Loe raamatut: «The Religious Life of London», lehekülg 9

The London Congregational Association has four District Missions. It has aided in planting and sustaining eight Churches and Missions in four districts. They ask 1000l. a year, with which, aided by local support, they undertake to plant ten new district Missions in spiritually destitute localities, and sustain them until they are enabled to support themselves. As an illustration of what may be done in this way I give the following account of the District Mission established by the Church and Congregation under the care of the Rev. Dr. Raleigh, of Hare Court Chapel, Canonbury, as drawn up by the Rev. J. H. Wilson, of the Home Missionary Society.

The parent Church selected necessitous districts, in which they have opened schools and mission-rooms; in these a number of the congregation begin to labour as teachers, visitors, evangelists, &c. The result is the early formation of a branch Church, where the poor people secure all the privileges of Christian fellowship, and the fine feeling of a Church-home, a place which they call “our Chapel,” and where they look up to some one whom they call “our pastor,” and soon those so gathered together become co-workers with the parent Church in extending its influence in the locality – rising out of these movements, the Church at Hare Court Chapel have now five branch Churches. From the last report (1868) it appears that there are now three rooms for religious service for the young, and several others for meetings with the poor and ignorant; three day schools, and five Sunday or ragged schools; two large week evening schools, and several smaller ones; seven mothers’ meetings; a district nursery for children and infants, whose mothers require to leave them during the day; coal clubs; home for little boys, where thirty are fed and clothed; three paid ministers; six lay evangelists or pastors; two Bible-women; six paid teachers, and seven paid monitors for day schools; and to aid them, there are from 300 to 400 members of the Church and congregation earnestly engaged as evangelists, pastors, teachers, helps, visitors, Scripture readers, &c. During the year about 120 had joined the Church. The Sunday and ragged schools are attended by 1300 children; the day schools by 900, and the evening schools by upwards of 400. Besides, there are temperance societies and Bands of Hope, and in the summer months out-door services.

Another society worked by the Congregationalists is the Christian Instruction Society, founded in the year 1825, to aid in evangelizing London. House-to-house visitation was from the beginning and still is its main characteristic. Its other agencies are lay-preaching in and out of doors; the Sunday afternoon opening of places of worship; lectures on prevailing immorality and vice, and united quarterly prayer meetings. This society, however, is by no means sectarian. At its united quarterly prayer meetings ministers of the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Independent denominations join.

THE SEVENTH-DAY BAPTISTS

As you go down Leman Street, Whitechapel, on your left, nearly at the bottom, stand two public-houses – one the Shamrock, the other, if I mistake not, the Brown Bear. Between them is a narrow little passage; on the right is a Gospel Hall, facing you is a plain brick-built Meeting-house, with a door which at certain times opens in vain, and with a window which is covered with wire of a very suggestive character. Above the window is an inscription, stating that it was rebuilt in 1790, but that it was founded more than a century before that. A side door leads you into a grass-grown and quiet enclosure. There are a few gravestones there, recording, in illegible characters, the piety and virtues of those who have gone before. At the back of the Meeting-house is the minister’s residence. In the same square resides the pew-opener, with her little family, who seem fresher and livelier than you would expect in such a place. Outside rush along the Fenchurch Street trains to and fro, sometimes with a scream which, as you will by-and-by find, will drown the preacher’s voice. Outside there are factories and warehouses darkening the air; outside there are heathens – baptized I daresay, but nevertheless heathens – as complete and entire as any discovered by Captain Cook; outside go up and down all day the sailors of every country under heaven, at all times when on shore a disorderly lot, with a strong tendency to get drunk and quarrel; outside are the lodging-house keepers, and Jew slop-sellers, and foul women and crimps, who lie in wait for poor Jack; outside, nightly and daily, on Sundays and week-days, once a week and all the year round, is the ever-deafening and ever-growing roar of London life.

