Another thing which impresses a stranger is a peculiar habit of speech common to nearly all these people, and is possibly nearly the only relic of their more religious days. “God-forgotten” was the phrase they nearly all used, an expression which gives occasion to the question, “Have Christians, who are the representatives of God upon earth, misrepresented Him to these people by their neglect?” A grudge against God, an idea as if He were the author of evil and not good to them, seemed general. Many of the phrases used showed a sort of reckless belief, which, under the circumstances, was worse than unbelief. Coming down a long dark stair late at night, from an overcrowded land, a frightful hag clutched my arm with her skinny hand, and hissed into my ear, “Is it God’s elect you are seeking here? It’s the devil’s elect you’ll find,” laughing fiendishly at her own wit. “So this is Blackfriars Wynd,” remarked one of our party, as we passed down the crowded alley. “No, it’s hell’s mouth,” exclaimed a forlorn woman, who was dragging a drunken man to his joyless home. “Do you think the missionary would dare to mock me by telling me of God’s love? Could he have the face to do it here?” a poor woman exclaimed, whose three fatherless children lay ill on some straw, which served for a bed in a cellar, of which it and a kettle were the only “furniture.”
It is one thing to hear unpleasant facts stated by unwelcome speakers, or to meet with them fossilized in statistical tables, but altogether another to confront them in beings clothed in kindred flesh and blood, in men, women, and children claiming a common Fatherhood, and asserting their right to be heard. These our brethren, haggard, hopeless, hardened, vicious, on whose faces sin has graved deeper lines than either sorrow or poverty; this old age which is not venerable, this infancy which is not loveable, these childish faces, or faces which should have been childish, peering from amidst elvish locks, and telling of a precocious familiarity with sin,—these glowering upon us from the tottering West Bow, with its patched and dirty windows, from the still picturesque Lawnmarket, from the many-storeyed houses of the High Street,—these are spectres not easily to be laid to rest, and “polite society,” which has become perfect in the polite art of indifference, must encounter them, sooner or later, in one way or another.
Surely it is possible to raise these our brethren, who are living and dying like brutes, to a platform on which the gospel of Him who came to preach glad tidings to the poor would not be met by nearly insuperable obstacles. Though more wretches have been pulled out of the mire by mission churches than by any other agency, the masses are “lapsed,” “gone under,” sunk on the whole to lower depths than the ministerial plummet can sound, and the ministers, most of whom are hampered by the existing necessities of large congregations, are not directly responsible for a condition of things which is a disgrace to Scottish Christianity. My own experience leads me to believe that these lapsed masses must be raised out of the “Slough of Despond” before they can hear or see; that these miserable thousands must have at least as much light, air, and space as we give our brutes, before a ministerial visit can be aught but a mockery,—before they can rise to manhood and womanhood in Christ. The ministers are not to be altogether blamed for failing to carry the tidings of peace to those who are too deaf, from drink and demoralization, to hear them. Condemn them if they fail to thunder into ears scarcely less dull, that the blood of those who are going down alive into the pit will be required of a church-membership which is bound to aim at no lesser measure of devotion than His who laid down His life for the brethren. Let them demand the lives of these godless ones from the respectable who enjoy the Sabbath luxury of sermons; let them declare a crusade against the Christlessness and apathy of those who sit at ease at communion-tables, content to leave those to the outer darkness for whom that same body and blood were broken and shed, and they will be guiltless.
It was by a life of sacrifice and a death of shame that the redemption of this world was wrought; and it is by a life of sacrifice alone—if loving search after the lost, if personal sympathy with the wretched, if stooping to raise and aid the poor are to be called sacrifice—that the Master’s steps can be followed and His work on the earth be completed.
I. L. B.
EDINBURGH: T. CONSTABLE,
PRINTER TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY.
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BY JOHN BROWN, M.D., F.R.S.E.