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A LECTURE

BY THE REV. A. MURSELL,

IN THE

FREE TRADE HALL, DECEMBER 13TH, 1857.

THE original title of this address, when it was delivered many months ago, elsewhere, was taken from the popular local poem, "Come Whoam to thy Childer an' Me," but as this was only used as a catch word to arrest attention, I saw no reason to preserve it. I have already intimated it as one guiding object of these addresses, to bring ministers and "outsiders a little more familiarly together, or at least take a step in that direction.

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It is always best to have some definite end in view in addresses of this sort, and to state it plainly at the outset, and so, both for your guidance and my own, I may as well say that what I want to try to do in this lecture is to create a stronger love of home, and greater respect for family ties, as wife, children, and relations, in the minds of any who may be a little in the habit of spending, selfishly, at a distance from home, in the public-house or elsewhere, those wages or earnings which ought to be shared at home with the wife and children, and which ought to be devoted to increase the comforts of the cottage, and not to help to paint a new sign or fix a new beer-engine at the Pig and Whistle pot-house.

It is just possible that there are none here who are thus in the habit of neglecting the claims of home and family-I hope they wont feel insulted at these remarks being made in their hearing, for it is to be hoped that they may be persuaded by them to use their influence in respect to this matter with those who really need it.

I am afraid, I must confess, that it is rather an impudent thing for a young man with no wife or family, and, what's more,

with precious little prospect of ever having either, to get up to give advice to fathers of families-but I hope you will excuse the immodesty of it, as it is only a lesson of common humanity that I want to press upon your attention.

In trying, by any indirect influences which these meetings may have upon the poorest of the poor, who from indifference or other natural reasons refuse to attend them-in trying to prove to those who live in the meanest and most abject abodes of poverty, that religion may make even their homes happy, I am setting myself rather a thankless task, because it forces me to preach contentment to those who are in want of the commonest comforts of life and I know how easy it is for those who have these comforts to lecture and upbraid with discontent those who have them not. But in order to show you that I do not speak in ignorance of the misery that exists in the world, I shall take the liberty of reading an extract from the report of Dr. Letheby, the officer of health to the Sanitary Commission of London, reported in the Times. I do this, not for the information of my working friends so much as for the special entertainment and enlightenment of certain friends who will, perhaps, believe from such a source, what they would not credit on my bare authority. I happened, in a sermon the other day, to make some slight allusion to certain scenes of vice and wretchedness, and was charged with overdrawing the picture, and offending fastidious ears with coarse details which went beyond the truth. Now, let us see whether the plain statement of this Dr. Letheby, who has seen with his own eyes what he describes, is very likely to be easily overdrawn; for, as we are going to speak of our English homes, it is as well to know what sort of paradises we have to talk about. I dare say lots of folks will be disgusted, but I can't help that. Dr. Letheby says:

"I have also been at much pains, during the last three months, to ascertain the precise conditions of the dwellings, the habits, and the diseases of the poor. In 1,989 of these rooms-all, in fact, that are at present inhabited-there are 5,791 inmates, belonging to 1,576 families; and, to say nothing of the too frequent occurrence of what may be regarded as a necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children, are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room, there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savageswhere all the offices of nature are performed in the most public and offensive manner, and where every human instinct of propriety and

decency are smothered. Like my predecessor, I ha e seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents; brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day's tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families that tenant the same room-where birth and death go hand in hand-where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other or from the rest of the inmates. Such instances as these, and I might add others of even more extreme debasement, are not uncommon within the walls of this city; and though they call loudly for interference, yet I hardly know how the powers of this commission can be best exercised in suppressing them.

"In the ward of Bishopsgate, a little above Houndsditch, there is a narrow passage called Rose-alley, which leads from the main thoroughfare into New Street. I visited the back room on the ground floor of No. 5. I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children, and in it was the dead body of a poor girl, who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living, and we may well ask how it can be otherwise than that the human heart should be deadened to all the gentler feelings of our nature, when such sights as these are of common occurrence?

"So close and unwholesome is the atmosphere of some of the rooms, that I have endeavoured to ascertain by chemical means, whether it does not contain some peculiar product of decomposition that gives to it its foul odour and its rare powers of engendering disease. I find that it is not only deficient in the due proportion of oxygen, but it contains three times the usual amount of carbonic acid, besides a quantity of aqueous vapour charged with alkaline matter that stinks abominably. This is, doubtless, the product of putrefaction and of the various fœtid and stagnant exhalations that pollute the air of the place. In many of my former reports, and in those of my predecessor, your attention has been drawn to this pestilential source of disease, and to the consequence of heaping human beings into such contracted localities; and I again revert to it because of its great importance, not merely that it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, but because there stalks side by side with this pestilence a yet deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while society averts her eye, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence, and pauperism."

Such are the homes of thousands of Queen Victoria's subjects, in this nineteenth century of progress.

