Once, after a talk about Egypt and its old religion, the Osiris worship, the beautiful story of the virgin Isis, and her son Horus, who was slain by Set, the King of Evil, and rose again from the bosom of the Nile, I heard it said, ‘They thought the same then, did they? only called them different names.’ The largeness of the idea caught the hearer; its universality bore testimony to its truth. Would it not be helpful if our religious teachers, instead of spending their precious time denouncing the errors of other religions, would take the truths running through the great stories common to them all, and in an historical attitude of mind show the growth of thought, the development of spirituality till his hearers are brought face to face with the Founder of our religion, who set the noblest example; taught the purest doctrine; lived the highest spiritual life; was in Himself, to use the Bible words, ‘the way, the truth, and the life’?
Again, to be quiet, to be alone are among influences that purify. Every one when abroad has, I suppose, felt the privilege of being able to go into the churches whenever they wished. In our great towns the privilege is equally needed, and, where the poor live, doubly so. When one room has to be shared by the whole family, sometimes including a lodger, there can be no quiet, and loneliness is impossible. Some of the clergy are recognising this want, and open their churches at other than service times, but the practice is still rare. A notice outside our church tells how those may enter who ‘wish to think or pray in quietness.’ About ten a day use the permission, some of them kneeling shyly in the side aisle, as if their attitude were unwonted and caused shame; others sitting quietly for a long time, as if weary of the grind and noise outside; while sometimes men come to make their mid-day prayer. Here again is a means with invisible results; but quiet and loneliness are possessions to which every one has a right, without which it is difficult, almost impossible, to ‘commune with God,’ and the gift of which is still to be given to the poor.
Then there is the beauty of Art, now almost entirely absent from the dwellings of the poor, and yet by them so felt as a pleasure; the beauty of form and colour, which it is possible to show in schoolroom and church decoration; the beauty of light and brightness, the beauty of growth to be seen in gardens and churchyards. Outside our church are planted two Virginia creepers; poor things they are, hardly to be recognised by their relations in kindlier soil. But once, in a third-class carriage, I was surprised to hear the church described as the one ‘where the jennies growed.’
It is easier now (thanks to the Kyrle Society and Miss Harrison’s generous gifts of work) to make school and mission rooms pretty. A beautiful workroom is a very strong, though invisible, influence. One girl, who had to leave our school on account of moving from the neighbourhood, said quite naturally, among her regrets at leaving and her description of the new school, ‘It is so ugly it makes one not care.’
The pictures in a schoolroom should be various, and, if possible, often changed. Pictures of action or of historical incidents are the most generally appreciated, but pictures of flowers, fairy tales, landscapes, and sea are suggestive.
Picture galleries have hitherto been thought of chiefly as pleasure places for the educated, or as schools for the student. They can become mission-halls for the degraded. It is easy to arrange visits with a few people to the National Gallery, to the Kensington or Bethnal Green Museums; it is not an unpleasant afternoon’s work to guide little groups of people, just pointing out this beautiful picture, or putting in a few words to explain this or that historical allusion. I once took a girl—a merry lassie, light-hearted, fond of pleasure, but in danger of taking it at the expense of her character—to the National Gallery. The little picture of Raphael’s, where the women acting as the angels stand over the sleeping knight, offering him the protecting shield, opened to her a new truth. Here was a fresh possible relation between man and woman, not the one of rough jokes and doubtful fun, but a new connection not to be despised, either, where the province of the woman was to keep the man safe; a large lesson taught by dumb lips and dead hands.
When Sir Richard Wallace lent his pictures to the Bethnal Green Museum, he not only brightened the eyes of many used only to the drear monotony of East London, but he taught one poor wretched woman with a whining baby hanging on her thin breast a large lesson. Dirt on child and mother showed her condition, and was a dreary contrast to the Madonna with lovely crowing baby before whom the little group paused. ‘Ah, yer could easy enough “mother” such a baby as that now,’ was her apologetic remark, showing that the picture had conveyed the rebuke, and that the reverence born of faith in the painter’s heart had not yet finished bearing fruit.
It is but feebly that I have tried to show how such means could be used to teach spirituality to the lowest classes. It is not necessary to speak of school-lessons, lending libraries, mothers’ meetings, night-schools, temperance societies, and clubs; agencies for the good of the people which are at work in every well-organised parish; neither has mention been made of the communicants’ meetings, prayer assemblies, church services, which are food to feed and build up many of those who already recognise their true life, and strive bravely, amid adverse circumstances, to live it. We can all work at these in gladness and thanksgiving. They are not so hard to persevere with, for some result attends them. In meetings and classes there is encouragement in the regularity and the appreciation of the attendants. In services and prayer-meetings there is the knowledge that they help and strengthen the faint-hearted; but in the indirect means of helping the degraded there is little encouragement, for there can be no results. The highest work is often apparently resultless, bringing no personal thanks, no world’s applause; a failure, worthless labour, if judged by the world’s standard of work; a success, worth doing, if it open to a few, whom the usual means have failed to reach, the great secret of true being, their spiritual life; a buried life, buried but not dead.
Henrietta O. Barnett.