The Religious Life of LondonRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Religion
The Religious Life of London
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
London (England) -- Religion; Religious thought -- England -- London
In London, if we are to believe what we hear in some quarters, the real
seat of true and undefiled religion is to be found amongst the small body
who meet in an obscure street leading out of the Walworth Road. The
neighbourhood is not a very attractive one, and is inhabited chiefly by
retail tradesmen, who must find it in these hard times a struggle to make
both ends meet. You must look sharp to find the place of which you are
in search. In a row of shops opposite Lion Street you will see one in
the day-time with the shutters up. On the shutters you will see one or
two little bills headed Christian Meeting House, containing an
invitation, as follows:—“Dear friend, you are affectionately invited to
the following meetings.” Then you have a list of the times of meeting,
an announcement that all seats are free, and the text, “For both He that
sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all one, for which cause He
is not ashamed to call them brethren.” If you enter, you see a few
benches in what is meant for a shop, and a few more in the room behind.
Where the window is there is a desk, at which the chairman or conductor
of the meeting sits. By the door is a little box into which the
offerings of the faithful are poured. As a rule the place, which cannot
hold more than forty or fifty adults comfortably, is well filled by very
poor people. It is the only place of meeting of the sect in London.
They are numerous, so they say, in Essex, Sussex, and Surrey, but in the
Walworth Road they are few and not popular with their neighbours, who
possibly know no better. Now and then up comes a street-boy and makes a
hideous noise through the keyhole; but the Peculiar People have got used
to that. I should fancy with the keen-witted artisans of London they
make but little way. The reader may remember that a little while ago
some of these people figured in a police-court. They had refused all
proper medical aid for a child, and it died in consequence. They have
great faith, these poor people. They have great scorn also for people
more benighted than themselves. They speak contemptuously of the time
when they knew no better, when they trusted in forms, and attended on a
one-man ministry, and were humbled and dejected on account of sin, and
called themselves miserable sinners, and confessed that they had done the
things they ought not to have done, and left undone those things which
they should have done. All that sort of feeling and talk is all wicked
in their opinion; for theirs is the glorious liberty of the sons of God
and joint heirs of heaven. Religion has no difficulties for them, no
mysteries; nothing beyond the reach of man, heights to which he cannot
ascend, depths which he cannot fathom. To come together and declare
their unspeakable joy is all that they have to do. For this the beginner
is as competent as the grey-headed believer, the sister as well as the
brother, the ignorant man as well as he who has had a college education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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