Now it is hard to tell a man whose ite is spent in dens like these that he ought to be contented with the lot which God has given him. But God never willed it that any of his creatures should live in such haunts as these, and therefore it does not

become any man who lives in this condition to be contented with it. It is crime, and drunkenness, and vice which has formed these earthly hells; and it is gross neglect and cruel indifference on the part of rich and influential men which has suffered them to thicken and increase. If people were not so disgustingly and selfishly refined and fastidious-if they would believe a tale of woe, and sympathise with it when they hear it, instead of calling it coarse and vulgar when it is related to them, and turning up their noses at those who dare to tell it then there would be more practical effort put forth to further the cause of humanity-and to let a sunbeam of cleanliness and intelligence fall upon the pauper's home. If there were more Christians like old John Howard, who did not disdain to penetrate the cellars of the beggar or the criminal, and whose manly heart did not shudder to approach the filthy bed on which was stretched the victim of disease, or the wasting prey of deathif there were more angels of mercy, with large and loving hearts, who would speak a word of kindness to those who need it most, and float a gospel promise on the noisome air which reeks from the haunts of poverty and crime-if there were more Christians of this sort, there would be less occasion, bye and bye, for Boards of Health to send their officers to ferret out the causes why humanity is so debased and wretched.

Magistrates are, to no small degree, responsible for the poor man's dislike of home. Those in high places should learn to be considerate of his temptations, and not too hastily condemn him. There is far more credit due to a poor man for keeping out of trouble, than to a rich one; and the hateful names by which the menials of the law will often banter the poor man who has transgressed it, under strong temptation, only tend to harden. him in crime, and steel his heart against religion and philanthropy.

I have turned down the leaf of Charles Dickens' "Chimes," at a scene which I should like, if you will allow me, just to read to you. After describing a dinner given by a country magistrate to his tenantry, he introduces upon the scene a returned convict, whom he calls Will Fern:

"Gentlefolks-you've drunk-the labourer-look at me. Just come from gaol, and neither for the first time, nor yet the second, nor yet the third nor fourth.

"Look at me-you see I'm at my worst. Beyond all hurt or harmbeyond your help-for the time when your kind words or kind actions could have done me good, is gone with the scent of last year's beans and clover on the air.

"I've lived many a year in this place. You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I've seen the ladies draw it in their books a hundred times. It looks well in a picter, I've heerd say, but there an't weather in picters, and may be 'tis fitter for that than for a place to live in.

""Tis harder than you think for to grow commonly decent in such a place. That I grow'd up a man and not a brute, is saying something for me, as I was then.

"I dragged on somehow-neither me nor any other man knows how; but so heavy, that I couldn't put a cheerful face upon it, nor make believe that I was any other than what I was.

"Now, gentlemen-you gentlemen that sits at sessions when you see a man with discontent writ on his face, you says to one another: 'he's suspicious, I has my doubts,' says you, about Will Fern. Watch that fellow!' I don't say, gentlemen, that it an't quite natʼral, but I say 'tis so; and from that hour, whatever Will Fern does or lets alone-all one-it goes against him.

"Now gentlemen, see how your laws are made to trap and hunt us, when we're brought to this. I tries to live elsewhere. And I'm a vagabond. To gaol with him! I comes back here. I goes a nutting in your woods, and breaks a timber branch or two. To gaol with him! One of your keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden, with a gun. To gaol with him! I has a nat'ral word angry with that man when I'm free again. To gaol with him! I cuts a stick. To gaol with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To gaol with him! It's twenty mile away; and coming back I begs a trifle on the road. To gaol with him! At last, the constable-the keeper-anybody-finds me anywhere, a doing anything. To gaol with him, for he's a vagrant, and a gaol-bird known; and gaol's the only home he's got.

"Do I say this to serve my cause? Who can give me back my liberty? Who can give me back my good naine? Who can give me back my innocent niece? Not all the lords and ladies in wide England. But gentlemen, gentlemen, dealing with other folk like me, begin at the right end. Give us, in mercy, better homes when we're a lying in our cradles; give us better food when we're a working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us back, when we're a going wrong; and don't set gaol, gaol, gaol, afore us, everywhere we turn. There an't a condescension you can show the labourer then that he wont take as ready and as grateful as a man can be; for he has a patient, peaceful, willing heart. But you must put his rightful spirit in him first; for whether he's a wreck and ruin, such as me, or is like one of them that stand here now, his spirit is divided from you at this time. Bring it back, gentlefolks-bring it back! Bring it back, afore the day comes when even his Bible changes in his altered mind, and the words seem to him to read, as they have sometimes read in my own eyes, in gaol: Whither thou goest I cannot go; where thou lodgest I do not lodge. Thy people are not my people, nor thy God my God.”

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With such influences as these to wean his heart from home

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