meetings, night-schools, temperance societies, and clubs; agencies for the good of the people which are at work in every well-organised parish; neither has mention been made of the communicants’ meetings, prayer assemblies, church services, which are food to feed and build up many of those who already recognise theirtrue life, and strive bravely, amid adverse circumstances, to live it. We can all work at these in gladness and thanksgiving. They are not so hard to persevere with, for some result attends them. In meetings and classes there is encouragement in the regularity and the appreciation of the attendants. In services and prayer-meetings there is the knowledge that they help and strengthen the faint-hearted; but in the indirect means of helping the degraded there is little encouragement, for there can be no results. The highest work is often apparently resultless, bringing no personal thanks, no world’s applause; a failure, worthless labour, if judged by the world’s standard of work; a success, worth doing, if it open to a few, whom the usual means have failed to reach, the great secret of true being, their spiritual life; a buried life, buried but not dead.

Henrietta O. Barnett.

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