Work amongst working men ..

Front matter

OF THE

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Contents

I. MY FIRST VENTURE . . •

II. MY FIRST CONVERTS ....

III. INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE

Chapter II. My First Converts

EANTIME I was steadily going on with the organization of my meeting, and was slowly gathering round me a band of earnest helpers, both men and women. I was always reminding them that if I v/as the head they were the limbs, and that the head without the hands and feet would be helpless ; so that they grew to feel that the meeting was theirs as well as mine ; and we all worked with a will. Their part was not only to recruit for the meeting but also to watch for any who were impressed, and keep them back for the after meeting, and talk and pray with them, as well as to visit them in their own houses, or in some cases bring them up to me. Ultimately I was joined by Miss Macpherson, since well known in

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

connection with emigration, and found her most helpful to my inexperience.

Very soon one of my right-hand helpers, a working-man, who had stood for seven years almost alone on the side of Christ in some large brick-fields, but now found himself a sort of spiritual father amongst his mates, who till then had led him a life of constant petty persecution, told me that seven working-men wished to lead a different life, and would like me to talk and pray with them. So they came up to my house, most of them, at the time I am writing, Christian men of more than ten years standing, but then in the glow of their first faith and their first love, with that simple, hearty, unreserved surrender of themselves to God common to working-men, but rare, at least in its outward manifestations, in more sophisticated ranks of society. I remember now one of those first prayers that welled out of a full heart, rude in language but deep and pure in feeling : — ' O Lord, you know how I have been knocked about in the world, and grow’d up in publics, and never had any one to care for my is WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN

soul, till our blessed hand-maiden came to teach us about our Saviour, and about our Father in heaven/

v

Few, indeed, of us can realize the rough unhumanizing character of the lives of many of our working-men. Some, like this man, had lost their mother young. Many more, alas ! might as well ha/e been hatched by steam, as far as any mother’s care and tenderness go, and would doubtless have echoed the young street Arab’s sentiment, ‘He didn’t see what good mothers were, ’cept to wallop a fellow.’ And it is just this rough, motherless, uncared-for side of their lives which makes the influence of a refined and educated woman something to them which the most tender-hearted man can never supply. I would especially urge this fact on those wno object to a woman working among men. Would that I could only think that these rough notes, written vears after I have myself been laid aside from this work, might be the means of stirring up some lady, young or old, to try her influence over the working-men of her neighbourhood, and be to

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

some dusty, hard-toiling lives a gracious dew from heaven, ‘ twice blessed/ indeed ; blessing her who gives and him who takes.

But my first prayer-meeting had its very funny as well as its solemn, joyful side. One man, with a strange grotesque gargoyle sort of face, who was more influenced by his love for me than by the deep spiritual change that had begun in the others, thinking that he would certainly be called upon to ‘ make a prayer/ had prepared himself beforehand for the emergency. He learned an oration by heart, or

rather, in this instance, I should say by head, and came into my presence with it at full cock, warranted to go off at the least notice. So

when two or three of the others had given

vent to their few broken heartfelt utterances, he began with a flourish of Jewish trumpets, ‘O Thou that dwellest between the cherubims!’ There was a dead pause. Then turning his

queer face over his shoulder, he said, with a piteous bleat to me, * Oh, Miss, I’m stuck fast, I can’t get on ! ’

Still on my knees, I solemnly answered, 1 Never

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mind, my brother, God will teach you another time ; ’ and at once began a few words of concluding prayer. But alas for an unfortunately keen sense of the ridiculous ! For a few moments my voice quivered and wavered on the very verge of laughter, and it was only by a superhuman effort that I managed to control myself. When I rose from my knees I felt as if my hair must have turned grey in the struggle.

Not many Sundays had passed before I noticed an old man who always sat in the same place, and listened to me with a queer, perplexed look on his weather-beaten face. I soon ascertained that he was popularly known by the name of 4 Old Tom,’ and was a well-sinker, who for seventy years had led a wild and desperate life; the hair-breadth escapes he had met with in his dangerous calling seeming only to have hardened him and made him more reckless. Time after time he had been dug out of the earth only to come up from his living grave to resume his wild courses. His only son had been struck dead before his eyes on the line; nothing seemed

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

to make any impression on his hard old heart. But as he sat and heard for the first time of the love of his God ; how the Father had never hardened His heart against His lost child ; how the door of heaven was left on the latch even for such as he; how poor old Tom’s very place was kept up in heaven ‘ prepared for him/ if only he would arise and come home to his Father, strange thoughts were stirred in that dim old mind. But poor old Tom had one difficulty, which always seemed to stand in the way. ‘ Fm no scholard/ he used to say to himself, scratching his grey head in a perplexed sort of way; ‘it ain’t no manner of use, I don’t know how to make a prayer.’

