, lay wholly in a
future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the
labouring classes themselves.

But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his
district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his
personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face
of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little
children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his
name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his
efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really
unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's
Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round
him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every
Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers
whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those
who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the
sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of
yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a
society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe,
the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the
common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to
the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades'
unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be
Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most
sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from
"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were
enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor
agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high
thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a
dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.

His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what
he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency
that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the
advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in
the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the
resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has
done so much to create and encourage pauperism