The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-07-24 00:00:00

A_CARD

JO HN WHITNEY,
For many years connected with the Albion Newspaper Office,
STATIONER, PRINTER, &e.,
8, CHAPEL-STREET,
(Nearly opposite the Sessions•house.)

TEE

7Listnrpool

TUESDAY; JULY 24, 1855

THE CHURCH AND THE POOR

THE Gospel is not preached to the poor. A strange
judgment to pass on this Church of England, in an age
when we are told that the growth of true religion was
never so rapid, nor its empire so universal. When we
hear that a " faithful ministry " of the Gospel never
fails to attract crowded congregations ; and movements
got up against papal aggressions and new articles of
faith manifest how large a portion of each man's life
is occupied by other than material interests. And yet
this is a fact which we must look closely and boldly in
the face; it suggests the existence of an unhealthy
element in our condition, which prevents the Church
of this country from rightly fulfilling her mission,
and points to the danger there is of a speedy removal
of that tree, which, if it do not increase its fruit, may
be found only to encumber the ground.

It is but an illustration of this fact, that the earnest-
minded incumbent of a suburban district deemed it
fitting, the other Sunday, to substitute for his own
pulpit a rostrum in the Exchange area, in the hope, we
presume, to find some of that class which is wholly
excluded from the Church in which he ministers.
And as this case is in itself, and its attendant circum-
stances, an instance of present evils, and the ineffi-
ciency of popular remedies, we shall use it for our
present purpose,

We said last week that. churches, now-a-days, are
not built for the poor.; and here we find the case of a
clergyman, enjoying a very high reputation for the
oratorical exercises of the pulpit, for whom a large
church with an unusually liberal endowment has been
built, in which, such has been the facility for makingmer-
chandise of its accommodation, that absolutely no space
has been left for the reception of those who must have a
Gospel " without price," or none at all. Distressed,
no doubt, with a position which very frequently trus-
tees impose upon the incumbent, he is moved with a
desire to carry the Gospel to the poor. Accordingly,
for the afternoon of one Sunday, he emerges from his
exclusive position, to declare to a more mixed audience,
that the message with which he is charged is ad-
dressed to all, without difference and exception—to
the poor equally as to the rich. The rostrum is
then descended, the preacher departs for the privileged
communication of the evening to cushioned seats and
barricaded pews., and the mission to the poor is
finished. Feelings have been, perhaps, roused in the

breast of many a hearer, which he knows not how to
direct, inquiries suggested which he knows not how to

solve, vague hopes excited, of which he looks about in
vain to discern any chance of fulfilment, resolutions

formed which he is left alone to develope into action

and life. They lead to nothing ; they end a very
short distance from where they began ; the man has
heard doctrines, and received them into his intellect,
but no living organization snatches him from the world,

takes him into itself, and so presents him to his

Divine Deliverer.

Now, for the credit of the popular religion of the
day, we wish to suggest whether, amid so much appa-

rent devotion, and so many signs of zeal, there may
not be at the root of the evil we are deploring some
subtle cause which does not directly impugn the ge-
nuineness and worth of this seeming anxiety for the
Gospel. Surely we must not take as an evidence of

the religiousness, or the irreligiousness, of the day,

this practical indifference to the heathenism of our

towns, this spectacle of a Church powerless to fulfil

her mission to the many " outcasts from the common-

wealth of Israel"—Of whom one day account will have

to be given—through her inability to offer a free Gos-
pel to the people ;. this vast moral ruin of a disor-
ganised society, of class alienated from class by the anti-
pathies of a money-loving age, and the Church herself
practically vindicating the distinctions of class at the very
steps of the altar, and, with the Gospel of reconciliation in

one harid, demanding a pecuniary consideration for her
spiritual services with the other. If this is to be ac-

cepted as a reproach upon modern Protestantism, it
seriously behoves Protestants to ask whether that can

be a religion of Christ which neglects the poor of
Christ, and failsto fulfil a most important branch of the
mission which Christ committed to His Church. If
it will one day be the condemnation of professing
Christians that they saw the poor in want and failed
to relieve them, surely it will be the condemnation of
a Church that it saw the poor wanting the Gospel, and
failed to preach it. We are answered, it is all very
well to -mark out your plans for Church extension, but
where are the means for putting them into practice ?

We highly approve of your suggestion to form a dis-

trict, appoint a staff of clergy, and build up the living
Church preparatory to the material establishment of
the Gospel organization; but who will come forward
with the money for so necessary but expensive a work ?
Yes ; this may be a true rejoinder, but it leaves us
where we were, it leaves us still to find the best alter-
native of two explanations of the state of things we are
investigating. We may still ask, are we to ascribe
the public apathy you complain of to the power-
lessness of the religion which you affirm to be so
popular and wide-spread ?
You might say, that this in an irreligious age ;
men will not listen to our teaching; " Evangelical
religion" is at a low ebb. But you do not say so,
'nay, you often extol the Christian liberality of the
public. They do build churches, and provide ministers;
the mischief is, that these are not for the poor. And
we think it might be right, in a logical point of view,
to leave the case in your hands for explanation ; to
call upon you, who professedly have religious posses-
sion of the town, to prove that your religious teaching
is not impeached by its apparent fruit or want of
fruit, in this direction. Is it.preally from a want of
real religion, that people build churches from a motive
of attachment to a particular minister, but that they
have no thought of giving them to Christ through His
poor, or of any special offering of devotion in the act ;
'that churches are got up rather to produce a par-
ticular interest for the money laid out, than as an act
of free charity ; an aspect which is not changed by the
fact, that that interest reverts to the minister, for the
minister's services are the things pre-arranged to be
paid for, and those services are for the good of the
payers themselves ; that, taking the most . favourable
type of the popular Church system, viz., a church
where a " faithful ministry" draws crowded audiences,
it is yet impossible to see in the House of God a
closer picture of the world, provision for the poor
being accounted a very secondary consideration, and the
gradations of wealth and " respectability" marked out
with the decorum of the concert-room or the theatre ?
We are much concerned, then, to find out a way of ac-
counting for the defect in popular modes of further-
ing Christianity without denying the growth of true
'religion, the " prevalence of a preached Gospel," " the
zeal' and fidelity" of the clergy, or the sincerity and
willingness of their flocks. It is clear there is some-
thing wrong somewhere, and in discarding the more
invidious solution of the question, we are surely chal-
lenging. attention to the explanation we have to offer.
That explanation, to which we can do no more this week
than make the barest reference, will be, that the
Church's office in the propagation of the Gospel is not
—in some particulars which have a very serious in-
fluence on the mode of its administration—appre-
hended with full and entire distinctness, and that,
therefore, failure in her missionary work may consist
with very laudable intentions and ranch unsimulated
zeal. And that it must be a question of great signifi-
cance, how we employ the agency of the Church in
the propagation of the Gospel among heathens or
whit we may call Christian aliens, needs no enforce-