iritual pastors,
and masters: To order myself lowly and reverently to all my
betters.... Not to covet nor desire other men's goods; But
to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do
my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please
God to call me.

A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers was
Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the
coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the
starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in which
they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly known as
"Little Hell." In this place two hundred people were crowded into
nineteen houses. "There is not one creature in it that can give a cup
of broth if it would save a life." In one winter eighteen perished of
"a putrid fever", and the clergyman "could not raise a six-pence to
save a life."

And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover
you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not
even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have
anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the
mental powers of England's most popular woman writer. She was
perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for
stealing butter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too
high a price. When there came a famine, and the children of these
mine-slaves were dying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy
because God had sent them her pious self. "In suffering by the
scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of
knowing the advantage you have had over many villages in your having
suffered no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place
she explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
be grateful to the rich!

Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite
all ranks of people together, to show the poor how
immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show
both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.
It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages
you derive from the government and constitution of this
country--to observe the benefits flowing from the
distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high
to so libera