You perceive now how the Salvationists work here? They are the “friends” of the girls: they “help” them. Find out from a girl if she is miserable: find out if she would sooner go back to a respectable life. Go everywhere fearlessly: Find out if any girl is being detained against her wishes. Be gentle with them as with equals. Make them feel that you care for them for their own sakes. Work upon their feelings—speak of their home, their mother, their father, their brothers, their sisters. Offer them a new start. Then, the moment that of their own free will they are ready to come, put them into a cab and drive straight away with them to the Home. Here they come under the influence of the women officials of the Army, (some of whom, however, also do visiting work), the same system being pursued with them as with the men. They are not made to feel that they are dealing with people more loftily refined or more loftily righteous than themselves. They are not made to feel that they are “fearful sinners.” They are made to feel that sin is fearful and that they have sinned fearfully, but that they have every hope before them, hope of a new life before God and man. As for the women officials of the Salvation Army, I will say this, that in no body of female religionists, except the Catholic Sisters, have I found so many sweet true women. I have also known Anglican Sisters who were well worthy of a place beside them. Such women are the essence of Christianity. They are the true children of Mary Magdalene and Monica, of the love and of the affection of the soul. Preference for any one of these three classes, there can be none. I cannot exalt true love above true affection any more than I can exalt heat above light: their joy is equal. But in one respect the Salvationist women have an advantage over the others, just as the Salvationist men have over the celibate priests—in just that, in the fact that they need not be celibates. Many of these Salvationist girls and women are the sweethearts or wives of their fellow-workers. This, I think, is as it should be. He who neglects or despises that great law of Nature and God, passion, will be assuredly punished for it. To make a large body of men and women celibates is to put a premium on immorality and hypocrisy. This great rock the Salvation Army has avoided, and herein it has done most wisely. Here, where Rome is weak, it is strong. We must not, however, think that there is nothing to be said in behalf of celibacy: there is much, very much. If we were all men like Francis of Assissi or Vincent de Paul, it would be perfect; but unfortunately we are not. At the same time, he who has seen the work of Catholic priests and of Protestant clergymen or ministers in times of plague and pest must feel how great a clog to perfect courage are those hostages a man has given to fate in wife and children. On the other hand, observe that times of pest and plague are comparatively rare, and that every great idea when put into practice is but a mixed good. What we have to do is to choose that which has least evil, or shall we say most good, and this can, we feel sure, be only chosen in conformity with all of those few great primeval laws which are the guides of life, which are the direct words of Nature and of God.
VIII.
So much, then, for the how of the Salvation Army. Let us now consider if it has helped us to the why—nay, if it has not absolutely told us the why! Did we not instinctively catch at something we saw two or three times rising before us as with small but teleological significance in it? Did we not feel, as we uttered that expression with which this something inspired us, that here was the why in propria persona? Religious Socialism.
In this state of affairs—the powerlessness of the Socialists to bring home to the People the great idea of social improvement: in the misery unspeakable of the People; in the atmosphere heavy with the degradation of the People—what is it that the People has done? It has evolved a movement, no longer from without, but from within itself. It has sought for consolation for its unspeakable wretchedness in the perennial spring of Religion, of the yearning love of Jesus. It has, at the touch of the first match that came to it, blazed up into the flaming fire of Religious Socialism.
In the early part of the thirteenth century the People did the same, the People of Italy. But what a heaven lies between the man who led that movement and the man that is leading this! O my eloquent Rationalists, O my loquacious Secularists, both of you whom I esteem so much—how ready are you to talk of the degradation which that gigantic superstition and delusion, Christianity, wrought upon the People! Whenever are you tired of brandishing “starry Galileo” and scattering the scattered dust of poor old Copernicus in the face of Catholicism, making it to tremble and sneeze fearfully? Does it never occur to you that that divine Goddess Scientia, whom you worship with such noble devotion, has wrought a far deeper degradation on the people than Catholicism ever did? Have you never seen, crouching under the shadow of your railways and your telegraphs and all your improved machinery, the unspeakable wretchedness of London, of Birmingham, of Manchester, of Glasgow? And now that this People, whose lives your Goddess has made of such a sort that they will not stand too favourable a comparison with those of dogs—now that this People, in its passionate searching after some consolation, however slight, of whatever sort, seizes on this creature of superstition and delusion, this Jesus who is only a man, just like you or me, and whom you have so triumphantly proved so, and makes him the text for this flaming fire of Religious Socialism—has it never struck you, O my eloquent Rationalists, O my loquacious Secularists, what an appalling difference there is between Salvation Army banners, handkerchiefs, brass-bands, and concertinas, and the “green boughs, flags, music, and songs of gladness” that came forth from the Umbrian towns and villages to welcome Francis of Assissi? have you never felt that there is any essential difference between the perpetual Revivalist hymn of “My Jesus to know and to feel his blood flow,” and the “Canticle of the Creatures?” But, above all, have you never felt that it is more to that divine Goddess Scientia, whom you worship with such noble devotion, than to anything else that this appalling difference is due?
