eed a friend more urgently than they need a
pastor, or, if they must have a pastor--then the pastor must be
completely disguised as a friend. I always wonder why it is the popular
fallacy that the poor need religion more than the wealthy. My own
experience is that you will find more real Christianity in Shoreditch
than you will ever find in Mayfair--even though the "revealers" of it may
drink and swear and otherwise lead outwardly debased lives. Well, the
surroundings, the "atmosphere" in which they have been forced to live,
encourage them in their blasphemy. I never marvel that they are often
profane; I wonder more greatly that they are not infinitely more so. But
it seems to me that you will "uplift" them far more by pulling down their
filthy habitations than by preaching the "Word of God" at them at every
available opportunity. They are the landlords, the profiteers, the
members of Society who do so little to cleanse and purify the human life
among the tenements, who require the "Word" more urgently than the
enforced dwellers therein. Only the other evening I paid a visit to one
of the general committee of the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission in the
little flat which he occupies at the top of a huge building called
"flats." These flats consist of only two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen.
There are no "conveniences"--except some of an indescribably filthy
nature which are mutually shared by the inhabitants of several flats, to
their own necessary loss of self-respect and decency. And in these
two-roomed flats families ranging from three to twelve members are forced
to live, and for this benefit they must pay six shillings a week. How
can youth reach its full perfection amid such surroundings--surroundings
which can be multiplied hundreds of times in every part of London and our
big cities? And when I _know_ the magnificent "promise" of which this
same youth is capable--the war showed it in one side of its
greatness--and see the surroundings in which it must grow and expand,
physically as well as spiritually, I marvel at its moral achievements and
I hate the society which permits this splendid human material only by a
stroke of luck ever to have its chance. For what has this youth of the
slums got to live for? He can have no home-life amid the pigsties which
are called his "home", his strength is mostly thrust into blind alley
occupations which he is forced to take, since his education has fitted
him for nothing