At last he heard me give an account of how a working-man they all knew and respected came to be what he was. He was once a farmservant in a Christian family, when the mother of the house died quite suddenly. The father sent for his two sons ; and when they met, they fell on one another’s necks and wept, and comforted one another with the words of everlasting life. And the young man felt how beautiful a thing is family love in Him in whom all the families of the earth are blessed, and turned away with a longing to be like that father and his two sons. He crept up into a hay-loft, and there and then, to use his own words, ‘for the first time I knelt down and tried to pray. I didn’t know a bit how, but somehow or other I managed to blunder on, and I blundered on that night and the next morning, till somehow,’ he added, with a sudden smile, full of the peace of God, ‘ my blundering on found me my Saviour.’

‘Well,’ thought old Tom, and a gleam of light came into the dark perplexed face, * I’m no scholard ; I can’t make a prayer, but I can blunder on.’

The next day he was sinking a well a hundred and twenty feet below the surface of the earth. His fellow-workmen had left him alone to finish his dangerous job. Suddenly all the words he had heard and all his sinful life came over him, and he felt he must pray there and then. So, kneeling down by the side of his old bucket, he put his rough, horny hands to-

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

gether, and, while the great tears streamed down that rugged face, he prayed his first prayer : ‘ O Lord, I'm the biggest of sinners, but you are a bigger Saviour. O Lord, save poor old Tom from his sins, and give him a new heart, for Jesus Christ's sake.' And at the bottom of that deep well, a hundred and twenty feet below the surface of the earth, the great Saviour and the great sinner met together, and when poor old Tom was pulled up to the surface he was a new creature in his God.

He came eleven miles away from his work, and waited four hours outside my house, to tell me of his conversion ; and I had to take him in at eleven o'clock at night, when I got home, to give thanks to the Father for him.

Poor old Tom ! he never saw me without asking me if I wanted a well sunk, that he would be glad to do it * gracious ' for me if I did. I believe he would gladly have bored the earth under my feet into a bottle-rack ‘ gracious,' if by so doing he could have testified the love and gladness of which his old heart was full.

Another of my regular attendants I noticed

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always sitting close to me, with one hand up to his ear, listening with a look of rapt attention. I soon became acquainted with him, and found he was an intelligent and well-educated man, a gardener by trade, but placed in circumstances of great home unhappiness. His wife had formed a sort of maniacal hatred to him, which showed itself in persistent efforts to injure him, and alienate the hearts of his children from him. Always a moral man, he had resisted the temptation to drown his sorrow in intemperance, but he had never found any comfort in religion. He had tried church after church, but finding his deafness made it impossible for him to hear, he had latterly given up going to any place of worship, and had shut himself up in his miserable home. His heart was beginning to darken down into a reckless despair, when curiosity led him to the Abbey school-meeting, to see what it was like. To his surprise and delight he could hear my clear penetrating woman’s voice with ease ; and before two or three Sundays had passed, he had found the peace which passeth understanding in his

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

God, ‘ the place of rest imperturbable, where love is not forsaken if itself forsaketh not.’ The whole expression of his face changed ; he had the look of those

... in this loud stunning tide Of human care and crime,

Who carry music in their heart Thro’ dusky lane and wrangling mart ; ”

and his love and gratitude found radiant expression in the lovely flowers with which he filled my drawing-room. His great natural beauty of character grew perfected by divine grace, and despite his deafness he became an earnest worker. A year or two after his wife became a Christian, and they were re-united in the love that passeth knowledge. For both I have had long since to give thanks as having departed in God’s holy faith and fear.

The tokens of gratitude I received were of the most varied kinds, ranging, as may be seen, from the offer of a well to a gift of flowers. Fresh eggs, a chicken, a Bible, a hare — N.B. not poached — a Church Service, posies of all sorts and sizes, a cluster of field-birds shot at dawn, whose tender little loosened throats and filmy eyes I nearly wept over as I held them up by their pretty coral feet, but which nevertheless made an excellent pie, a small gold locket, etc., etc. On one occasion, two very tall heads of Brussel-sprouts were brought to the week-day meeting, and duly presented after it was over, when I disappeared in triumph with one under either arm, like a modern Daphne, sprouting cabbage instead of laurel, as befits this utilitarian age.

