I do not want authority for this opinion: you have heard the
speech of the right reverend prelate {27} this evening--a speech
which no sanitary reformer can have heard without emotion. Of what
avail is it to send missionaries to the miserable man condemned to
work in a foetid court, with every sense bestowed upon him for his
health and happiness turned into a torment, with every month of his
life adding to the heap of evils under which he is condemned to
exist? What human sympathy within him is that instructor to
address? what natural old chord within him is he to touch? Is it
the remembrance of his children?--a memory of destitution, of
sickness, of fever, and of scrofula? Is it his hopes, his latent
hopes of immortality? He is so surrounded by and embedded in
material filth, that his soul cannot rise to the contemplation of
the great truths of religion. Or if the case is that of a
miserable child bred and nurtured in some noisome, loathsome place,
and tempted, in these better days, into the ragged school, what can
a few hours' teaching effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a
whole existence? But give them a glimpse of heaven through a
little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be
clean; lighten that heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag
and in which they become the callous things they are; take the body
of the dead relative from the close room in which the living live
with it, and where death, being familiar, loses its awe; and then
they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were
so much with the poor, and who had compassion for all human
suffering.
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