“Dear friends,” the girl was saying, as Beaumont and Storth joined the crowd, “believe me, we plead with you for your good. I cannot think it right so many of you should lead the lives you do. Some of you, I fear, live very far apart from Christ, living only, as it were, that you may continue to live. All your efforts, all your anxieties, are summed up in that—to continue to live. If you can live honestly you are the more content, because you do not like the risks of dishonesty. If you are unhappily compelled to live meanly, meagrely, you put up with it as best you may, hoping, for a turn of your luck. If you are not so compelled how do you show your gratitude to the Almighty giver and disposer? By faring sumptuously every day, caring only for raiment and fine linen, for dainty dishes, good cheer, soft living. Perhaps you are of the foolish ones that cannot be quite happy without the envy of your neighbours. Then you spend your money upon vanities that give you no real pleasure, except the poor delight of making someone jealous of your good fortune. You work very hard to get more money than you have any need for to buy luxuries that are hurtful to you body and soul. You are really very foolish so to waste this precious life in vain strivings. How much of the misery and poverty of this world are caused because one man conceives he cannot be happy till he has amassed a large fortune. It does not seem to matter to him that the price of his wealth is the abject misery of many whom in church on Sundays he calls his brothers. So have I seen a greedy pig snouting in the trough long after he has eaten his fill, and pushing aside some half-starved weakling of the same litter. The vaunted brotherhood of man is like that. Do you think that you have solved all problems when you have spoken glibly of supply and demand, or this new doctrine of the survival of the fittest? Methinks I see one of your sleek manufacturers, an alderman, maybe, perhaps a magistrate. He is well clad, housed sumptuously; he has money always at command, enough and to spare. I can fancy how sweet to him must be that smooth saying, ‘the survival of the fittest.’ Pshaw! The man mistakes a letter. He means the survival of the fattest. Do you think Jesus Christ died for the survival of the fittest, for the sacred law of supply and demand? It seems to me that the fittest do not survive. They are too fit, and the world crucifies them. That is the world’s way of dealing with the fittest. No! Jesus taught a very different doctrine, and His teaching will square with that of neither your Huxleys nor your Spencers, and still less will it square with your consecrated supply and demand. You have tried to carry on the world with theories of men’s devising. Are you satisfied with the result? Does Dives enjoy his dinner the more because he has perforce heard the moans of Lazarus at his gate? Is anybody who has a head to think and eyes to see and a heart to feel content with things as they now are? Oh, no! They tell me you people in Huddersfield are great Radicals and are going to set everything right by Act of Parliament. Well, you have tried Parliament tinkering a many centuries. Is the world so very much better for your Acts of Parliament? Don’t you think it is time to try a little of Christ’s doctrine? And Christ’s doctrine means what? In a word, Christ’s doctrine is Christ living. But you profess Christ on Sunday. Where do you put Him on Monday? On the shelf with the Family Bible. He is too sacred a Being, you think, perhaps, for the mill, the warehouse, the shop.
“Christ, I think, meant that the lives of the people should be more joyous, more free from carking care, from grinding poverty. I cannot think Christ meant the world should always have its Dives and always its Lazarus. Surely there is a happy board of solid comfort midway between the insolent ostentation and sinful waste of the rich man’s table, and the floor on which the dogs fight for the fallen crumbs. Let us find that happy mean, and there will be more of the brotherhood of man and more kinship with Christ.
“But you tell me that a working-man has only one use for good wages—to spend his superfluity in drink. I know full well how prone so many are to besot themselves with drink. But you—” and here the speaker looked full at Beaumont and the other well-dressed men, now not a few, who stood on the skirts of the growing gathering, “you who have never known want can scarcely credit me if I tell you that the most part of the fearful, sickening drunkenness of the people comes not from too much money, but from too little. When people are stupefied by drink they forget for a time their hunger, their rags, their mean, despicable condition, their empty, dirty homes, their squalid courts, their unkempt children, their slattern wives, in a word, they lose their real selves and become for an hour or two your equals. A drunken man is only dreaming with his eyes open, and when the waking life is so cold, so bare, so unlovely, do you wonder that men love to dream?
“Do I then excuse drunkenness? God forbid. Nay, rather do I plead with all that they should quit the accursed thing and not purchase for themselves that Fool’s Paradise, so costly, and from which they awake to find the world still harder. But I am here to-night to plead with all who may hear me, rich or poor, high or low, master or man, to try to live in all things the Christ-life. There are miserable sinners enough besides the poor drunkard. I daresay some of you have stopped to listen just on purpose to hear the faults and vices of the very poor and very lost denounced. It is soothing, no doubt, to see other people soundly trounced, to hear vices we haven’t got, and imagine we are never likely to have, scathingly lashed. But I think we’ll let the poor sinner have a rest to-night. There are sins in high as well as in low places, and first and foremost I count the sin and folly of setting all your heart and all your mind on the mad haste to be rich, caring to stand well with the world, to have the seat of honour at the feast, to surround yourself with all the garb and trappings of wealth—in a word, to get on. It is a mean and paltry ambition. Who are you that you should want to thrust yourself head and shoulders above your fellows? When the final judgment comes, what will it avail you to have piled up riches and be driven to church in a carriage and pair.
“I tell you, there are a few other matters that will have to be inquired into there——”
“Oh! come along, Beaumont,” said Storth, “we’ve had about enough of this bally rot. Canting humbug, I call it. Chuck the girl a bob, and let’s slide,” and he flung the silver coin towards the tambourine of Happy Sal and moved away. Beaumont flung no coin, but, raising his hat, followed his companion.
“I’d have liked to hear the end of it, Storth,” he said. “The young lady, for she’s that you can see with half an eye, has tackled a big subject. I fancy that’s not the usual kind of Salvation Army harangue. If it is, I think I must hunt up their barracks.”
“A lot of blooming nonsense, I call it. That is so far as I could understand what the dickens the girl was driving at. But I say, though, if she’s a fair sample of Salvation Army lasses, I think I’ll put in an hour or two at the Barracks myself. Face like a Mary Magdalene, hasn’t she? ’Spose that’s about the time of day with her, eh, Beaumont?”
“You’ll have to read faces better than that, Sam, or you’ll never be any good in Court,” said Beaumont. “Do you believe in anything or anybody? Is there no good thing under the sun?”
“Believe in anything or anybody? Rather. Not many bodies, but a good many things. I believe in Sam Storth. I’ve a very great respect for him too, and mean to do him well. I believe in a good dinner, and if somebody else is fool enough to pay for it, that won’t spoil my appetite, you bet. I believe in good wine, and it won’t break my heart if it comes out of your or any other fellow’s cellar, and if I can’t get good wine at your expense, I’ll be thankful for good beer at my own. There’s a very good tap of it at the Royal, let me tell you. And I believe in good clothes, and I’d rather drive than walk. Third-class riding’s better than first-class walking, let me tell you. And I like a good play, not Shakespeare, you know, nor anything classic, but something you can take easy, with plenty of leg in it, don’t you know! And I like a pretty girl, too, but not enough to chuck myself away on one, and I like a coin or two in an old stocking, for I’ve an eye for a rainy day, and don’t mean to be out in the wet when it comes. There, that’s about my credo, Beaumont, and if I can only get a fair share of what I want, there isn’t a heartier singer of the doxology in church than yours truly.”