On Saturdays this little old-fashioned meeting-house is opened twice a day. Of sects, as we all know, there are many Lilliputian varieties. One of the smallest of these is that of the Seventh-day Baptists. In this country there are two congregations of them; one in Mill Yard, and one far away in Gloucestershire, where, according to the common proverb, “God is.” At one time they were a sect, as they are I believe at this time in America. Here, in England, they have dwindled down to two skeleton congregations, an endowment, and a Chancery suit. As there is money a form of worship is kept up, though for all practical purposes the cause is dead. There may be four grown-up persons besides the pew-opener to form the morning service: there are just as many in the afternoon. There is no week-evening service. At one time, many, many years ago, there was a Sunday-school, but the scholars have grown up and moved away, and none have come to take their vacant places. Inside the door you are informed there are no pew-rents, no collections. Nevertheless, the people keep away. In the pulpit is a learned man of an old-fashioned and almost extinct type, and no one regards him; and yet I must confess there was to me a fascination in the place. It was the ghost of what I knew in youth. Long, long ago, there were just such old-fashioned meetings, with just such sounding-boards over the pulpit, just such plain and high pews, just such learned divines, just as deficient in all practical appeal. Up in the window before me buzzed the very same bluebottle fly, only a little more elderly and less active in consequence, which, in younger and happier days, distracted the writer’s attention, and interfered sadly with what would have been otherwise a profitable opportunity. There are no meeting-houses now. If you want to see one as they were, in all their original nakedness and want of grace, go to Mill Yard, Whitechapel. We, of course, have wonderfully improved, and yet I have a tenderness for the old meeting-house. How learned were their ministers, how awful and orthodox their deacons! With what fear did I eye the man who gave out the hymn, and with what greater fear the watchful individual who poked up with his long stick inattentive or sleepy boys!

But I return to Mill Yard. The Christian Church in our day has pretty well agreed to get rid of or, at any rate, ignore what is read in the Bible about the seventh day being “the Sabbath of the Lord your God.” At one time this was not so. Now the tide has receded and left the Seventh-day Baptists stranded on the mud. In doing so, the Church, of course, has increased the difficulty some feel about the Divine origin and perpetual obligation of the Christian Sabbath. Archbishop Whately, for instance, could reason with the Christian who had exchanged, in spite of the literal command of God, the Christian for the Jewish Sabbath, but his arguments would fail to touch the Seventh-day Baptist, who would contend that he was doing that which God had commanded. But the fear of this has not led Christians to abandon what, in the opinion of most of them, is the apostolic plan of meeting on the first day of the week. It is to be hoped the fund left for the benefit of the Seventh-day Baptists is not a large one. The mouldy appearance of Mill Yard Meeting-house indicates that it is not. But it is enough to retain at his post a gentleman who, perhaps, would be more profitably engaged elsewhere. Certainly it does seem like a waste of power to have a chapel and a service lasting nearly a couple of hours for one grown-up adult male and three adult females, excluding the chapel pew-opener. I must say, with the exception of a young gentleman in knickerbockers, who was so astonished at the apparition of a real stranger that he kept staring at me all the time of singing, all seemed to do their duty. The singing – and there was plenty of it – was really and truly Congregational. Five or six parts of the Bible were read, and the congregation followed with open Bibles. The preacher laboured at his discourse, and quoted Hebrew and Latin as if we had all been learned divinity students. Nor could he have prayed with more fulness and power had the benches been filled with living souls waiting to draw near to the Father of spirits and live. One could not but respect the preacher, however useless seemed his learning and misdirected his research. Yet I would be sorry to stand in his shoes. He had hearers once – Where are they? Dead, or moved away, is the reply. He says in 1840 he began “to officiate as afternoon preacher in the ancient Sabbath-keeping congregation in Mill Yard.” He talks of “nearly sixty years of close critical, philological, and exegetical study of the sacred Scriptures;” of “more than thirty years of constant and laborious exposition of them;” of his having fully, freely, fearlessly, and repeatedly discoursed upon every part of natural and revealed religion. In spite of his age, physically he is not unequal to his work. He has a good voice, yet practically he beats the air. There are few to listen to his words and respond to his appeal. I wonder – as in his quiet study he reads the ancient versions of the Bible and laboriously constructs his argument: – whether it ever occurs to him that there is something better and grander than seventh-day baptism, or systematic theology, and that is everyday Christianity. I wonder, too, while looking on the dead graves and the long grass, whether it occurs to him that in that region of all unclean and deadly sin it especially behoves the preacher, in preference to ingenious speculation or antiquarian research, to impress on the heart and consciences of men the yearning, living love of God. It is not in the calm retreat, the silent shade, that vice and irreligion can be confronted and changed into purity and piety. One would fancy at Mill Yard the contrary opinion was held, as the preacher goes on, expounding the Proverbs or the Book of Job to empty benches, while close by the harlot plies her unhallowed calling, the publican retails his vitriol gin, and mothers, with eyes artificially black, knock about their little ones or cover them with kisses, as they themselves are alcoholically stimulated into maudlin tenderness or demoniac rage! If you want to see what an endowment can do for religion, go to Mill Yard. No doubt those who left money for the place thought they were doing God service. In reality, an endowment can but preserve a corpse which had better be put away. We bury our dead out of our sight. As it is in the material world so it is in the spiritual world. We love to look on life; we shrink with abhorrence from the sight of death, when Time’s decaying fingers have dimmed the lustre of eyes once bright as stars, and plucked from beauty’s cheek the blushing rose.

