THE RARITY OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY
Would it not be useful to ask ourselves the question whether we are forgetting the true meaning of "charity" in the constant endeavour to take advantage of organized benevolent institutions, about the actual working of which we concern ourselves very little? As the years go on, and what we call civilisation advances, are we or are we not losing sight of "our neighbour" in a long vista of vicarious benefactions, bestowed through the medium of a subscription list, or casual contributions at an "anniversary festival?"
At the speeches that are made on such occasions, when the banquet is over, and the reading of the amounts subscribed is accompanied by the cracking of nuts and a crescendo or decrescendo of applause, in proportion to the liberality of the donors, we are so frequently reminded of "the good Samaritan," that we begin to feel that we may claim some kind of relationship to him; and may shake our heads with solemn sorrow at the inexcusable conduct of the priest and the Levite. It would be worth while, however, to ask ourselves whether we quite come up to the mark of him who, finding the man wounded and helpless by the wayside, dismounted that he might convey the sufferer to the nearest inn; poured out oil for his wounds and wine for his cheer; left him with money in hand for the supply of his immediate needs; and did not scruple – with a robust and secure honesty – even to get into debt on his behalf: since the crown of good-will would be the coming again to learn of the patient's welfare. The debt was a pledge of the intention.
That was the Lord Christ's way of looking at charitable responsibility, and at benevolent effort; and even granting that He illustrated the answer to the question, "Who is my neighbour?" by an extreme case of sudden distress, the longer we look at the peculiar needs of the man who was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, the more perhaps we shall be convinced that there are greater, far greater evils, and more terrible accidents, than to fall among thieves, who temporarily rob, strip, and disable their victim.
The present fashion of dealing with such an unfortunate traveller would very much depend on which particular class of philanthropists the modern Samaritan who found him by the road-side happened to belong to.
Of course, it would be a scandal to our Christianity to follow either priest or Levite, although our cowardly sympathies might lie between the two; so, in order to make all safe, we hit on a compromise, and, according to our circumstances, try to find a medium line of conduct between Samaritan and Levite, or Samaritan and priest. We are ashamed to pass on without doing something, and so we call at the inn on our way, and leave the twopence there, in case anybody else should think fit to bring on the man who is lying, stunned and bleeding, in the roadway. Or else, having contrived to rouse the poor fellow to a little effort, we borrow an ass and take him back with us, to find some organised institution for the relief of those who fall among thieves, where the wine and oil are contracted for out of the funds. And there we leave him, without remembering anything whatever about the twopenny contribution which would represent our own share in the benefaction.
It is an awful thought, and one which it may be hoped will soon become intolerable, that, with the mechanical perfection of means for relieving the necessities of those who are afflicted, there seems to grow upon us a deadly indifference to the very deepest need of all – that personal, human sympathy, without which all our boast of benevolence is but as the sounding of brass and the tinkling of a cymbal. Can it be possible that we are approaching a condition when, refusing to have the poor and the afflicted, the widow and the orphan always with us, we shut them away out of our sight, leaving the whole duty of visiting them, of clothing them, of giving them meat and drink, to be done by an official committee; a charitable board, distributing doles, exactly calculated, on a carefully devised scale, and divided to the ounce or the inch, in supposed proportion to the individual need of each recipient? Will there ever come a time when we shall persuade ourselves that we fulfil the law of Christ by paying so much in the pound for a charity rate, and leaving all the actual "relief" to be effected by an official department, or a series of official committees?
The present aspect of charitable administration would be truly appalling if this were likely to be the result, for there are far too many evidences of that deadly indifference which will get rid of all real personal responsibility by paying a subscription, and will pay handsomely, too, at the same time smiling grimly, and half satirically, at the recollection that there are a number of people who always have on hand "cases," of whom they are anxious to rid themselves by placing them in any institution that will receive them without payment.
