28 SEPTEMBER 1861, Page 19

B OOKS.

LIFE WORK.*

Mosv people who concern themselves with philanthropic action at all have heard of the " Missing Link," the little book which de- scribed how a new kind of missionary, a woman of the labour- ing class, went among the uncivilized tribes of London, helping, teaching, and praying, with effect. The little book, full as it was of stories of human misery, of poverty so bitter that its victims lived in daily terror of death from hunger, and physical suffering so acute that the senses seemed deadened to all save pain, excited the sympathy of classes wider than the one to which it orr,inally appealed. Money flowed in freely, to the amount of six thousand pounds. Indivi- dual cases were relieved with a lavishness which the lady who founded the mission was sometimes compelled to check, and in some instances in ways which showed better than money how quick and real was the sympathy of those who gave. One poor woman, for instance, bedridden for sixteen years, had been accustomed to lie alone all day and night, for want of means to secure attendance. A kindly neighbour, who pitied her desolation, lent her a clock, that "its tick might keep her company." The sick woman, with the morbid sensitiveness natural to such cases, felt comforted by the clock, and when it broke—it was an American affair, made to sell—mourned over the loss of the accustomed sound. The incident was mentioned ca- sually in the " Missing Link," and, says the editor, " I could have hung the room with the clocks" sent for her. The authoress in the present book continues the story of the " Missing Link," relating the growth of the mission, which now employs 150 Bible-women, the new experiments made, and the teaching which experience has brought. As a book Life Work is not equal to the " Missing Link." It is carelessly arranged, the chapters being dislocated one from the other in a very perplexing way, while the special reli- gious dialect, which is neither English nor scriptural, nor even conventional, except with a most limited class, is more annoying than ever. But Life Work is not to be fairly judged by its literary character. It is not a book, but a report, a record of one of the noblest and most successful efforts ever made to relieve human suffering, to civilize the savages whom laws and education com- mittees cannot reach, and carry some knowledge of divine truth to wretches who feel, as one woman said, " there is no God for the poor." Errors of taste may well be forgiven to the women who can pass hours a day in the persistent effort to raise a race immersed in crime as well as poverty, and whom their grand- mothers would have swept by with a shiver of disgust. For, we are bound to say, though all these narratives are steeped in sectarianism, and bear upon them ineffaceably the mark of a narrow religious culture, there is not one of them with the faintest trace of pha- risaism, of any emotion towards misery except intense desire to amend it, of any feeling towards sin, save that those that are sick most need the physician. It is even curious to observe how tho- roughly the superintendents conquer their abhorrence of drunkenness, always so specially acute with women, because it is almost the only offence which creates besides moral repugnance, physical terror, and learn at last to regard it as a curable disease. There is much of genuine courage as well as moral worth in this little incident : " She joined our Mission eighteen months since. Her countenance, bloated and degraded, had on every feature the stamp of vice. I thought her breath polluted the atmosphere around. I shrank from contact with her, and longed to sanction the proposition made at thab time, that she should be banished from our Mission roomas too hardened to get good, and so bad that others objected to sit with her. Thank God, I remembered that I was called to imitate Him who receiveth sinners and eateth with them.' At first her attendance was most irregular, and for some months ceased. I met her one day last October in the street, and asked, Why have you not been at the Mission-room lately ?" I'll come now you're back, you'll see me next time.' I did not believe her, for I saw that she had been drinking. She came, however. I think that day I told the story of the sinful woman who washed Christ's feet. Her attention was riveted. She has never missed but one meeting since, and that was through illness. Do you look round to recognise her ? Ah, you will not know her from my descrip- tion, though her countenance is not so changed as her life."

We must remember, too, that the appearance of exaggeration, the popular complaint of these stories, is often unreal. All savages ex- aggerate emotion, and in one instance in particular, educated men are disqualified to form an opinion. The effect of Bible-reading seems to be described with more enthusiasm than acumen, but it will be observed that the readers have instinctively addressed their audiences with Christ's words and teaching, and not with conventional pietism, and that the teaching is in all cases absolutely new. Grown men cannot judge how those words andpromises and illustrations would affect them if early use had not made them so familiar, and if they heard them just as a gleam of hope pierced through that permanent sense of wretchedness which covers as with a film the hearts of English savages. The undue importance attached to the habit of swearing—oaths being with some classes merely interjections with as little moral importance as the cluck a Bechuana puts between Ins words—ceases to appear preposterous when it is remembered that abstinence from oaths is perhaps the very best sign of the dawning self-restraint which is the beginning of amendment. This is not the plbce to discuss the author's ideas of the mode in which prayer is answered, but we would just suggest to those whom such statements as she puts forward utterly alienate, that the man who has risen from stealing food to praying for it, has passed a moral gulf as wide as that which separates a Pagan from a philosopher. The managers of the mission are gradually discovering wherein their true strength lies. We infer from an occasional dissonance of • Lift Work ; or, the Link and the Rivet. By L. N. R. Barbet and Co. opinion that the narratives are written by many hands, but they agree pretty fully upon this great point. The half-educated woman of their own class impresses the uneducated most easily, learns their wants with least risk of deception, and most readily encourages them to hopeful effort. They cannot tell her "it is easy frrclies to talk,' and must perforce find at least a reason for dirt. But the funds, except for extreme cases, must remain with the superin- tendents. If the poor can beg of their teacher, they do beg, instead of learning. The poor, too, are bad financiers, whether Bible- women or profligates, partly, we fancy, for the very simple reason

