Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa,
and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash-house, where you can
have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free.
Then after having washed and eaten you can make yourself comfortable.
You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to
write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing.
At eight o'clock the Shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what
we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern.
Two or three hundred men in the men's Shelter, or as many women in the
women's Shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each
other, in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor--what are you
to do with them? This is what we do with them.
We hold a rousing Salvation meeting. The Officer in charge of the
Depot, assisted by detachments from the Training Homes, conducts a
jovial free-and-easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and
their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a
meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer, short and to the
point; there are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the
meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been
saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their
companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are of
those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice
and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand,
and who are, as they say in all sincerity, "as happy as the day is
long." There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these
meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and
conditions of men; casuals, gaol birds, Out-of-Works, who have come
there for the first time, and who find men who last week or last month
were even as they themselves are now--still poor but rejoicing in a
sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer
outcasts and forlorn in this wide world. There are men who have at
last seen revive before them a hope of escaping from that dreadful
vortex, into which their sins and misfortunes had drawn them, and being
restored to those comforts that they had feared so long were gone for
ever; nay, of rising to live a true and Godly life. These tell their
mates how this has come about, and urge all who hear them to try for
themselves and see whether it is not a good and happy thing to be
soundly saved. In the intervals of testimony--and these testimonies,
as every one will bear me witness who has ever attended any of our
meetings, are not long, sanctimonious lackadaisical speeches, but
simple confessions of individual experience--there are bursts of
hearty melody. The conductor of the meeting will start up a verse or
two of a hymn illustrative of the experiences mentioned by the last
speaker, or one of the girls from the Training Home will sing a solo,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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