Let it not be imagined that these latter words of mine are intended to apply to those workers among the poor, who, with small means of their own, cannot do much more than speak words of advice and comfort, and give their earnest help to better the condition of sordid homes and of neglected children. There are scores of true, tender-hearted women who, spending much time amongst the sick and the afflicted, feel their hearts sink within them as they see how much more might be done, if they had but the wherewithal to appease the actual physical needs of those to whom they try to come spiritually near.
If but the miracle so easy to others were first performed, and the five thousand fed, then indeed might follow that still greater miracle, the earnest listening of the once turbulent multitude to the words of the Bread of Life.
But there are those who pursue what they regard as "charitable work" as an excitement – an amusement – just as children are sometimes set to play with Scripture conversation cards, and puzzles out of the Old Testament, with a kind of feeling that the employment comes nearly to a religious exercise. There is as much danger of these persons missing the true work of charity as there would be in the employment of paid officials – indeed, the latter would have one advantage; they would be less likely to be imposed upon by those who to obtain some special advantage would cringe and flatter.
The first great difficulty in visiting and temporarily relieving the lower class of destitute poor, is to disabuse their minds of an inveterate notion that the benevolent visitor and distributor is paid by some occult society, of which the recipients of bounty know nothing, and for which they care very little. Unfortunately, the sharp determined amateur visitor, who "does a district" as other people with leisure do a flower show or a morning concert – but, alas! these very words of mine show how common is that lack of true charity of which I designed to speak. Who am I that I should sum up the disposition and the heart of my brother or my sister? Only I would say that this suspicion on the part of the ignorant poor, which is so often complained of – the notion that their interviewers are paid for the work of charity – can only yield to the conviction that the work itself is undertaken with warm living human sympathy. Before the true relief shall come to any man, it must come by faith. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness," and in righteousness also.
The two tendencies that are driving us away from charity to a kind of selfish economy, are the habit of "relieving our overcharged susceptibilities by secreting a guinea," and thinking we have thereby fulfilled the claims of religion and humanity, and the practice of going about seeking where we may find candidates for other people's guineas, and so becoming a kind of charitable detectives, with an eye to reputation and advancement in the force.
We are forgetting that heartfelt sympathy, that clasp of the hand and beam of the eye which will make even a cup of cold water a benefaction, if we have no more to give, or if the need goes no further than a refreshing draught, that shall be turned from water into wine by the power of loving fellowship. Or we may be saying, "Be ye clothed, and be ye fed," trusting to some other hand to do the necessary work, without having ourselves first wrought for the means of taking our part in it, either by a deep personal interest in the relieving institution or in the destitute recipient.
"Yet one thing thou lackest," – even though out of thy great possessions a large proportion is given to the poor; "follow thou me." "Go about doing good," do not think to have fulfilled the law without love – that which you call charity; the mere giving– is but to offer a stone when bread is required of you, unless it be done with love in your heart – personal, human, and therefore Divine love. "If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which is your own?" Use the benefits of institutions – even though you use them only for others – as you would use your own property. Recommend only cases that are known to you to be worthy and necessitous, and, should the institution depend on voluntary support, let a contribution accompany your "case," if you can any way afford it, as an act of justice as well as of mercy.
Don't join in the traffic in votes, and never go begging for "proxies," in order to have an exchangeable stock on hand, that you may secure a candidate for any particular institution. This kind of gambling is a cancer that is eating the heart out of genuine, pure, charitable effort, and is making way for the cold impersonal system of distribution, which is now being advocated by those who would make the relief of human wretchedness and distress a mechanical organisation without the soul of love. At the same time, let us not forget that no charitable effort which would be efficacious in affording relief to the widely-spread distress by which we are surrounded, could be even so much as attempted without associations established for the express purpose of relieving particular forms of suffering. This, indeed, is the glory of our country, that humanity is so strong among us as to lead us not only to combine, but to emulate. The absolute concentration and centralization of charitable effort would be a calamity. The breaking up of the best of our institutions, which have grown from small beginnings in almsgiving into wide and influential centres of benevolent effort, would be destruction.