And you, O my Middle-class, of whom I am so humble a unit, did it ever occur to you that it is rather a foolish thing to paint a boy’s face black and then be shocked at it? If the People, its foulness and its ferocity, makes you shiver and shudder, who pray made it foul and fierce but you who govern it?—What do you say? “It was no business of yours?” That was what Cain said, but respectable Christians like you are not surely going to take that eminent casuist as your mouth-piece? If you were Atheists or Agnostics, now, worshippers of “the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,” of course that would be another matter, but you are Christians, respectable Christians who always wear black coats on Sundays, and object to having the Library and Picture-Gallery open.
Well, there! I cannot make myself angry with you, my dear Middle-class. I admire your good qualities too much for that—too much indeed, as I often tell myself; for who shall say but that my belief in your ultimate regeneration and new birth unto a really glorious place in a true civilization be not, after all, but infatuation? Here is Carlyle, whom we all love and admire so, trying to be our benefactor by demonstrating to us our illusions on this matter, and telling us, ever since 1830, of the “steady approach of democracy with revolution (probably explosive) and a finis incomputable to man; steady decay of all morality, political, social, individual; this once noble England getting more and more ignoble, and untrue in every fibre of it, till the gold (Goethe’s composite king) will all be eaten out, and noble England will have to collapse in shapeless ruin, whether for ever or not none of us can know.” Really there are hours when I am made quite to suffer by thinking of what is going to happen to my dear Middle-class when the People rise unanimously against it,—“roaring million-headed unreflecting, darkly suffering, darkly sinning ‘Demos’” (as Carlyle says again), “come to call its old superiors to account at its maddest of tribunals.” It will, I fear, be little good for the Mr. Caffyns of those times to write letters to the Argus of those times, explaining the physiological aspects of the movement. On such an occasion in Paris, in 1793, Mr. Caffyns went up into the arms of La Guillotine for much less heinous offences than that, and who would be left capable of recording whether, in this case, they went up “with a tripping movement” (as Mr. Caffyn tells us the fanatical “Hallelujah lasses” go), or whether they marched, as perhaps Mr. Caffyn himself marches to church or chapel every Sunday morning, to the edification of all beholders? But let us not think of such an appalling spectacle. Mr. Caffyn is still with us, and the Argus is still with us, and perhaps some morning we shall have some more brilliant letters on the physiological aspects of Mr. Caffyn’s friends, the hallelujah lasses.
I cannot, I say, make myself angry with you, my dear Middle-class of England (and you might plausibly suggest that it would not matter much if I did), and how then shall I even frown at this Middle-class of Victoria, about whom (if Carlyle is right) I am more infatuate still? Does not the People breathe free in Australia? Are we not liberated here from that charming “Upper Ten Thousand” which monopolises the best of the bad education England has to offer, the Public Schools and the Universities? Is there not a hope that, now that the primary education of the People is progressing so satisfactorily, some of our young rising politicians, (or even some of the old ones), may bring home to us the fact that we want equally—nay, far more!—a secondary education for the Middle-class? so that Victoria may step forward as a competitor with the most universally civilized nation in the world, France, and teach England the unspeakable glory and advantage of (we should call it) an Upper-class, “homogeneous, intelligent, civilized, brought up in good public schools” (and not, as now, in more or less good, or more or less bad, denominational, and “private adventure” schools) “and on the first plane.”