I supposed myself acquainted with all the approved renderings of the Episcopal morning service, but when the clergyman who officiated at the Abbey began to twang out "Dearly beloved brethren," &c., in a nasal, drawling semi-chant, I was taken completely aback. It sounded as though some graceless Friar Tuck had wormed himself into the desk and was endeavoring, under the pretense of reading the service, to caricature as broadly as possible the alleged peculiarity of Methodistic pulpit enunciation superimposed upon the regular Yankee drawl. As the service proceeded, I became more accustomed and more reconciled to this mode of utterance, but never enough so to like it, nor even the responses, which were given in the same way, but much better. After I came away, I was informed that this semi-chant is termed intoning, and is said to be a revival of an ancient method of rendering the church service. If such be the fact, I can only say that in my poor judgment that revival was an unwise and unfortunate one.
The Service was very long—more than two hours—the Music excellent—the congregation large—the Sermon, so far as I could judge, had nothing bad in it. Yet there was an Eleventh-Century air about the whole which strengthened my conviction that the Anglican Church will very soon be potentially summoned to take her stand distinctly on the side either of Romanism or of Protestantism, and that the summons will shake not the Church only but the Realm to its centre.
RAGGED SCHOOLS.
In the evening I attended the Ragged School situated in Carter's-field Lane, near the Cattle-Market in Smithfield [where John Rogers was burned at the stake by Catholics, as Catholics had been burned by Protestants before him. The honest, candid history of Persecution for Faith's sake, has never yet been written; whenever it shall be, it must cause many ears to tingle].
It was something past 7 o'clock when we reached the rough old building, in a filthy, poverty-stricken quarter, which has been rudely fitted up for the Ragged School—one of the first, I believe, that was attempted. I should say there were about four hundred pupils on its benches, with about forty teachers; the pupils were at least two-thirds males from five to twenty years old, with a dozen or more adults. The girls were a hundred or so, mainly from three to ten years of age; but in a separate and upper apartment ascending out of the main room, there were some forty adult women, with teachers exclusively of their own sex. The teachers were of various grades of capacity; but, as all teach without pay and under circumstances which forbid the idea of any other than philanthropic or religious attractiveness in the duty, they are all deserving of praise. The teaching is confined, I believe, to rudimental instruction in reading and spelling, and to historic, theologic and moral lessons from the Bible. As the doors are open, and every one who sees fit comes in, stays so long as he or she pleases, and then goes out, there is much confusion and bustle at times, but on the whole a satisfactory degree of order is preserved, and considerable, though very unequal, progress made by the pupils.
But such faces! such garments! such daguerreotypes of the superlative of human wretchedness and degradation! These pupils were gathered from among the outcasts of London—those who have no family ties, no homes, no education, no religious training, but were born to wander about the docks, picking up a chance job now and then, but acquiring no skill, no settled vocation, often compelled to steal or starve, and finally trained to regard the sheltered, well fed, and respected majority as their natural oppressors and their natural prey. Of this large class of vagrants, amounting in this city to thousands, Theft and (for the females) Harlotry, whenever the cost of a loaf of bread or a night's lodging could be procured by either, were as matter-of-course resorts for a livelihood as privateering, campaigning, distilling or (till recently) slave-trading was to many respected and well-to-do champions of order and Conservatism throughout Christendom. And the outcasts have ten times the excuse for their moral blindness and their social misdeeds that their well-fed competitors in iniquity ever had. They have simply regarded the world as their oyster and tried to open its hard shells as they best could, not indicating thereby a special love of oysters but a craving appetite for food of some kind. It was oyster or nothing with them. And in the course of life thus forced upon them, the males who survived the period of infancy may have averaged twenty-five years of wretched, debased, brutal existence, while the females, of more delicate frame and subjected to additional evils, have usually died much younger. But the gallows, the charity hospitals, the prisons, the work-houses (refuges denied to the healthy and the unconvicted), with the unfenced kennels and hiding-places of the destitute during inclement weather, generally saw the earthly end of them all by the time that men in better circumstances have usually attained their prime. And all this has been going on unresisted and almost unnoticed for countless generations, in the very shadows of hundreds of church steeples, and in a city which pays millions of dollars annually for the support of Gospel ministrations.