If anything that may be written hereafter concerning some representative (large and small, but still truly representative) efforts to do the work that Christianity demands as its first evidence of reality, should lead to a deeper and wider personal interest in their behalf, it will be matter for rejoicing. The larger the number of people who ask what is being done, the greater will be the desire to continue the good work, or to declare it. The attention that might in this way be directed to the mode of affording relief would exercise so keen an influence in the reformation of abuses, and the adoption of improvements, that all our charities would soon become truly "public." With the more earnest conviction of the duty of personal inquiry, and real sympathetic interest in the individual well-being of our poorer brother or sister, would come the satisfaction that we belonged to an association, or to a chain of associations, which will afford to him or to her the very relief which otherwise we should despair of securing.
I purpose in another chapter to ask you to read the story of an institution that was in its day wonderfully illustrative, and even now serves to take us back for two centuries of history. Only yesterday I was speaking to some of its inmates. One of them had nearly completed her own century of life, most of them had seen far more than the threescore years and ten which we call old age; but they come of a wonderful race, the men of fire and steel; the women of silent suffering – the old Huguenots of France.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE STRANGER
A hundred and eighty-seven years ago a French army invaded England and effected a landing at various places on the coast. Smaller divisions of that army had previously obtained a footing in some of the chief towns of Great Britain; and for about fifty years afterwards other contingents arrived at intervals to find the compatriots settled among the people, who had easily yielded to their address and courage, and by that time were apparently contented to regard them as being permanently established in the districts of which they had taken possession. The strange part of the story is, that for a large part of this time England was successfully engaged in war with the country of the invaders, and not only with that country, but with a discarded prince of its own, who, having received assistance from France, strove to regain the throne which he had abdicated by raising civil war in Ireland. Then was to be seen a marvellous thing. A detachment of the French army of occupation in England went with King William to the Boyne, and when the mercenaries who were at the back of James in his miserable enterprise came forth to fight, they beheld the swords of their countrymen flash in their faces, and heard a well-known terrible cry, as a band of veteran warriors cut through their ranks, fighting as they had been taught to fight in the Cevennes and amidst the valleys and passes of Languedoc. For the army that invaded England in 1686, and for four or five years afterwards, was the army of the French Huguenots, against whom the dragoons of Louis XIV. and the emissaries of Pope and priests had been let loose after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Four hundred thousand French Protestants had left their country during the twenty years previous to the revocation of that pact, which had been renewed after the siege of Rochelle, and though the attempt to escape from the country was made punishable by the confiscation of property and perpetual imprisonment in the galleys, six hundred thousand persons contrived to get out of France, and found asylums in Flanders, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and England, after the persecutions were resumed.
Comparatively few of the men who came in the second emigration had fought for the religion that they professed. They had learned to endure all things, and with undaunted courage many of them had suffered the loss of their worldly goods, the burning of their houses, hunger, poverty, and the imprisonment of their wives and daughters in distant fortresses, because they would not forswear their faith. Hundreds of their companions were at the galleys, hundreds more had been tortured, mutilated, burned, broken on the wheel. Women as well as men endured almost in silence the fierce brutalities of a debased soldiery, directed by priests and fanatics, who had, as it were, made themselves drunk with blood, and seemed to revel in cruelty. With a resolution that nothing seemed able to abate, pastors like Claude Brousson went from district to district, living they knew not how, half famished, in perpetual danger, and with little expectation of ultimately escaping the stake or the rack. Nay, they refused to leave the country, while in the woods and wildernesses of the Gard great congregations of their brethren awaited their coming, that they might hold services in caves and "in the desert," as they called that wild country of the Cevennes and of Lozére. These men were non-resistants. They met with unflinching courage, but without arms. Those of them who remained in France stayed to see the persecutions redoubled in the attempt to exterminate the reformed faith. They were the truest vindicators of the religion that they professed. Up to the time of the siege of Rochelle, and afterwards, Protestantism was represented by a defensive sword, but these men discarded the weapons of carnal warfare. Only some years later, when the persecutors (rioting in the very insanity of wrath because their declaration that Protestantism was abolished was falsified by constant revivals of the old Huguenot worship) directed utter extermination of the Vaudois, did the grandeur of the non-resisting principle give way before the desperation of men who came to the conclusion that, if they were to die, they might as well die fighting.