A more curious spot in all London is not than Mill Yard Meeting-house. The day I was there, after a service of nearly two hours, it was established by the learned minister, who is an F.S.A., and calls himself elder of the congregation (he must often stand a good chance of being junior as well), that the title of the Book of Proverbs was only to be applied to the first part, that it consisted of divers distinct sections, and that generally the book was found in the Bible after the Psalms. Evidently the preacher is a learned, painstaking student of the Dryasdust school – full of crotchets; but the biggest crotchet of all is that he should go on preaching year after year in Mill Yard.

Mr. Spurgeon’s works and essays are so constantly before the public that the briefest notice of them is all that is necessary here. In his great Tabernacle near the Elephant and Castle, which is one of the sights of London, he has a church alone consisting of 4700 members, and such is the orderly arrangement that, as he said, if one of his members were to get tipsy he should know of it before the week was out – a statement perhaps true in reality if not literally. Enormous as his place of worship is, it is always filled; but it represents, not so much a Christian Church as a Christian community on a gigantic scale. In his Orphanage at Stockwell some 135 boys are boarded, clothed, and taught. Then at Newington he has established an Orphanage and School, and under his great Tabernacle is a Pastors’ College, which in a couple of years takes the raw student from the shop or the counting-house and sends him forth into the world a ready-made divine, occasionally not a little to the dismay of those who consider a good training and a careful preparation great helps to ministerial usefulness. The students are lodged in families around, and on the Sunday are principally employed in preaching in various districts near London. Some of the Baptist places are very small indeed, and very badly attended. It were better, one would think, that they were shut up and merged with other churches or denominations. There is something inexpressibly melancholy in the long lists of Zions, and Bethels, and Mount Sions, where the pastor and the people scarcely live. Amongst some of the Baptists there are some of Antinomian tendencies, and the preachers of such doctrines have very large congregations. They are the elect of God, and can never sin. As to their doctrine and its results, one illustration will suffice. A member of one of the largest of these Antinomian places unfortunately got tipsy, fell out of the cart in which he was riding, and broke his leg. “Ah!” said his sympathizing pastor when he heard of it, “what a blessed thing he can’t fall out of the covenant.” The Antinomian believes that Christ paid, with his death, the price of the pardon of a certain number. These are in the covenant, and out of that covenant they cannot fall. There are in the Church of England those who preach this doctrine, but their number is rare. Up in Notting Hill is a Tabernacle built up and carried on by Mr. Varley, an humble imitator of Mr. Spurgeon. Originally Mr. Varley was a butcher, but he took to preaching; and finding that people came to hear him, and that he did them good, he now devotes himself entirely to ministerial work. At his Tabernacle, in St. James’s Square, there is accommodation for 1200 hearers, and for the education of more than 500 children. This history of these Tabernacles shows what may be done when suitable agency is employed. Mr. Spurgeon’s subscriptions are really wonderful. Twenty thousand pounds were given him by one lady for the purpose of founding his orphanage. More than once 2000l. have been dropped into his letter-box, as he told the writer of an article in the Daily Telegraph, where, ludicrously enough, he appeared under the head of “Unorthodox London.” “When recently attacked by illness, he began to despair; but that same evening a lady left 100l. at his door, and 1000l. came in immediately afterwards.”