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that not one woman in fifty can cipher in her head, but chiefly because they have lost from poverty the sense of the true value of money, or rather of the proportion between receipts and expenditure. The first Bible-woman. " Marian," whose efforts were so successful, broke down hopelessly as a directress, and is now an invalid in Suf- olk, and generally any distribution of funds injures untrained distributors. We suspect, too, though it is not stated, that the re- ceivers have more confidence in the justice of a superior class, a feeling very often perceptible in England, and arising, we think, not ia the least from servility, but from an over-appreciation of that self-restraint in manner which only cultivation can confer. So strong is the reliance on the class above, that the reporters, though strongly deprecating that course, still allow that ladies who never stir from their drawing-rooms can still aid in the work, and nobody who knows the value of sober counsel to the very degraded—some of whom seem just as incapable of consecutive thought as if they were drunk —can doubt the fact. All, without exception, regard oral teaching, and especially expository reading, as the quickest mode of teaching. Thousands who can read won't,—feeling it just as irksome as one half of those who call themselves educated do. The first and quickest way to their hearts, however, is sympathy, mere human sympathy, some- times without any teaching at all. There are very few, we imagine, sunk into the depth in which they cannot feel what an act like the fol- lowing means, and, be it remembered, the act itself was not disfigured, as the record of it is, by the quaint dialect : " I asked a woman, who seemed deeply affected at our meeting, whether she would go to hear Wearer, at St. Martin's Hall. She said, while the tears streamed down her cheeks, 'I can't, for I've no boots.' I took my own off, say- ing, Will these fit you ?' They did. She went at once, and becoming still more deeply convinced she was a sinner, returned to find me still among the penitents, and she found Jesus, too, with us—praise the Lord!'"

"Finding Jesus" is scarcely the expression which the Evangelists would have used, but the old truth remains, that which is godly is of God, and when drunkards become sober and harlots chaste, it matters little in what form their teacher records her impressions of the change. Nor is it possible to doubt that cases of this kind indicate a feeling deeper and nobler than the marvellous "patience of the poor :"

" In a back kitchen, in a little street not far from one of London's seats of 1 earning, lies Catherine H—, on a bed of almost constant pain. The upper half of ner window is level with the small paved back yard of the house, and her eye can only rest on a brick wall. Her aspect is somewhat refined and delicate. . . . . When she left the hospital as incurable, she sank, in her own idea, from a state of former respectability, as she was reduced to take this back kitchen three years ago. She did not know that the Lord had prepared for her a friend in the landlady of the house, who would kindly pay her all the attention her for- lorn, sad state required. She had not a single relative upon whom she could lay claim. She had her right leg amputated when only seventeen years of age, by the late Sir William Brodie, but walked with a crutch, and was able to keep a situation of trust, under one mistress, for a long while afterwards. The mistress died, and then she supported herself by needlework, till, from a succession of abscesses, her right arm became utterly useless. For weeks and months together she is confined to her bed by sores, which prevent a wooden leg from being fixed, and the pain of these is so great as to make sleep a rare blessing.

" She has been brought, however, into a happy and resigned state of mind. ' All the time I have visited her,' says the above Lady Superintendent, I have never heard her express a want:"

There are dozens of such stories in this little volume, all alike suggesting that, wisely or unwisely reported, the labours of this mission form a distinct link between the very lowest class and civi- lization.

There is one hint given in this work which might be followed up farther, and that is of the misery the want of mere nursing causes to the poor. There are hundreds who, utterly incompetent to teach, would still be willing to nurse, and this kind of assistance might be more efficiently organized. A regular corps of quasi-missionary nurses, with access to a doctor or two, and as many hospital tickets as could be begged for them, would probably do as much to diminish London misery as any other form of effort. The hospitals do much, but there are hundreds of cases which they cannot reach where only a little brain is required to terminate suffering, and thousands where incur- able disease, which the hospitals will not admit, is susceptible of marked alleviation. The hungry eagerness with which the sick poor will bestow their thanks for the cheap pillow made of paper shredded till it is as soft as down is sufficient evidence of their want, and we do not know a form of aid which more rapidly removes the great obstacle to aid, class-suspicion. Practical sympathy will not make sinners sane, but it is the missing link from heart to heart; and the charge of ingratitude so often repeated is merely a libel, having its origin in the popular indifference to alms given without such sym- pathy. The Bible-women tell a different story :

" My poor mothers were very glad to see me back, and had some new troubles to tell me; one was sick, and another's husband out of work, and some had been unkindly treated, which they attributed to my absence, as well as the worse behaviour of their children. ' If you had been at home, I should only have had to say I would tell you, and that would have been enough for them.' Poor things, how my heart rejoiced to see them, and to receive the little proofs of their affection. One brought me a parse, and another took her gold ring off her finger and placed it on mine as a token of love, and they said, ' We have been past your door every day to see if your shutters were open, longing to be the first to see you when you came home.' One brought me a small case of birds when I was alone, saying, ' Oh, that prayer that you prayed when my husband broke his ribs, how it made me cry, and so it did him. We talk about it now sometimes. I wish you would pray with me once more.'

If, as philanthropists tell us, the next object of society must be to cure the dislocation of classes, if the relief of human suffering should be the object of every civilized man, if sympathy be better than in- difference, if, in fine, Christianity, however emotional, be better than heathenism however subdued, then work like this unmistakably de- serves the sympathy its reporters do their best to repel.