It must be remembered that some of them knew well how to fight. Some of their leaders – men of peace as they were, and men of an iron determination, which was shown in the obstinacy with which they refused to take up the sword – had come of stern warriors and were Frenchmen– Norman Frenchmen – Protestant Norman Frenchmen. A rare combination that; – cold hard steel and fire.
But it was not till some time afterwards that these men became the leaders of the peasantry, the chestnut-fed mountaineers who came down from their miserable huts and joined what had then become an organised army of insurrection. Before this time arrived a strange aberration seemed to move the people. The old simple non-resisting pastors had been done to death by torture and execution, and the people met, it is true, but often met amid the ruin of their homes, or in desert places, and as sheep having no shepherd. Then a wild hysterical frenzy appeared among them. Men, women, and even children claimed to be inspired, and at length fanaticism leaped into retaliation. On a Sunday in July, 1702, a wild mystic preacher, named Séguier went down with a band of about fifty armed men to release the prisoners. They were confined in dungeons beneath the house of one Chayla, a priest, who directed the prosecutions, and invented the tortures which he caused to be inflicted for the conversion of heretics. The Protestants broke open his door, forced the prison, and ultimately set fire to the house, in attempting to escape from which Chayla was recognised and killed. This was the beginning of a series of retaliations by the tormented people, the success of which changed the whole attitude of the Protestants of the district. They had formerly endured in silence; now they were desperate enough for insurrection. And the insurrection followed. Séguier was captured, maimed, and burnt alive; but others took his place. The war of the "Camisards" had commenced. Then it was that the leaders of the Protestant army in the Cevennes arose; – Roland and Cavalier, and the men who for a long time waged successful warfare against the royal forces, till defeat came accompanied by a new régime.
The rumbling of the revolutionary earthquake was already shaking the throne and the persecuting church. Voltaire, educated by the Jesuits, and hating religion, was helping to deliver the martyrs of the Protestant faith even before he began to "philosophise."
The struggle of the Camisards can only be said to have ceased when the persecutions were nearly at an end, and France itself was tottering. But what of that great Huguenot contingent which had invaded Britain, and was growing in number year by year as the émigrés, leaving houses and land, shops, warehouses, and factories, fled across the frontier, or got down to the shore, and came over the sea in fishing-boats and other small craft, in which they took passage under various disguises, or were stowed away in the holds, or packed along with bales of merchandise, to escape the vigilance of the emissaries who were set to watch for escaping Protestants? It is a little significant that of these non-combatant Protestants eleven regiments of soldiers were formed in the English army; but the truth is that of the vast number of émigrés who left France, some 30,000 were trained soldiers and sailors, and doubtless a proportion of these came to England, though probably fewer than those of their number who served in the Low Countries. At any rate, in 1687, two years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there arrived in England 15,500 refugees, some of whom brought with them very considerable property, and most of them were men of education, or skilled in the knowledge of the arts, or of those manufactures and handicrafts which are the true wealth of a nation. At Norwich and Canterbury they quickly formed communities which became prosperous, and helped the prosperity of the districts, where they set up looms, and dyeworks, and other additions to the local industries. In London they formed two or three remarkable colonies, so that when Chamberlain wrote his "Survey of London," there were about twenty French Protestant churches, the greater number of which stood in Shoreditch, Hoxton, and Spitalfields – in fact, above 13,000 emigrants had settled in or near the metropolis. The one French Protestant church founded by Edward VI. was, of course, inadequate to receive them, and their immediate necessities were so great that a collection was made for their relief, and a sum of 60,000l. was by this means obtained in order to alleviate their distress.
