In Darkest England and The Way Out [176]
to work double-tides. With hard physical labour, from morning till night in the surroundings we know and see, how much mind and leisure is left for higher things on six days of the week? ... We must look this matter in the face. I do not pretend to establish the proportion between different sections in which these things happen. Still less am I willing to lay the blame on those who are houseless, landless, and property less. What I say is that if the Government of a country allows millions of human beings to be thrown into such conditions of living and working as we have seen, these are the consequences that must be looked for. "A child," said the Anglican Bishop South, "has a right to be born, and not to be damned into the world." Here have been millions of children literally "damned into the world," neither their heads nor their hands trained to anything useful, their miserable subsistence a thing to be fought and scrambled for, their homes reeking dens under the law of lease-holding which has produced outcast London and horrible Glasgow, their right to a playground and amusement curtailed to the running gutter, and their great "object-lesson" in life the drunken parents who end so often in the prison, the hospital, and the workhouse. We need not be astonished if these not only are not Christians, but have never understood why they should be....
The social condition has created this domestic heathenism. Then the social condition must be changed. We stand in need of a public creed--of a social, and if you will understand the word, of a lay Christianity. This work cannot be done by the clergy, nor within the four walls of a church. The field of battle lies in the school, the home, the street, the tavern, the market, and wherever men come together. To make the people Christian they must be restored to their homes, and their homes to them.
End
The social condition has created this domestic heathenism. Then the social condition must be changed. We stand in need of a public creed--of a social, and if you will understand the word, of a lay Christianity. This work cannot be done by the clergy, nor within the four walls of a church. The field of battle lies in the school, the home, the street, the tavern, the market, and wherever men come together. To make the people Christian they must be restored to their homes, and their homes to them.
End