The chief impression made on me by the spectacle here presented was one of intense sadness and self-reproach. I deeply realised that I had hitherto said too little, done too little, dared too little, sacrificed too little, to awaken attention to the infernal wrongs and abuses which are inherent in the very structure and constitution, the nature and essence, of civilised Society as it now exists throughout Christendom. Of what avail are alms-giving, and individual benevolence, and even the offices of Religion, in the presence of evil so gigantic and so inwoven with the very framework of Society? There have been here in all recent times charitable men, good men, enough to have saved Sodom, but not enough to save Society from the condemnation of driving this outcast race before it like sheep to the slaughter, as its members pressed on in pursuit of their several schemes of pleasure, riches or ambition, looking up to God for His approbation on their benevolence as they tossed a penny to some miserable beggar after they had stolen the earth from under his feet. How long shall this endure?
The School was dismissed, and every one requested to leave who did not choose to attend the prayer-meeting. No effort was made to induce any to stay—the contrary rather. I was surprised to see that three-fourths (I think) staid; though this was partly explained afterwards by the fact that by staying they had hopes of a night's lodging here and none elsewhere. That prayer-meeting was the most impressive and salutary religious service I have attended for many years. Four or five prayers were made by different teachers in succession—all chaste, appropriate, excellent, fervent, affecting. A Hymn was sung before and after each by the congregation—and well sung. Brief and cogent addresses were made by the superintendent and (I believe) an American visitor. Then the School was dismissed, and the pupils who had tickets permitting them to sleep in the dormitory below filed off in regular order to their several berths. The residue left the premises. We visiters were next permitted to go down and see those who staid—of course only the ladies being allowed to look into the apartment of the women. O the sadness of that sight! There in the men's room were perhaps a hundred men and boys, sitting up in their rags in little compartments of naked boards, each about half-way between a bread-tray and a hog-trough, which, planted close to each other, were to be their resting-places for the night, as they had been for several previous nights. And this is a very recent and very blessed addition to the School, made by the munificence of some noble woman, who gave $500 expressly to fit up some kind of a sleeping-room, so that those who had attended the School should not all be turned out (as a part still necessarily are) to wander or lie all night in the always cold, damp streets. There are not many hogs in America who are not better lodged than these poor human brethren and sisters, who now united, at the suggestion of the superintendent, in a hymn of praise to God for all His mercies. Doubtless, many did so with an eye to the shelter and hope of food (for each one who is permitted to stay here has a bath and six ounces of bread allowed him in the morning); yet when I contrasted this with the more formal and stately worship I had attended at Westminster Abbey in the morning, the preponderance was decidedly not in favor of the latter.
It seemed to me a profanation—an insult heaped on injury—an unjustifiable prying into the saddest secrets of the great prison-house of human woe—for us visiters to be standing here; and, though I apologised for it with a sovereign, which grain of sand will, I am sure, be wisely applied to the mitigation of this mountain of misery, I was yet in haste to be gone. Yet I leaned over the rail and made some inquiry of a ragged and forlorn youth of nineteen or twenty who sat next us in his trough, waiting for our departure before he lay down to such rest as that place could afford him. He replied that he had no parents nor friends who could help him—had never been taught any trade—always did any work he could get—sometimes earned six-pence to a shilling per day by odd jobs, but could get no work lately—had no money, of course—and had eaten nothing that day but the six ounces of bread given him on rising here in the morning—and had only the like six ounces in prospect between him and starvation. That hundreds so situated should unite with seeming fervor in praise to God shames the more polished devotion of the favored and comfortable; and if these famishing, hopeless outcasts were to pilfer every day of their lives (as most of them did, and perhaps some of them still do), I should pity even more than I blamed them.
The next night gave me a clearer idea of