At times, however, in my day and night visiting among my rough people, my experiences were by no means so satisfactory, and often sharply taxed my mother wit how best to extricate myself from an awkward position. On one occasion, I found myself between a drunken husband and wife, in just that stage of inebriety which makes a man quarrel with his shadow for keeping close at his heels. Unfortunately this man was not reduced to his shadow, being well supplied with a substantial loud-tongued wife

MY FIRST CONVERTS .

to exercise upon, and very soon they got to high words, drowning my feeble efforts to make myself heard. They were so maddening one another, that I saw in a very few moments they would come to blows, utterly regardless of my presence, and for all I could do to prevent it, he might half kill her under my eyes. What was to be done ? My eyes fell on a tea-tray, with some loose cups and saucers and spoons upon it. In a moment I set to work, and hammered on it with such inspired energy, producing such a rattling fugue of cups and saucers and tea-tray, as effectually drowned the voices of my belligerents. For a few moments they tried to go on shouting at one another, but, bless you ! it did no harm, as neither could hear the other, and soon they gave it up in despair.

Then I put in a few mild persuasive words, till they began at one another again ; and again I betook myself to my loud but peaceful drum till I gained myself another short hearing. At last, between these ‘ two voices/ mine and the tea-tray’s, I got them into a better frame of mind, and the threatened danger was averted.

On another occasion, a drunken tailor, whom his wife persisted in fetching out of a public-house for me to exhort, greatly embarrassed me by insisting on ‘ seeing me straight home/ as he expressed it, with a ludicrous disregard to facts, and the irregular curves and zig-zags we should infallibly describe in his present condition. However, as the choice lay between having him as my escort or leaving him to vent his ill-humour in beating his wife, I resigned myself to my fate. I believe I walked miles before I reached home that night. I never estimated before the force of the drunken Irishman’s exclamation, on being condoled with on the length of way he had come, ‘ Och, yer honour, it’s not the length but the breadth.’

My difficulties during the first few months of my work were further enhanced by a strong opposition from without. The unreasoning feeling against a woman fulfilling her Lord’s injunction, ‘Go tell My brethren that I go unto My Father and their Father, to My God and their God,’ was stronger then than it is now. The old tendency to stick to the letter of

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

Scripture, and sin* against its divine progressive spirit, to bind women, after nineteen centuries of freedom, with precisely the same bandages and restrictions which were necessary to preserve social order when first the equality of the sexes was practically assumed by Christianity, was then in full force. Nay, the usual tendency showed itself to extend these restrictions from their original use, as regulations for the ecclesia , the public and authorised services of the church, to all cases whatever ; rendering it unlawful, not only for me to teach my poor, ignorant men, who were willing to be taught about God and Christ by me, and by no one else, but also for a mother to teach her grown-up sons, a queen to address her parliament, a woman to teach the public by her written words. A storm accordingly raged for some time against me, during which my own clergyman stood valiantly by me, quietly urging, on all sides, that some of the worst drunkards and blasphemers in his parish were now regular and consistent communicants at his church; was he to prefer their remaining drunkards and bias phemers to their being influenced by a lady, and oppose what God had blessed ?

For some months the opposition lasted ; but for the encouragement of all steady workers, I gladly record that, even in one of the great centres of ecclesiasticism, it gave way before good work and practical results. The leading Evangelical clergyman, who had begun by cutting me in the streets, ended by presenting me with four volumes of his sermons in token of his esteem and sympathy with my work. Being of a placable disposition I built the bulky tomes up into an altar of friendship in one corner of my room, and I need scarcely say that my sense of reverence forbade my ever disturbing the sacred stones.

But what I most needed never failed me — the support of my own clergyman, the friendship and hearty co-operation of one of our Indian missionaries, then working as a curate in the same district as myself, and, what was sweetest and best, the tender, wise sympathy of my father.

CHAPTER HI.

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE.

UT how did I get this influence over working men ? perhaps some one will ask. starting, as I did, with no knowledge of them as a class, or as individuals, and finding myself in a few weeks with some thousand on my hands. As the answer to this question may be helpful to other workers, I will try and reply to it in some detail.

