The Religious Life of London

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Transcribed from the 1870 Tinsley Brothers edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.

the
RELIGIOUS LIFE OF LONDON.

by
J. EWING RITCHIE,
author of “british senators,” “the night side of london,” etc.

“’Tis Nature’s law
That none, the meanest of created things,
Of form created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good.”

Wordsworth.

LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1870.

london:
savill, edwards and co., chandos street,
covent garden.

to
SAMUEL MORLEY, Esq., M.P.
to whose unexampled activity and munificence
(by no means confined within his own denomination)
much of the religious life of london is due,
this volume is respectfully dedicated
by
THE AUTHOR.

INTRODUCTION.

Man is undoubtedly a religious animal. In England at any rate the remark holds good. No one who ignores the religious element in our history can rightly understand what England was, or how she came to be what she is. The fuller is our knowledge, the wider our field of investigation, the more minute our inquiry, the stronger must be the conviction in all minds that religion has been for good or bad the great moving power, and, in spite of the teachings of Secularism or of Positivism, it is clear that as much as ever the questions which are daily and hourly coming to the front have in them more or less of a religious element. It is not often foreigners perceive this. Take Louis Blanc as an illustration. As much as any foreigner he has mastered our habits and ways—all that we call our inner life; yet, to him, the English pulpit is a piece of wood—nothing more. According to him, the oracles are dumb, the sacred fire has ceased to burn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain; church attendance, he tells us, in England, besides custom, has little to recommend it. There is beauty in desolation—in life changing into death—

“Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers;”