The London Congregational Association has four District Missions. It has aided in planting and sustaining eight Churches and Missions in four districts. They ask 1000l. a year, with which, aided by local support, they undertake to plant ten new district Missions in spiritually destitute localities, and sustain them until they are enabled to support themselves. As an illustration of what may be done in this way I give the following account of the District Mission established by the Church and Congregation under the care of the Rev. Dr. Raleigh, of Hare Court Chapel, Canonbury, as drawn up by the Rev. J. H. Wilson, of the Home Missionary Society.
The parent Church selected necessitous districts, in which they have opened schools and mission-rooms; in these a number of the congregation begin to labour as teachers, visitors, evangelists, &c. The result is the early formation of a branch Church, where the poor people secure all the privileges of
Christian fellowship, and the fine feeling of a Church-home, a place which they call “our Chapel,” and where they look up to some one whom they call “our pastor,” and soon those so gathered together become co-workers with the parent Church in extending its influence in the locality—rising out of these movements, the Church at Hare Court Chapel have now five branch Churches. From the last report (1868) it appears that there are now three rooms for religious service for the young, and several others for meetings with the poor and ignorant; three day schools, and five Sunday or ragged schools; two large week evening schools, and several smaller ones; seven mothers’ meetings; a district nursery for children and infants, whose mothers require to leave them during the day; coal clubs; home for little boys, where thirty are fed and clothed; three paid ministers; six lay evangelists or pastors; two Bible-women; six paid teachers, and seven paid monitors for day schools; and to aid them, there are from 300 to 400 members of the Church and congregation earnestly engaged as evangelists, pastors, teachers, helps, visitors, Scripture readers, &c. During the year about 120 had joined the Church. The Sunday and ragged schools are attended by 1300 children; the day schools
by 900, and the evening schools by upwards of 400. Besides, there are temperance societies and Bands of Hope, and in the summer months out-door services.
Another society worked by the Congregationalists is the Christian Instruction Society, founded in the year 1825, to aid in evangelizing London. House-to-house visitation was from the beginning and still is its main characteristic. Its other agencies are lay-preaching in and out of doors; the Sunday afternoon opening of places of worship; lectures on prevailing immorality and vice, and united quarterly prayer meetings. This society, however, is by no means sectarian. At its united quarterly prayer meetings ministers of the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Independent denominations join.
THE SEVENTH-DAY BAPTISTS.
As you go down Leman Street, Whitechapel, on your left, nearly at the bottom, stand two public-houses—one the Shamrock, the other, if I mistake not, the Brown Bear. Between them is a narrow little passage; on the right is a Gospel Hall, facing you is a plain brick-built Meeting-house, with a door which at certain times opens in vain, and with a window which is covered with wire of a very suggestive character. Above the window is an inscription, stating that it
was rebuilt in 1790, but that it was founded more than a century before that. A side door leads you into a grass-grown and quiet enclosure. There are a few gravestones there, recording, in illegible characters, the piety and virtues of those who have gone before. At the back of the Meeting-house is the minister’s residence. In the same square resides the pew-opener, with her little family, who seem fresher and livelier than you would expect in such a place. Outside rush along the Fenchurch Street trains to and fro, sometimes with a scream which, as you will by-and-by find, will drown the preacher’s voice. Outside there are factories and warehouses darkening the air; outside there are heathens—baptized I daresay, but nevertheless heathens—as complete and entire as any discovered by Captain Cook; outside go up and down all day the sailors of every country under heaven, at all times when on shore a disorderly lot, with a strong tendency to get drunk and quarrel; outside are the lodging-house keepers, and Jew slop-sellers, and foul women and crimps, who lie in wait for poor Jack; outside, nightly and daily, on Sundays and week-days, once a week and all the year round, is the ever-deafening and ever-growing roar of London life.
On Saturdays this little old-fashioned meeting-house is opened twice a day. Of sects, as we all know, there are many Lilliputian varieties. One of the smallest of these is that of the Seventh-day Baptists. In this country there are two congregations of them; one in Mill Yard, and one far away in Gloucestershire, where, according to the common proverb, “God is.” At one time they were a sect, as they are I believe at this time in America. Here, in England, they have dwindled down to two skeleton congregations, an endowment, and a Chancery suit. As there is money a form of worship is kept up, though for all practical purposes the cause is dead. There may be four grown-up persons besides the pew-opener to form the morning service: there are just as many in the afternoon. There is no week-evening service. At one time, many, many years ago, there was a Sunday-school, but the scholars have grown up and moved away, and none have come to take their vacant places. Inside the door you are informed there are no pew-rents, no collections. Nevertheless, the people keep away. In the pulpit is a learned man of an old-fashioned and almost extinct type, and no one regards him; and yet I must confess there was to me a fascination in the place. It was the ghost of what I knew in
youth. Long, long ago, there were just such old-fashioned meetings, with just such sounding-boards over the pulpit, just such plain and high pews, just such learned divines, just as deficient in all practical appeal. Up in the window before me buzzed the very same bluebottle fly, only a little more elderly and less active in consequence, which, in younger and happier days, distracted the writer’s attention, and interfered sadly with what would have been otherwise a profitable opportunity. There are no meeting-houses now. If you want to see one as they were, in all their original nakedness and want of grace, go to Mill Yard, Whitechapel. We, of course, have wonderfully improved, and yet I have a tenderness for the old meeting-house. How learned were their ministers, how awful and orthodox their deacons! With what fear did I eye the man who gave out the hymn, and with what greater fear the watchful individual who poked up with his long stick inattentive or sleepy boys!