In point of fact Mary Wythburn had not done an unheard-of thing in preferring to work among the poor rather than be married. Many girls had made the same choice; and many men too. The world of the great East of London was the scene of more heroic labours for the wretched than had ever been known before. Methodism had its centre there, from which radiated all sorts of beneficent lights that flashed across the darkness. The Congregationalists had a home where good women who had given up their wealth for Christ’s sake, and that of humanity, lived together in a little community, and laboured in every conceivable way among the poor. The Baptists had long led the Forward Movement, which was another name for the “applied Christianity” in which the Church had now come to believe. The Episcopal Church had brought wealth, culture, and influence to bear upon the problem of the outcasts. University men had chosen this work instead of Parliamentary honours, or the accumulation of money. And many a young lady had quietly disappeared from society, and, receiving a pound or two a week from her father for her personal needs, had gone to dwell among the poor, as poor, in order to live a consecrated life of Christian helpfulness. Mary Wythburn had but added one to the already swelling multitude who had yielded to the fascination of the modern ministry of love and service. The old things repeated themselves—with a difference. The piety which had moved men and women to withdraw from the world and give themselves entirely to a religious life was equally strong and impassioned in many of the young men and women who were sworn disciples of Jesus now; but they served Him by withdrawing from luxuries only, and not from men. They took no vows upon them excepting the usual ones which characterise the entrance into the Church, but they put a different meaning into them. They heard a call summoning them into the thick of the crowd, there to do the works of their Master—to feed the five thousand, to heal the sick, to open the eyes of the blind, to deliver the captives; aye, to take the little children into their arms and bless them.