The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-01-17 00:00:00

THE POOR LAWS OF THE BIBLE.

In London, on Tuesday morning, the Rev. J. Baldwin
Brown delivered "the Merchant's Lecture," at the Weigh
Home Chapel, Fish-street•hill. The portion of Scripture
read was the 25th chapter of Leviticus, and the text was
taken from Psalm will. 15—" I will satisfy her poor with
bread."
The preacher said that the "great bread and cheese
question," was, after all, a fundamental one to those
who looked into it with a discerning eye, and it
connected itself closely with much higher things.
The breadleas poor had been the scourge and disgrace
of every form of human society. Misgovernment
always meant the misery of the poor, and the frenzy of
the starved masses was the one thing against which no
Government could make head. The real gauge of
any civilization was the manner in which the dif-
ferent classes felt their need of each other, and ful-
filled their duties towards each other. God recognised
the fundamental character of the question of satisfying
the poor with bread, and if the poor laws of the
Bible could be fairly administered there would be an
end to the complaints of the poor. God had from
the beginning made the poor man's cause his own.
Nowhere on earth probably had the poor been so
cared for as in Palestine, nor where they still so
cared for anywhere as among the Jews. Let any one
think when a Jewish beggar last asked him for
alms. The injunctions in Leviticus and Deuter-
onomy with regard to the poor were not allowed
to be a dead letter ; the prophets took up the same
key-note, and enforced that legislation with the utmost
vehemence. It was the same after the Restoration.
There was a tenderness in Biblical references to the
poor which was not matched in any other ancient
literature. But the Bible did not give aupport to
the notion that bread was the great good of
man. He who should shower bread on all, making
no provision for industry, concord, and brotherly
love, WS uld in the end promote misery, and
hasten, instead of retarding, the dieFointion of
society. Everywhere it had been found that com-
munism would end in wreck. God hated the
grinding of the faces of the poor more than he
hated any evil under the sun, and His voice was lifted
up against it in terrible tones. "But,' the poor might
say, "if God so hates the oppressor, why does He not
strike him down ? " He did strike the oppressor down
with an awful stroke; let Turkey be witness, and also
the state of Russia at the present day. If they
followed the course of the oppressor long enough they
would mark his end; but God had other generations to
educate beside the present one, and ages were days
with Him. No one could study the history of tyranny
without seeing that God was terribly in earnest about
the rights of the poor.
In conclusion, Mr. Brown pointed out that much
suffering endured by the poor was owing to their own
fault,
.though this was no reason why they should not
be pitied and relieved. But all relief should have for
one of its aims the stimulating of its objects to self-
help, and the poor should never be encouraged to look
for the constantly-recurring dole.
rf liE

-DAILY PRESS. - According to the Printers'
Register, which this month contains its annual list,
there are now 153 daily newspapers published in
the United Kingdon—viz., 18 in London, 94 in the
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and 1 in Jersey; 78 are issued in the morning and 75
ZO arc published at ld. 69 at id,, and
tmaeinte: (14) at paces varying erom Ad. to 3d.
itnh e the
r evening;
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and 46 ea independent or neutral,

THE LATE DR. BUDD.
The death fa announced of Dr. William Budd, which
occurred at Clevedon on the 9th inst.

As a physician Dr. Budd was not satisfied with corn.
bating disease; his constant attention was devoted
to its causes and to the means of substituting preven-
tion for cure. "He was," (remarks a correspondent
who knew him) "one of those men in whom the sight
of suffering never blunts the feeling of pity for
the sufferer, and the gratification of scientific
curiosity never suspends the desire to destroy it. To
exterminate disease was the passion of his life. His
contribution to medical knowledge was the germ theory
of disease, of which he is in this sense the practical
originator. He was the first to treat zymotic
fevers as the result of specific organic growths bred in
the individual system and propagation through
it; and he thus not only substituted the idea of a
tangible cause for the vague theories of infection cur-
rent before his time, he established the fact that
cholera is due to as specific a poison as typhus or
typhoid fever, and must be stamped out by the same
means; and if his mode of treatment was met by
doubt in the case of ailments admittedly contagious,
an outbreak of cholera which took place at Bristol,.
and of which he published the account, supplied a yin-
dication of his principle already confirmed and verified
in relation to typhoid fever by the epidemic at North
Tawton. Its successful application in Indian hospitals
is equally matter of history."
When Dr, Budd's last illness overtook him he was
collecting materials for a treatise on tubercular con-
sumption, which he also believed to be caused by an
organic poison and communicated through it; and the
hope of striking at the root of this national and
hitherto incurable malady gave a fresh intensity to his
exertions and a deeper bitterness to their defeat. In
all he did and all he would have done, he sustained the
prestige of a remarkable family.
Dr. Budd was one of nine gifted brothers, of whom
several have won laurels in the medical profession,
though one only, Dr. George, has practised in London.
The two youngest are honourably remembered at
Cambridge as senior wranglers of Pembroke College,
of which Octavus Budd is now the oldest fellow. They
were all born and, as children, bred in the Devonshire
village of North Tawton.