THE INDUSTRIAL CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Such hostility as exists against the Industrial Christian Fellowship is not, I think, attributable to anything that the Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy may have said five years ago, as Miss Withington suggests in her letter of April 17th; Indeed, the extraordinary crowds who flock to his meetings in every part of the country testify that he has got a message that men want to hear.
The rock of stumbling appears to lie in the fact that this Fellowship makes, on behalf of the Church, a tremendous claim. It refuses utterly to regard religion as a department of life. It is all, or nothing. No part of life is to be excluded. Everything that man is, everything that man does, nationally, socially, industrially, individually, all without any exception is to be brought to the touchstone of the distinctively Christian ethic. Against such a claim men in every human grouping 'will be found in rebellion. It asks too much. Large numbers of sincere and devout church people, for example, strongly object to any attehipt to take religion out of Church into social and industrial fields. There is again a numerous class of people, more than adequately represented in the daily and weekly Press, which is concerned above all other things in the maintenance of the status quo. They dread, far more than they dread the devil, anything that appears even remotely to be liable to make changes in the social order. To them any voice upraised mfbehalf of the poor, the unhoused, the unemployed, is the voice of the Socialist or the Communist. It is a conve- nient substitute for thought. " What you want," they always say, if pressed to give their solution of the prOblem, " What you want is a change of heart ! " And by this they seem to mean that they do not want a change in any other respect.
And, oddly enough, opposition comes from an exactly opposite quarter, from those who have the best of reasons for desiring very sweeping and immediate changes. Again and again, and almost every time the agents of the Industrial Christian Fellowship speak at the street corner, they are met with the fiercest abuse from men in the crowd, who shout that the speakers have come out " to dope the workers." What they dislike, one has a shrewd 'suspicion, is the fact that the missionaries of the Fellowship isitiver omit to press home the claim of Christ to reign in a man's -ei'arn heart: That no man is fit to undertake the reform of indilltrial or other conditions until he has begun to effect a reform* in his own life.
The Fellowship would seem indeed to be in no danger of, falling into the condemnation pronounced against those " oft whom all men speak well," and the very fact of opposition being so widespread, and coming from such diametrically'; opposite interests, inclines me to think that on the whole its message must be a true one, and to recall the words of One who said : " Remember the Word that I said unto you. The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted; Me, they will also persecute you."—I am, Sir, &c., -- EDWARD HARRISON. 1 St. Catherine's Vicarage; Abercromby Square, Liverpool.- •
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