Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
He continued: For it is frightfully evident that Christianity has not
kept pace with the population; that it has lagged terribly behind;
that, in plain words, we have in our midst a nation of heathens to whom
the ideals, the practices, and the commandments of religion are things
unknown--as little realised in the miles on miles of tenement-houses,
and the factories which have produced them, as though Christ had never
lived or never died. How could it be otherwise? The great mass of men
and women have never had time for religion. You cannot expect them to
work double-tides. With hard physical labour, from morning till night
in the surroundings we know and see, how much mind and leisure is left
for higher things on six days of the week? ... We must look this matter
in the face. I do not pretend to establish the proportion between
different sections in which these things happen. Still less am I
willing to lay the blame on those who are houseless, landless, and
property less. What I say is that if the Government of a country allows
millions of human beings to be thrown into such conditions of living
and working as we have seen, these are the consequences that must be
looked for. "A child," said the Anglican Bishop South, "has a right to
be born, and not to be damned into the world." Here have been millions
of children literally "damned into the world," neither their heads nor
their hands trained to anything useful, their miserable subsistence a
thing to be fought and scrambled for, their homes reeking dens under
the law of lease-holding which has produced outcast London and horrible
Glasgow, their right to a playground and amusement curtailed to the
running gutter, and their great "object-lesson" in life the drunken
parents who end so often in the prison, the hospital, and the
workhouse. We need not be astonished if these not only are not
Christians, but have never understood why they should be....
The social condition has created this domestic heathenism.
Then the social condition must be changed. We stand in need of a
public creed--of a social, and if you will understand the word, of a
lay Christianity. This work cannot be done by the clergy, nor within
the four walls of a church. The field of battle lies in the school,
the home, the street, the tavern, the market, and wherever men come
together. To make the people Christian they must be restored to their
homes, and their homes to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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