The class I had to deal with were, with a slight admixture of fossil-diggers, answering in some respects to navvies, just the common artizans of any non-manufacturing town, — bricklayers, carpenters, shoemakers, gas-men, wellsinkers, farm labourers, etc. Wild as they were in their habits, I always say that for head and heart you could scarcely match them. Their ignorance, in its depth and solidity, to the last was a surprise to me ; the learned pig would certainly have beaten them in a competitive examination; but at the same time they were possessed of a plenitude of mother wit, which made them a delightful, but difficult, audience to address. I remember one of the. members for the University, himself a noted speaker, saying, that he would rather address any other mob ; that if an accident did happen to one’s nominative, or one’s feet got hopelessly entangled in a broken construction, there was no hope of its passing unobserved, — the speaker’s confusion was certain to be rendered worse confounded by a perfect storm of banter and rough jokes. The element of the clever, sceptical mechanic was wholly wanting. I only met with one case of intellectual doubt of the shallowest kind, a fervent disciple of Shelley; but there was a good deal of rough scepticism of a moral kind among them. The rooted belief in a good-natured, easy-going God, who would never be hard on a poor fellow whatever his life might be, and a consequent total disbelief in

His moral laws; a conviction that all religion was a sham ; much Pharisaism in fustian that thanks God it is not as other men are ; methodists, saints, cants, hypocrites ; ‘ I give tithes of all I possess to the devil, and get fresh twice in the week ; ’ a hatred of parsons ; an ideal of manliness which aimed alternately at the beer barrel and the bull-dog ; and a disbelief in punishment hereafter, — these were the chief enemies to be contended against, and I found them quite enough.

In the first place it was quite useless to preach ready-made doctrines to them. Justification by faith, imputed righteousness, vicarious satisfaction, election, sacramental grace, regeneration, — all these things were simple Greek to them. Perhaps it was fortunate that it was so ; for at that time I was passing through the intellectual difficulties which most thoughtful young minds of the present day must encounter, and my hold on received opinions, except so far as I could work them out for myself, was loosened. It was evident that they and I must begin from the beginning.

I have often thought that if some of our great thinkers could have my problem to solve, it would be a very good thing for them. If only once they could wake up one morning, and find themselves with some thousand rough but shrewd fellows on their hands to be saved somehow , saved in that grossly intelligible sense of the word salvation which even Mr. Voysey would accept — saved from sin and degradation. There they were ; I could not get rid of them, waiting with their listening faces turned towards me ; some intelligible theory of the universe I must give them to get them to square their lives in obedience to its laws. Would it be any use to tell them * of a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness ? ’ Alas ! the stream of tendency with which they were most familiar, made for the public-house and wife-beating. Or would it be any good to preach to them the f method of Jesus/ the duty of self-abnegation, to these men who were driven, by every wild passion of their natures, to self-indulgence — passions that would make short work of any abstract notions, and could only be cast out by some other passion of love and adoration, such as only a living person can inspire ? Or was I to follow Mr. Herbert Spencer, and rise with them from the lower to the higher religion, and preach to them the great inscrutable Power, to which neither personality nor emotion can be assigned, and expect that the knowledge of It would regulate their moral emotions, with which It was out of all relation ? Or even preach a moral and beneficent Being, the Ruler of all things, far removed from them in the altitude of His perfections and blessedness ; when the misery and disorder of their lives was a proof either that He did not mind, or if He. did, didn’t much care ?

Alas ! I felt forlornly enough that my intellectual gospels had but one fault when brought into contact with the mass of humanity — they would not work . The intellectual few might

be saved ; but as for this people that knoweth not, on this showing we must say, with the Pharisee of old, ‘They are cursed.’ Only in the Christianity of the Bible could I find what I wanted ; could I not work out some simple form of it for them and me ?

I took my stand at once on the great facts of life and conscience. I never laid any doctrine before them without first carefully verifying it for them from their own life, their own conscience, their own heart. If for one moment I departed from this ground, I felt at once I had lost my hold upon them. At one fell swoop I had to get rid of all petrified dogmas, and received opinions, and orthodox phraseology, and stick to what I could in some measure prove.

My first effort was to get them to believe in moral law ; that there are great inevitable laws in the moral world as well as in the physical, and what a man sows that will he also reap. When they used to say to me, ‘I don’t believe in hell ; God is much too merciful to damn a poor fellow like me/ I answered cheerfully, ‘ Of course He is much too good and merciful. It is not God that “ damns you,” as you say ; it is you that condemn your own selves to a life of sin and misery away from Him/ And I used to illustrate it by what happened to Dr. Brown, the author of 9 Rab and his Friends/ in the great cholera year. He was then a young man, practising at Chatham, when one night he was called up to go at once to a village down the Thames, where the cholera had broken out.

