Hitherto the large number of the degraded people have appalled the philanthropist; they have been spoken of as the ‘lapsed masses’; and efforts to reach them have not been considered successful unless the results can be counted by hundreds. But there is the higher authority for the individual teaching; He whom all men now delight to honour, whose life, words, and actions are held up for imitation; He chose twelve only to especially influence; He spent long hours in conversation with single persons; He thought no incident too trivial to inquire into, no petty quarrel beneath His interference. We must know and be known, love and be loved, by our less happy brother until he learn, through the friend whom he has seen, knowledge of God whom he has not seen. All this must be done, and not one stone of practical helpfulness left unturned, and
God’s passionless reformers, influences
That purify and heal and are not seen,
must be summoned also to give their aid. Among these are flowers, not given in bundles nor loose, but daintily arranged in bouquets, brought by the hand of the friend who will stop to carefully dispose them in the broken jug or cracked basin, so that they should lose none of their beauty as long as the close atmosphere allows them to live: flowers (without text-cards) left to speak their own message, allowed to tell the story of perfect work without speech or language; all the better preachers because so lacking in self-consciousness.
Not second among such reformers may be placed high-class music, both instrumental and vocal, given in schoolrooms, mission-rooms, and, if possible, in churches where the traditions speak of worship, where the atmosphere is prayerful, and where the arrangement of the seats suggests kneeling; just the music without a form of service, nor necessarily an address, only a hymn sung in unison and a blessing from the altar at the close. To hear oratorios—St. Paul, the Messiah, Elijah, Spohr’s Last Judgment—I have seen crowds of the lowest class, some shoeless and bonnetless, and all having the ‘savour of the great unwashed,’ sit in church for two hours at a time quietly and reverently, the long lines of seated folk being now and then broken by a kneeling figure, driven to his knees by the glorious burst of sound which had awakened strange emotions; while the almost breathless silence in the solos has been occasionally interrupted by a heart-drawn sigh.
To trace the result is impossible and not advisable; but who can doubt that in those moments, brief as they were, the curtain of the flesh was raised and the soul became visible, perhaps by the discovery startling its possessor into new aspirations?
One man came after such a service for help, not money help, but because he was a drunkard, saying if ‘I could hear music like that every night I should not need the drink.’ It was but a feeble echo of St. Paul’s words, ‘Who can deliver me from the body of this death?’ a cry—a prayer—which given to music might be borne by the sweet messenger through heaven’s gate to the very throne beyond.
Then there are country visits; quiet afternoons in the country, not ‘treats’ where numbers bring wild excitement, and only the place, not the sort of amusement, is changed; but where a few people spend an afternoon quietly in the country, perhaps entertained at tea by a kindly friend; parties at which there is time to feel the quiet; where the moments are not so full of external and active interests that there is no opportunity to ‘possess the soul’; parties at which there is a possibility of ‘hush,’ in which, helped by Nature’s ritual, perfect in sound, scent, and colour, silent worship can go on.
For people spending long years in the close courts and streets of ugly towns, the mere sight of nature is startling, and may awaken longings, to themselves strange, to others indescribable, but which are the stirrings of the life within.
The stories of great lives, and of other religions, very simply told, as far as possible leaving out the foreign conditions which confuse the ignorant mind, are sometimes helpful. It is generally considered wise to hide from children and untutored people the knowledge of other religions, for fear it should awaken doubts concerning their own; but in those cases where their own is so very negative, it is often helpful to learn of faiths held by the large masses of mankind. To hear that the great fundamental ideas of all worships are similar would perhaps suggest to the hearer that there might be more in it than ‘just parson stuff’ and lead him to inquire further; or, if it did not do this, it would be some gain to remove the ignorance which, more than familiarity, breeds contempt of the despised foreigner.