CHRISTMAS MORNING WITH THE YOUNGSTERS

Amongst the most unpleasant recollections of an otherwise not unpleasant childhood are those connected with attendance at chapel on the evenings of Christmas Days. On such occasions there were circumstances, needless to explain, and in which the reader would take no interest were they explained, which compelled the writer to leave the pleasant fire and the games and mirth of the season, and, putting on his coat, trudge manfully in the dark and through the snow to shiver for an hour and a half at least at meeting. Other people the writer well knew were enjoying themselves. Father Christmas was not the rage then that he is now; Christmas-trees were a later invention, and so were Christmas tales; but still even in those far-away and benighted times there were cakes and ale, and homely Christmas carols and a little fun on a Christmas night, when blind-man’s-buff was in fashion, and snapdragon was to the little ones a wonder and a joy. The writer felt, as he sat in the comfortless square box of green baize and deal, and surveyed the scattered congregation, how much more agreeable it would have been had the old meeting been shut up on such a night, had the old minister saved his sermon, had the old ladies and gentlemen who formed the congregation dozed comfortably in their old arm-chairs at home. He arrived at the conclusion then which he has ever since retained – a conclusion the correctness of which no subsequent consideration has induced him to modify – that services at church or chapel on Christmas nights are an immense mistake. Christmas morning special services, however, are quite a different thing, and especially where children are concerned. They at any rate realize Christmas more fully than their elders, and assuredly it is by them the religious aspect of the day may be most vividly felt.

This is not a question for argument. More than forty years ago the late Dr. Fletcher, of Finsbury Chapel, instituted a special morning service at his own place of worship for Sunday-school children from the Sunday-schools of the district. The avowed object of that service was the benefit of the young. In time past it has been found to have had a salutary effect. It has been continued by Dr. Fletcher’s successor, the Rev. A. M‘Auslane, a minister whose manner, and personal appearance, and mode of speaking qualify him especially for so delicate and difficult a task. Mr. M‘Auslane hails from the land where Christmas is unknown. He was a student under Dr. Wardlaw at Glasgow. He commenced his pastoral duties in Dunfermline, but he has travelled south, and at Newport, in Wales, where he stayed a short while, and latterly at Finsbury Chapel, where he has now been eight years, he has caught something of the English regard for Christmas Day, and preaches accordingly. I scarce think London has a prettier sight to show than that of Finsbury Chapel on a Christmas morning. It is full in every part. On the ground floor and the first gallery are ranged the children and their teachers, and up above there is another gallery full of adult spectators. As they sing some of the finest of our hymns, such as —

“Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,”

the swell of their young voices is beautiful to hear. Their faces, full of joy, were equally beautiful to see. To be preached to by a learned man in a gown in a big chapel is something indeed for a little ragged urchin to think of. Then what pains must have been taken to master the tunes and sing them so well. Nor is this all by which the event of the year – as it must be for some of them – is characterized. At some of the schools the children, I believe, have a breakfast given them by the teachers previous to starting. At all of them there is a distribution of something satisfactory in the shape of buns. The muster is considerable. The schools represented at the service I attended, in addition to that belonging to the place, were Mile End, King Edward Street, Wood Street, Spitalfields, Willow Walk, Ark Street, Paradise Street, the Weigh House, the New Tabernacle, Bell Alley; Red Lion Street, Clerkenwell; Andrew Street Ragged-schools, Union Walk, Jewin Street, James Street, City Road, Ropemakers Street. The service commenced with singing —

 
“Another year has passed away,
Time swiftly glides along,
We come again to praise and pray,
And sing our festive song;
We come with song to greet you,
We come with song again.”
 

