All Saints' Day and Other Sermons

by Charles Kingsley

But, next to the chapel itself, a scent of carrion makes you start. You look, against the will of your smart and ostentatious guide, through a half-open door, and see another sight—a room, dark and foul, mildewed and ruinous; and, swept carelessly into a corner, a heap of dirt, rags, bones, waifs and strays of every kind, decaying all together.

You ask, with astonishment and disgust, how comes that there? and are told, to your fresh astonishment and disgust, that that is only where the servants sweep the litter. But crouching behind the litter, in the darkest corner, something moves. You go up to it, in spite of the entreaties of your guide, and find an aged idiot gibbering in her rags.

Who is she? Oh, an old servant—or a child, or possibly a grand-child, of some old servant—your guide does not remember which. She is better out of the way there in the corner. At all events she can find plenty to eat among the dirt-heap; and as for her soul, if she has one, the clergyman is said to come and see her now and then, so probably it will be saved.

Would you not turn away from that palace with the contemptuous thought—Civilized? Refined? These people’s civilization is but skin-deep. Their refinement is but an outside show. Look into the first back room, and you find that they are foul barbarians still.

And yet such, literally such and no better, is the refinement of modern England; such, and no better, is the civilization of our great towns. Such I fear from what I am told, is the civilization of Southsea, beside the barbarism to be found in Portsea close at hand. Dirt and squalor, brutality and ignorance close beside such luxury as the world has not seen, it may be, since the bad days of Heathen Rome.

But more, if you turned away, you would say to yourselves, if you were thoughtful persons—not only what barbarism, but what folly. The owner and his household are in daily danger. The idiot in discontent, or even in mere folly, may seize a lighted candle, burn petroleum, as she did in Paris of late, and set the whole palace on fire. And more, the very dirt is in itself inflammable, and capable, as it festers, of spontaneous combustion. How many a stately house has been burnt down ere now, simply by the heating of greasy rags, thrust away in some neglected closet. Let the owner of the house beware. He is living, voluntarily, over a volcano of his own making.

But more—what if you were told that the fault lay not so much in the negligence of servants as in that of the owner himself, that the master of that palace had over him a King, to whom all that was foul, neglectful, cruel, was inexpressibly hateful, so hateful that He once had actually stepped off the throne of the universe to die for such creatures as that poor idiot and her forgotten parents? Would you not question whether the prayers offered up in that chapel would have any answer from Him, save that awful answer He once gave? “When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood.”

Oh, my friends, you who understand my parable, has the awful thought never struck you that such may be God’s answer to the prayers of a nation which leaves in its midst such barbarism, such heathenism, as exists in every great town of this realm? And what if you were told next that the laws of His kingdom were eternal and inexorable, and that one of His cardinal laws is—that as a man sows, so shall he reap; that every sin punishes itself, even though the sinner does not know that he has sinned; that he who knew not his master’s will, and did it not, shall be beaten with few stripes; that the innocent babe does not escape unburnt, because it knew not that fire burns; that the good man who lives in a malarious alley does not escape fever and cholera, because he does not know that dirt breeds pestilence; that, in a word, he who knew not his master’s will, and did it not, shall be beaten with few stripes; but that he who knew his master’s will, and did it not, shall be beaten with many stripes? Then of how many and how heavy stripes, think you, will the inhabitant of that palace be counted worthy, who has been taught by Christianity for the last fifteen hundred years, and by physical science and political economy for the last fifty years, and yet persists, in defiance of his own knowledge, in leaving his used-up servants, and their children and grand-children after them, to rot, body, mind, and soul, in the very precincts of the palace, having no other excuse to offer for this than that it is too much trouble to treat them better, and that, on the whole, he can make money more rapidly by thus throwing away that human dirt, and leaving it to decay where it can, regardless what it pollutes and poisons; just as the manufacturer can make money more rapidly by not consuming his own smoke, but letting it stream out of the chimney to poison with blackness and desolation the green fields where God meant little children to gather flowers?

Ladies, to you I appeal, not merely as women, but as Ladies, if (as I am assured by those who know you), ladies you are, in the grand old meaning of that grand old word.

If so—you know then, what it is to be a lady and what not. You know that it is not to go, like the daughters of Zion in Isaiah’s time, with mincing gait, and borrowed head-gear, and tasteless finery, the head well-nigh empty, the heart full of little save vanity and vexation of spirit, busy all the week over cheap novels and expensive dresses, and on Sunday over a little dilettante devotion. You know, I take for granted, that whatever the world may think or say, that to be that, is not to be a lady.