The Religious Life of London

by J. Ewing Ritchie

In London, if we are to believe what we hear in some quarters, the real seat of true and undefiled religion is to be found amongst the small body who meet in an obscure street leading out of the Walworth Road. The neighbourhood is not a very attractive one, and is inhabited chiefly by retail tradesmen, who must find it in these hard times a struggle to make both ends meet. You must look sharp to find the place of which you are in search. In a row of shops opposite Lion Street you will see one in the day-time with the shutters up. On the shutters you will see one or two little bills headed Christian Meeting House, containing an invitation, as follows:—“Dear friend, you are affectionately invited to the following meetings.” Then you have a list of the times of meeting, an announcement that all seats are free, and the text, “For both

He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all one, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren.” If you enter, you see a few benches in what is meant for a shop, and a few more in the room behind. Where the window is there is a desk, at which the chairman or conductor of the meeting sits. By the door is a little box into which the offerings of the faithful are poured. As a rule the place, which cannot hold more than forty or fifty adults comfortably, is well filled by very poor people. It is the only place of meeting of the sect in London. They are numerous, so they say, in Essex, Sussex, and Surrey, but in the Walworth Road they are few and not popular with their neighbours, who possibly know no better. Now and then up comes a street-boy and makes a hideous noise through the keyhole; but the Peculiar People have got used to that. I should fancy with the keen-witted artisans of London they make but little way. The reader may remember that a little while ago some of these people figured in a police-court. They had refused all proper medical aid for a child, and it died in consequence. They have great faith, these poor people. They have great scorn also for people more benighted than themselves. They speak contemptuously of the time

when they knew no better, when they trusted in forms, and attended on a one-man ministry, and were humbled and dejected on account of sin, and called themselves miserable sinners, and confessed that they had done the things they ought not to have done, and left undone those things which they should have done. All that sort of feeling and talk is all wicked in their opinion; for theirs is the glorious liberty of the sons of God and joint heirs of heaven. Religion has no difficulties for them, no mysteries; nothing beyond the reach of man, heights to which he cannot ascend, depths which he cannot fathom. To come together and declare their unspeakable joy is all that they have to do. For this the beginner is as competent as the grey-headed believer, the sister as well as the brother, the ignorant man as well as he who has had a college education. Triumphantly they ask—

“When the Lord would speak,
Think ye he needs the Latin or the Greek?”

Of course not. And thus in turn they all preach and pray with a zeal which literally is not according to knowledge. If a man cannot say he lives without sin, they set him down as no Christian. At one time they held that as the Spirit of God only teaches one

thing, that if true so-called Christians disagreed in Church matters, one of them was a child of the devil; and as they were not at all backward in applying this doctrine, they were split up as fast as they gathered together. They have a great deal of the Methodist leaven amongst them, and at prayer, or while speaking is going on, express their feelings in a way which, to a stranger, may be considered unnecessarily noisy. Their leaders seem to be a small tradesman in the Southwark Road, and a little, pale, wizened female, whose utterances and prayers are of the most extraordinary character—a sort of sing-song, now rising and then dropping, in a way which in a secular personage and on secular subjects would be ludicrous in the extreme. But they profess to have no leaders. They have elders, who are simply elders. They become such by lapse of time alone.

As to their organization, I much question if they have any. One brother assured me there were rules, but as the price was fourpence, and as trade was slack, he had been unable to procure a copy of them. In answer to our appeal, an elder said there were such, but they were under lock and key, and he could not find them for us; whereupon another brother reached out a New Testament, with the

assurance that there, and there alone, were their rules. What information we could get we had to fish out by questions. As to Church membership, they have no preliminaries. All who come are of the Church; those whom the Lord calls will join them, and if the Lord has not called them they will soon drop away. They consider that every service is the sacrament, and they have no special form. In the same way they have no baptism—infant or adult, creeds, confessions of faith, forms of prayer, ministers set apart and trained to preach;—all these things they have done away with. By communion as brother with brother, and sister with sister, they can cherish the true Christian life. If one of them lack anything, let him or her ask of God. How familiarly and at times irreverently they pray, the reader can well imagine. It is difficult to say common things with propriety, says the old Latin proverb. It is more difficult to introduce them into prayer, to inform the Lord that Brother Jones would have been present had he not been unable to come, and to explain the peculiarly distressing circumstances of Sister Smith. For acting on the world outside, they have great faith in out-of-door preaching, an exercise in which they take great delight, and for which they consider themselves

peculiarly qualified. They forget, as one has wittily remarked, that if the Lord does not need man’s learning, still less does He need man’s ignorance. As to the financial question, they get over that without much difficulty. Their expenses are next to nothing, and each brother or sister is ever ready to contribute his mite. They have nothing to pay for pew-rents; they have no minister’s salary to collect; they have no educational institutions to support; the rent of a room in a back street is no serious item; and as to church furniture, that is easily supplied—a door-mat, a dirty desk, half a dozen old forms, a second-hand Bible or so, a greasy hymn-book that has done duty many times, and they have all that they require. It is not for me to judge my brother. To show him how fatal is his fluency of tongue, how presumptuous his hope, how unfounded his joy, is a thankless task. All I would suggest is, that he should exercise a little of that charity of which he stands in need himself, and not fancy that to him has been revealed what men of greater piety and higher intellect have been unable to discover. Another objection may also be taken. In an ancient town, with a fine old castle, many, many years ago, there was an attempt to form a volunteer regiment.

Unfortunately all wanted to be officers; the consequence was, the regiment came to grief. The Peculiar People have too many officers. Where every one has an equal right to teach, the number of the taught will be small indeed.