The men rowed for their lives, for they were pulling against Death. The first thing he did after he had prescribed for the sick, was to call all who were not already stricken together.

Not one would allow it, but he could see, by a look in their faces, that they were all in for the cholera. So he gave them a prescription which, he assured them, if taken in time, would save their lives. They all took it but one woman. In vain he entreated ; she obstinately refused. ' She was not going to have the cholera — not

she/ They all had it ; but that woman was

the only one who died of it. ‘Now, then/ I asked, ' was it the doctors fault ? ’

‘No, that it warn’t; it was the woman’s own fault/

'Well, then, you have got a disease in your soul called sin ; you may deny it in words, but you know it ; and, what’s more, God knows it, and offers you a remedy. He offers you a Saviour, and He says to the heart that loves

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and receives Him, “ The blood of Jesus Chribt cleanseth from all sin” But you won’t take the remedy, and you perish. Whose doing is it ; God’s or your own ? ’

‘ Well, I know I am in the wrong way now ; but before I die I mean to turn over a new leaf.’

‘You mean to say you will cry, “ Lord, have mercy upon me” on your death-bed, and then you think you will be all right. My brother, be sure of this, there’s no such thing as running up a bill all our lifetime with the devil, and then sneaking out when pay-time comes. You are much too honest yourself not to see that.’

Sometimes I used to put it differently to them. 6 Well, suppose you were to go to Heaven, with your unchanged hearts, when you die, what would you do there ? Death itself won’t change you. Death is no more than birth. The child that is diseased before birth is diseased after birth. Would you be happy? What ! no publics, no getting fresh, no loose talk and jolly songs, nothing but good things, the very mention of which makes you uncomfortable ? Why, you would be like a man a friend of mine, a physician, was called in to see. He was a farmer, who had lived a bad life all his days, ruined his constitution by drinking, and now all the doctors in the world could not save him. So Dr. Bull said he had better send for a clergyman, and prepare himself for another world, as his days in this were numbered. The dying man accordingly turned to his wife, and asked her to send for their minister, when she burst out into a bitter laugh. “ What,” she exclaimed, “are you thinking of going to Heaven after all ? And what will you do when you get there? You’ll be like a pig in a parlour!” ‘ If it were possible to put a sinner into Heaven/ I used to urge, ‘ you could not put him in a hotter hell.’

And little by little they came to see the great Christian doctrine, that eternal sin must be, in the very nature of things, eternal punishment and eternal misery, and that salvation means being saved from the guilt and power of sin and selfishness, and not merely going to Heaven. As to the speculative point, whether moral evil is eternal, whether in that /coXao-is aicovios, the ‘ chastisement of ages/ into which the wicked are told to depart, there be ultimate purification and deliverance from the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched, the remorse and the suffering that eternally cling to moral evil, I simply let that alone. It is with the chances of this world, and not of the next, that we are practically concerned.

But how to make them feel not only the consequences of sin, but what sin is in itself before God, its exceeding sinfulness, I frankly confess I found but one means for doing this — Christ and the Cross of Christ. In that perfect manhood, so tender yet so strong, courageous unto death for the truth ; pitilessly severe against all sham and dishonesty, but opening its arms for the weary and heavy-laden to rest, and weep upon its breast ; cutting keen as crystal through all false pretences, yet, like crystal, yielding to the weakest beam of light, and dyeing it with a thousand lovely hues, so that the repentant harlot becomes, under that gracious influence, a saint, and the rude fisherman an apostle of the world; in Him, taking our children in His arms, feeling for all human sorrow, weeping beside our open graves, healing all who were oppressed, they grew ashamed of their own low type of manhood. And in the suffering, the blood, the agony, the death of shame that the world’s evil, that our sin cost the Son of God, they began to realise the exceeding hatefulness of sin ; while in that God spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, they were led to realise God’s love to the sinner, the heart of their Father towards them. I troubled them with no theories, I simply gave them the facts ; and I illustrated those facts, not by foolish figments about a good little boy bearing the punishment of a bad little boy, or an impossible monarch who caused himself to be flogged in the stead of his rebellious soldiers, but by all the most sweet and solemn facts of life.