Among these émigrés were many noblemen and gentlemen of distinction, who, with their wives, were reduced to extreme poverty by the confiscation of their property. These had learned no trade, but with characteristic courage many of them set themselves to acquire the knowledge of some craft by which they might earn their bread, while some of their number learned of their wives to make pillow-lace, and so continued to support themselves in decent comfort.
To those who knew the "old French folk," as they came to be called in after years, when the later emigration had again increased the number of the weavers' colony in Spitalfields, nothing was more remarkable than the cheerfulness, one might almost say the gaiety, that distinguished them. Reading the account given by French writers of the old Huguenots in France, one might be disposed to regard them as stern and sour sectaries, but that would be a very erroneous opinion. Perhaps the sudden freedom to which they came, the rest of soul, and the opportunity to endeavour to serve God with a quiet mind raised them to a tranquil happiness which revived the national characteristic of light-heartedness; but however it may have been, the real genuine old French weaver of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green was a very courteous, merry, simple, child-like gentleman. The houses in which these people lived, some of which are still to be seen with their high-pitched roofs and long leaden casements, were very different to the barely-furnished, squalid places in which their descendants of to-day are to be found; and, indeed, the Spitalfields weaver even of seventy years ago was usually a well-to-do person; while in the old time he could take "Saint Monday" every week, wear silver crown-pieces for buttons on his holiday coat, and put on silk stockings on state occasions. This was in the days when French was still spoken in many of the little parlours of houses that stood within gardens gay with sweet-scented blooms of sweet-william, ten-weeks-stock, and clove-pink. When there was still an embowered greenness in "Bednall," and Hare Street Fields were within a stone's throw of "Sinjun" – St. John, or rather St. Jean Street, – or of the little chapel of "La Patente," in Brown's Lane, Spitalfields. Even in later times than that, however, I can remember being set up to a table, and shown how to draw on a slate, by an old gentleman with a face streaked like a ruddy dried pippin. I was just old enough to make out that the tea-table talk was in a strange tongue; but I can remember that there were evidences of the refinements that the old refugees had brought with them across the sea. Not only in their neat but spruce attire, in their polite grace to women, in their easy, good-humoured play and prattle to little children, in their cultivation of flowers, their liking for birds, and their taste for music, but in a score of trifling objects about their tidy rooms, where the click of the shuttle was heard from morning to night, these old French folk vindicated their birth and breeding. By tea-services of rare old china, rolls of real "point" lace, a paste buckle, an antique ring, a fat, curiously-engraved watch, a few gem-like buttons, delicately-coloured porcelain and chimney ornaments; by books and manuscript music, or by flute and fiddle deftly handled in the playing of some old French tune, these people expressed their distinction without being aware of it. It has not even yet died out. Unfortunately, many of their descendants – representatives of a miserably paid, and now nearly superseded industry – have deteriorated by the influences of continued poverty; and even so long ago as the evil war-time of Napoleon I., many of the old families anglicised their names in deference to British hatred of the French, but there are still a large number of people in the eastern districts of London whose names, faces, and figures alike proclaim their origin.
But we must go back once more to the time when the great collection was made. It is at least gratifying to know that the £60,000 soon increased to £200,000, and was afterwards called the "Royal Bounty," though Royalty had nothing to do with it during that reign. In 1686-7 about 6000 persons were relieved from this fund, and in 1688 27,000 applicants received assistance, while others had employment found for them, or were relieved by more wealthy émigrés who had retained or recovered some part of their possessions. But there were still aged and sick people, little children, widows, orphans, broken men, homeless women, and lonely creatures who had become almost imbecile or insane through the cruelties and privations that they had suffered. For these a refuge was necessary, and at length – but not till 1708 – an institution was founded in St. Luke's, under the name of the French Hospital, but better known to the "old folks" as the "Providence."
Of what it was and is I design to tell in another chapter.