The Rev. W. Tyler then read a part of the fifth chapter of Matthew, and offered up an appropriate prayer, in which a special reference was made to the evangelistic work carried on in the City. Another hymn was sung, and then came the sermon, the subject of which was Christ blessing children, and the text of which was in Mark x. 14 and 16. Mr. M‘Auslane described how a painter had portrayed the scene; not having the picture there to show them, he would attempt a description of it in words. Some might have thought Jesus too busy or children too insignificant. In reality it was not so, and he believed that if Jesus came in this year into London, He would act now as He did then. Sometimes people forget – the butler forgot Joseph. Jesus Christ never changes. The preacher endeavoured to bring out what the text teaches about Jesus and children: – 1. It taught that Jesus is attractive to children. Some men and women children don’t like at all; others they go to cheerfully and willingly. Jesus Christ draws them to Him just as the sun the flowers. He is spoken of as the Sun of Righteousness. Why is a child not afraid to walk through the valley of the shadow of death? It is because he sees Jesus, and when he has passed through on the other side there is Jesus, the most attractive in all that land. 2. The text taught that Christ takes a deep interest in children. It was clear the Apostles did not, or they would not have tried to prevent them from coming forward. He takes the same interest now. It was to Him children had to be grateful for bodies and souls, for kind friends, and the comforts of life. All power is given to Him in heaven and on earth. Salvation is the gift of Christ, and that is another proof of the interest He takes in children. If any boy there had no father or mother, sister or brother, or friend, if he stood in this cold world alone, let him take this thought with him – in the morning as he rose from his humble cot, in the evening as he retired to rest – Jesus cares for me. Here the preacher paused while the children refreshed themselves by singing “The Pilgrims,” the boys asking, the girls replying, and all joining in the chorus, the last verse of which is —

 
“Come, oh, come! and do not leave us;
Christ is waiting to receive us,
Christ is waiting to receive us,
In that bright, that better land.”
 

Mr. M‘Auslane resumed. The text taught (3), Jesus prays for children. It is true we have not the prayer, but, nevertheless, he believed that Jesus prayed. The account in Matthew implies that He did. His prayer would, in all probability, be that God would be the protector of these children, and guide them all through life to the heavenly, happy land. There was a young man once condemned to die. His brother, who had lost an arm in the service of his country, went and pleaded for him. The judges were overcome, not by his eloquence, but by the sight of the stump of the amputated arm, and spared his brother’s life. Christ, in the same way, might plead with the Father the five wounds received on Calvary. “I have often heard an old man pray for children,” said the preacher, “and have heard him ask for things which I am sure were not proper to ask for for children. It was so long since he had been a child that he had quite forgotten what children’s feelings were. It was not so with Jesus. But you must remember also to pray for yourselves. Jesus prayed for Peter that his faith might not fail, but it did, because Peter did not pray for himself. 4. Christ wishes children to be happy, and they could not be that without the pardon of sin and hope of heaven. 5. The text taught that there are a great many children indeed in heaven. It is true there were there Jesus, and the patriarchs, and prophets, and angels, and apostles, but there were more children there, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. That last text meant that the glory of heaven was open to children, but it also meant that the population of heaven was made up of children. They would be there of every colour, – from every quarter of the globe. Last Christmas morning one little child was in that chapel who is in heaven now. “Shall we go there when we die?” was the question which concluded and enforced the preacher’s appeal, which was plain and simple and thoroughly adapted to its end. Of course there were some little ones who could not follow the preacher, but it seemed to me that evidently the majority did. It is to be hoped they did, for none but those who live in London can tell what are its trials and sorrows for such as they, or what are their needs. From the Sunday-school even many a lad and girl has gone astray. It was only a few weeks before that, at a midnight meeting in the Euston Road of some eighty or thereabouts – I cannot speak within one or two – some seventy fallen, weeping women confessed that they had been Sunday scholars, and amongst them even there were Sunday-school teachers! Of the hundreds who trooped joyously into Finsbury Chapel on our last bright, joyous Christmas morning, who can say what may be the end? Of this one thing, however, we may rest assured, it will be long before some forget the wise, kindly words listened to then, the songs in which they then took a part, or the prayers that then went up to heaven for them.