The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

This represents this clergyman's attitude toward his people; and all who are their friends are his people. Is it any wonder that they never go beyond his care? He has baptized the children of three generations. Easter service is the home-coming of these families. They come from as far as they have money to pay their fare. The gray stone church is pretty. It has stained-glass windows, a baptistry, and maintains a surpliced choir. It is delightful to see the positive influence of these accessories on the people. Other churches to which they have access lack them, and the contrast deepens the love for the old church. It needs renovating, a parish house, a corps of modern workers. But these can well be dispensed with while that towering gray head leads the people. For the noble, unselfish life of the man stands before them always, the embodiment of eternal love and sympathy, interpreting both under conditions that would at times seem to justify doubt.

There is another phase of the Church's attitude toward its work in the poorer districts that lies at the root of the rejection of the Church by the majority of the thinking, self-respecting poor, and that is the assembling of the poor together as an exhibit of its work; the making of reports of which the poor are the statistics. The defence that this is necessary to stimulate the interest of the rich, and by that means secure the money for the continuing of the work in the poorer sections of the city, is but the evidence of the lack of spiritual life in the Church; the absence of the very foundation of Christianity and brotherly love.

The consciousness that watching the hungry eating Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners is hardly what Christ meant when he gave forth the decree, "Feed my lambs," is becoming a conviction; but it is due to the positive teaching of workers outside of the Church, who felt the irreparable loss of self-respect that must follow from such an exhibition. To gather the beneficiaries of their generosity together and take stock, as it were, of the investments, the dividends of which are to be realized wholly in the future life, has antagonized the self-respecting poor. They refuse to assemble as objects of interest, even in a church.

So dense is the spiritual perception of even some very good people, so materialistic is the plane on which work for the poor is conducted in some churches, that the results have been cruel—unconscious on the part of the offenders—but nevertheless cruel.

A group of very young girls worked in a factory on the borders of a section in which lived people of wealth and intelligence. The factory made no provision for a lunch room. When the weather permitted, the girls ate their lunches on the curbs and on the stoops of houses in the immediate neighborhood. This was demoralizing to the girls and distressing to several women in the neighborhood. Not far away was a large house hired and controlled by a church long noted for its broadness and its generosity. The basement of the house was not used, except twice a week in the evening by a working-girls' club. The use of this basement from half-past eleven till one was asked for and granted.

The plan was to have a woman arrange the tables, make tea, and wash the dishes used by the girls each day. The girls were to pay five cents a week for the use of the room and the tea. They were to bring their own lunches. The plan met with their warmest approval, and the lunch room was opened, with three young girls from a society in the church to help. The girls poured their own tea. For three days everything promised well. The girls accepted the one condition imposed, that they would go quietly to and from the factory at the noon hour, to avoid comments from the residents about. The fourth day some of the righteous, energetic souls belonging to the church thought they would see the result of their generous gift of the use of the room for which they had no other use.

Nine of them, personally conducted by one of the assistant ministers, crowded the two doorways to see these girls eat the lunch they brought from their own homes and drink the tea for which they were paying all they had been asked to pay. One small girl, with her hair still hanging in braids down her back, tried in every way to break off pieces of her luncheon without uncovering it. Finding she could not, she gave up, and tied the string about the paper again, sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. It was this child's first week out of school. Her father was now in the hospital for the third month. There were five children, of which this girl was the eldest. All the money saved by this skillful mechanic and his thrifty wife was gone, and this girl had to go to work. One can imagine faintly her feelings as she looked at the crowded doorways and knew that the whispered comments included her. The less refined, though more independent, girls sat with flaming cheeks, and holding papers over their lunches, ate them and drank the tea.

The first week represented the life of that lunch club. The girls went back to the curb and the sidewalk and stoops as lunch rooms. Here, at least, no personally conducted parties came to view them. If any one looked at them and they objected, they were on terms of equality, and at once notified the offenders of their offence. To the credit of the people who used that street, few stopped to look at the girls.

It would have surprised those very good people to have known the opinion those crude, uneducated girls had of them. A day or two later, standing with a group of girls who had not been present, with a half dozen of the men who worked in the factory, as spectators, the leader of the girls described the scene, caricaturing the "church gang," as she called them, and some of the girls who had been distressed by their presence. The group shrieked with laughter; yet there was an unpleasant note in it. "—— them! That's what they always do. Stay away from them after this," was the comment and advice of one of the men. "You bet!" responded the girl actor, as she curveted down toward the factory in response to the whistle calling them back to their work.

If the years as they passed did not clearly reveal that the Church that holds the poor is one over which men of the highest intellectual and social training are placed in charge, the mistakes of the present would be extenuated. Such churches do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual perception have erected and maintained bulwarks of righteousness in neighborhoods where the environment, the civic order is degrading. They have done this by conducting all the departments of their work with the view of developing the gifts of the people to whom they are ministering. The choir is the boys and girls trained by the best teachers they can secure. The Sunday-school teachers are the working boys, girls, men and women who are instructed by the pastor for their Sunday-school work. The officers of the church are the men of the neighborhood. The people are married and buried from the church; the children are baptized in it. The preaching is teaching that salvation is of time, as well as of eternity. The sins of the people are made visible. The pulpit holds the mirror up to nature. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading them into the promised land, made so by their own civic honesty, their own personal character.